April 25, 2023

Legal Aid Group Hosts Court Record Sealing Clinic

BY SARAH ROBERTSONThe Montague Reporter

GREENFIELD – Having a criminal record can make it significantly harder to find housing or secure a job. Every time an individual gets arrested, convicted of a crime, or is otherwise involved in the criminal justice system, it is recorded on the state’s Criminal Offender Record Information system, known as the CORI.
The system can make it difficult for people with criminal records to rebuild their lives. Next Friday, April 28, Community Legal Aid will host a CORI sealing workshop in Greenfield for those interested in removing past criminal charges from the public record. The workshop is open to “anyone and everyone who has a CORI and wants to know what their options are,” according to Community Legal Aid senior supervising attorney Alyssa Golden.

“Any and everything that can create a barrier for a person, we want to reduce wherever possible,” Golden told the Reporter. “People are positioning themselves as best as they can so in the future, when they want to make life changes, they don’t have to worry that this is going to follow them around.”

Community Legal Aid (CLA) is a nonprofit that provides free civil legal services to low-income and elderly residents of the five western counties of Massachusetts. Staff with the organization’s CORI and Re-Entry department have been hosting similar clinics across western Massachusetts to connect with residents who might not know that CLA exists, or what kind of work they do.

“Offering walk-in clinics might be a way to reach people who would not have sought us out in another way,” Golden said. “As we’ve grown as a unit, as legal aid, we’ve come to understand that in order to make sure people have access to their criminal records, it’s important we are out in the communities.”

The CORI-sealing workshop will take place in the Hayburne Building in downtown Greenfield at 55 Federal Street, Suite 250 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Friday, April 28.

Workshop attendees will receive a copy of their CORI, and have the opportunity to look through it with a CLA lawyer, for free. No appointment is necessary, but workshop attendees are encouraged to bring a state-issued identification card, Social Security card, or birth certificate in order for the attorneys to retrieve their CORI.

Generally, a misdemeanor can be sealed from a person’s CORI three years after a conviction. For a felony there is a seven-year waiting period.

A background check is part of the process to apply for a Section 8 housing voucher, and having a criminal record can, in some cases, disqualify an applicant from receiving financial aid. CLA lawyers frequently work on housing and discrimination cases, and can help a person appeal their denial of a subsidized voucher based on their criminal record.

“People absolutely should be appealing these denials, and are welcome to reach out to us if they are looking for assistance with these denials,” Golden said. “One of the reasons sealing clinics are important is we want people to get out in front of these barriers before they come up.”

It is against the law for a landlord or employer to request a person provide their own CORI. Instead, a specific form exists for them to request access to a CORI with much more limited information available.

“That party only has access to the system at the level they’ve been granted, based on why they’re running it,” Golden said. “Your own CORI could include any time you’ve been arrested, and really any time you’ve touched the court system.”

Convictions that can never be sealed include intimidating a witness, defrauding the court, perjury, bribery, and certain charges related to firearms sales. If these charges are dismissed prior to conviction, though, they can still be sealed.

“Sometimes there are mistakes that shouldn’t be there, and we can help fix that,” Golden said. “This is a time for someone to sit and go through their CORI with an attorney and address it.”

Certain employers – particularly those whose work involves children and other sensitive groups – can see non-convictions, or other records that have been sealed on a CORI. Members of the general public can also request CORI on anyone, but the information they will see is limited to the most recent convictions and pending cases.

Even if a charge is not yet able to be sealed, CLA lawyers will be able to help educate anyone about what their legal options might be. In these cases, the attorneys can help people understand what charges are on their CORI and what those mean.

“It’s a pretty traumatic experience, the process of being arrested, going through court process, and potentially being incarcerated. It can be a time of real crisis for a lot of people,” Golden said. “What’s on your record, the outcomes of these cases, this information isn’t necessarily clear.”

The clinic can also help people who want a charge completely expunged, which means totally erased from their record. Some cannabis possession convictions are eligible to be expunged now that the plant is legal for recreational use in Massachusetts. Anyone with a drug charge conviction processed by a state laboratory scientist involved with the state’s 2013 drug lab scandals

is also eligible for expungement. Drug lab-tainted cases are not automatically expunged from someone’s record, but have instead been vacated.
“It is fairly common for us to see those charges related to the drug lab,” Golden said.

CLA has offices in Northampton, Pittsfield, Worcester, Fitchburg, and Springfield, and receives public funding from the Legal Services Corporation. The Greenfield workshop is open to all Massachusetts residents, even those from outside of Franklin County, though CLA attorneys cannot help seal charges and convictions from out of state.

After the April 28 clinic, the next CORI-sealing event will take place on June 7 in Great Barrington.