Don’t Let Your past Define You
Video Transcribed: Can I get my criminal conviction expunged? Hi, I’m Ty Smith, an OKC attorney with Wirth Law Office, and we have people asking us exactly whether they can get an expungement. And a lot of people maybe don’t understand what an expungement is exactly, so I’m going to briefly try to explain that to you.
So an expungement essentially hides your criminal convictions from the public’s view. They can still be viewed by law enforcement, especially your state investigation bureau and the FBI. They’re not completely erased, but they are hidden from the public. So, because some jobs require a clean criminal record, it won’t show up on a background check. Okay? That’s the idea.
Now, there are certain requirements for it, and there’s actually a very wide plethora for it, one that would take multiple videos. But the requirements boiled down, essentially, if you have a misdemeanor from five years ago that didn’t require any conviction or anything, but it’s at least five years old, you might be eligible for expungement. And in all of these, make sure you talk with an attorney first before you actually take my word for it. This is just general legal advice. If you also committed a non-violent felony and you don’t have any other convictions for seven years after you were convicted of that and it has been five years since you completed your punishment for that, then you may be eligible for expungement.
Now, how do I get it? This is the most important one. Well, the easiest way to do it is you can go to the court where you were charged. So if you were charged in say Oklahoma County, you can go there. You can ask the court clerk for a petition to expunge. They have little pre-made forms, right? You complete that petition, you file it, and you pay the filing fee, which I know in Oklahoma is about 150 bucks. And then you get a hearing date, of course. You want to get a hearing date from the judge that’s assigned to you. Typically, it’s the one who presided over your case, but then you are going to want to send a copy to the arresting agency, so whoever arrested you, the district attorney for that county, and the OSBI. This is essentially just telling that you’re looking to get this stuff wiped from your records, from public view.
So they are given notice because they are allowed to show up at the hearing, that date that you’ve already said, and come out and say why you maybe shouldn’t have an expungement. Then you go to the hearing and you talk about why you should be given the expungement. And if it’s granted, it’s granted and it removes itself from public view, or it’s removed from public view. And then typically, that’s when you pay the $150 expungement fee, but it just depends on where. There’s a filing fee and an actual expungement fee.
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, you want to hire an attorney to maybe go through this process because if it sounds kind of time-consuming, that’s just because it is. It is time-consuming. You don’t have time to do that, you want to hire an attorney to come to do that for you, I do those things. Once more, I’m Ty Smith, a criminal defense lawyer in Oklahoma. You can find me at theoklahomacityattorney.com, or you can call my office at (405) 888-5400.
