Most people believe that if they file for an expungement in the state of California, their criminal conviction will be cleared and or their criminal record will be sealed. Unfortunately, this could not be further away from the truth. In California, the expungement law defined by California Penal Code Section 1203.4 permits a person to withdraw his or her plea of guilty or no contest (nolo contendere) and to enter a plea of not guilty after he or she has successfully completed probation. The court, in the interest of justice, will then set aside the guilty verdict, dismiss the accusation against that person, and release that person from all penalties and disabilities resulting from the offense of which he or she has been convicted. The conviction and the arrest record is never erased, sealed, or destroyed, but a notation is simply added to the record showing that the conviction has been dismissed pursuant to the California Penal Code Section 1203.4. The record can still be retrieved by anyone who requests it from a local court house. The record can also be retrieved anytime a person submits his or her fingerprints for government employment, certain private employment, state licensing, applying for a foreign visa to travel abroad, and increasingly other measures that have been proposed throughout the country.

Logically, a dismissed conviction would denote no conviction, so when a person fills out an application or is asked about whether he or she has a conviction, he or she should be able to respond that he or she does not have a conviction. Although many private and government employers permit applicants to claim that they’ve had no conviction if they’ve had an expungement, but many do not. In fact, most all government positions, and increasingly more private employers require applicants to submit to live-scan fingerprinting so that criminal records may be retrieved from the Department of Justice and or the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and if they’ve had an expungement, the record will come back showing the original arrest, the original conviction, the sentence, and the dismissed conviction pursuant to California Penal Code Section 1203.4. Unfortunately, the mere presence of the arrest record is enough to prejudice employers from hiring applicants who have had expungements, leaving them unemployed, relying on public social services, and even returning to crime as a means to support themselves, which in turn fails to reduce the rate of recidivism (committing new crimes).

The Church of My Faith in God has established The Expungement Reform Movement to propose a resolution that would permit people who have had or those who wish to have expungements the ability to petition the court to have an arrest and conviction record resulting in an expungement sealed after five years from the date of their expungement and destroyed three years after the sealing of an expungement in the similar fashion as the California Penal Code Section 851.8 permits individuals to petition to have their arrest records sealed and destroyed prior to conviction. The proposal also seeks to modify California Penal Code Section 11105 to restrict disclosure of an arrest and conviction that has been dismissed pursuant to California Penal Code Section 1203.4.

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