Santa Clara County to Automate Criminal Expungements

Expanding on technology launched two years ago to rapidly clear old marijuana convictions, Santa Clara County is now looking to automate batch expungements of low-level criminal records, clearing a major hurdle for people legally entitled to a clean slate to help reclaim their lives.

Starting this summer and through the end of the year, an initiative led by the district attorney’s office, partnering with agencies including the Superior Court and public defender’s office, is expected to institute a system that could greenlight upward of 10,000 expungements a year.

That would mark what one official called a “quantum leap” over the current court process for expungements, which tops out at about 1,800 clearances annually.

People convicted of some misdemeanors — as well as low-level felonies that can be reduced to misdemeanors — are eligible to have those convictions expunged, or cleared from local court and state Department of Justice records, if they go five years with no more offenses and fulfill their probation requirements.

But expungements are not automatic. An eligible person typically has to file an application with the court, either through the probation department or with the help of an attorney, and schedule a court hearing to get a judge’s signoff.

“We’re not making new laws. It’s just something not a lot of people take advantage of because most people don’t have the means to do it,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said. “Giving people that cleansing, that fresh start, is important. Everybody needs that. If they’re entitled to it, they should get it.”

By the estimate of the district attorney’s office, 80 percent of cases prosecuted in the county involve misdemeanors, totaling about 15,000 per year. That means as many as 10,000 people who were convicted of misdemeanors in 2016 could be eligible to get their records cleared, when accounting for cases with multiple charges.

That 2016 crop is where the district attorney’s office is starting with expungement automation. Having completed test batches of about 25 convictions, the office will start batches of 300 convictions this summer. The goal is that by the end of 2022, the office’s proprietary software will be capable of processing more than 10,000 expungements in a year — a fivefold increase of what can be done through conventional avenues.

The challenge of the project is not just approving thousands of potential expungement candidates, but also clearing their convictions from an array of databases to ensure they don’t show up in background checks, such as for job or housing applications.

“If we left it to the court to remove the convictions from local, state and federal databases, they don’t have the resources,” Rosen said. “That’s where we add the Silicon Valley secret sauce. We’ve written code, so that once a clerk pushes a button, everything is expunged.”

It helps that the system isn’t being built from scratch. In 2020, the county automated the expungement of 13,000 old marijuana convictions, prompted by the legalization of recreational pot in California.

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