Questions and answers about the law | New state law enables young people to make a fresh start | Columns

Among the new bills introduced by the Illinois General Assembly this year are some that address the sealing and expungement of juvenile criminal records.

What is sealing and deletion again? And what is a juvenile criminal record?

Sealing a criminal record is a process by which the report of an arrest or an indictment and/or conviction of a person is removed from the public record, but kept only for the eyes of certain government agencies (such as prosecutors and law enforcement). Expungement is the process of destroying/removing/erasing the entire criminal record of a case from all public and government records as if it never existed.

Juveniles are people who have been arrested or charged and/or convicted of crimes that were committed or alleged to have been committed when the person was under 18 years of age. There are certain crimes where the person under 18 could be charged as an adult. These would not be considered a juvenile criminal record.

The responsibility for sealing or expungement generally rests with the party seeking this relief. Paperwork is filed asking a judge to seal/expunge it. Typically, the prosecution is then given time to file an objection. If no objection is filed, or the judge finds the objection to be without merit given the facts and law of the case, he or she will order the criminal record in question to be sealed or expunged.

For juveniles, some expungements are automatically permitted by law once the case is closed, such as when the juvenile was arrested but never charged or received an informal or formal detention order. An automatic expungement occurs when the case is dismissed by the court, the juvenile was found not guilty or convicted and sentenced to probation and completed it (i.e., he did the things ordered by the judge, after which the case is dismissed), or when he was found guilty of a Class B or C misdemeanor (sentences of imprisonment not exceeding six months).

In auto-expungement cases where arrests did not result in charges, there must have been no arrests or charges within six months prior to expungement. If arrests are auto-expunged when charges are dropped or found to be “non-criminal,” there must have been no further arrests for any other reason within one year.

Otherwise, young people usually have to wait two years after the end of the proceedings before they can apply for the deletion of the relevant criminal records.

And speaking of types of juvenile crime, effective this year, juvenile victims of human trafficking may request the expungement or immediate sealing of their juvenile record if it relates to their involvement in a crime committed when they were under 18 years of age and which was a result of being a victim of human trafficking.

And to ensure that automatic expungements occur as cases back up in the courtroom hallways, beginning January 1, 2025, the date a juvenile’s sentence ends or the court issues an order transferring the minor to the juvenile court system, the judge must immediately set a date for the automatic expungement as soon as it takes effect. The minor will be notified of this hearing but will not be required to appear.

And that’s your flight report for today. The tower has given clearance for the takeoff of minors to delete the entry.

Brett Kepley is an attorney with Land of Lincoln Legal Aid Inc. Send questions to The Law Q&A, 302 N. First St., Champaign, IL 61820.