The added ability for a person to request that a judge expunge one or more marijuana offenses if the violation occurred after Michigan legalized recreational use in December 2018.
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The expansion of expungement eligibility for lesser traffic offenses, not including operating a vehicle while intoxicated.The added ability to combine multiple felonies or misdemeanor offenses arising from the same transaction as a single felony or misdemeanor conviction, as long as the offenses happened within 24 hours of one another and are not crimes involving assault, possession or use of a dangerous weapon, or an offense that requires more than 10 years in prison.Multiple convictions for the same crime, if they have a maximum penalty of more than 10 years in prison, are also ineligible. The law expands eligibility to up to three felony convictions and an unlimited number of misdemeanors however, no more than two assaultive convictions can be expunged.Automatic expungement isn’t likely to be implemented until late 2022 or early 2023. The implementation of an automatic process for scrubbing certain misdemeanors after seven years and certain felonies - not including those involving assault - after 10 years.And we also want to target lesser-served communities of color, where the odds are good that there's a disproportionate impact with consequences from the criminal justice system. “We want to target communities where this can really be a benefit. “We want to work with other community organizations, community activists and other neighborhood and community educators and partner up with them so it's not just a bunch of lawyers going into neighborhoods,” Grumm says. LAWM's first goal is to build awareness about availability and expungement’s benefits. Clean Slate Campaign The Clean Slate Campaign aims to expand eligibility and access to expungements through legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communication, which will contribute to the development of the long-term advocacy infrastructure necessary for transformative criminal justice reform in North Carolina. Grumm is currently recruiting community partners in order to better reach underserved, income-challenged populations and people of color who are disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system. LAWM will be rolling out the amped-up expungement program in Kent County in February. Those benefits cascade out to the communities they live in.” They have a much better chance of getting into stable housing if they have the expungement. “When people get expungement, it opens up employment opportunities, whether it's for new jobs or to advance in their current jobs.
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It widens the avenues for people to apply for expungement now and it creates the automatic expungement mechanism, which will go into effect in April of 2023,” Grumm says. Michigan expungement laws that went into effect in April 2021 let people remove up to three felonies and an unlimited number of misdemeanors over their lifetime, with some exceptions for certain kinds of convictions. In Michigan, for people who are eligible for an expungement, only 6.5% actually got that expungement within five years of being eligible.” The thing that really jumped out at us was a piece of data that came from a University of Michigan Law School study. “We know that, nationally speaking, about one in three adult Americans have some kind of a criminal record that could pop up in a background check. “There really isn't good county-by-county data on how many people might be eligible for expungement, but we know a couple of things,” Grumm says. The grant will help pay legal staff to take people through the complicated process and also cover administrative and legal fees that expungement entails. Kellogg Foundation grant will allow them to amplify their work within Kent County’s larger population center.
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LAWM has been doing expungement work in 17 counties for some time. “It's really heartening to think that you can open up a lot of doors for people.” The only thing that was keeping her from advancing was having this long shadow, this record for some mistakes she made when she was a kid,” says Steve Grumm, director of community engagement for Legal Aid of Western Michigan (LAWM). “When we did a criminal record expungement fair down in Kalamazoo in August, one of the first people I spoke with was a woman who said that she'd been in the same level of job at her employer for 20 years. In 2022 Legal Aid of Western Michigan will launch a three-year criminal record expungement project to help Kent County residents access better jobs, housing and education opportunities by moving on from long-past mistakes.