Assembly committee passes bill to expand expungement

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A bill to extend expungement eligibility to more people is moving forward in the Wisconsin Assembly.

The Assembly Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety on Thursday unanimously passed Assembly Bill 69, which would allow judges to order expungement after sentence completion and removes the age limit for expungement.

Judges can now order expungement if the conviction is for a Class H felony or below, the crime wasn’t violent, the person committed the crime before age 25 and has no previous felony conviction. Expungement is contingent upon sentence completion and must be ordered during sentencing.

Before passing the bill, the committee voted on an amendment offered by Rep. Cody Horlacher, R-Mukwonago, on Tuesday. It added stalking, vandalism of a business, trespassing of a dwelling and violations of a restraining order as crimes excluded from expungement. Rep. Tip McGuire, D-Kenosha, said some people who can now have their records expunged for some of those offenses won’t be able with this amendment.

“I think some of these … ultimately express a lack of faith in our judiciary,” McGuire said. “What this change does is remove this discretion based on the nature of the offense.”

Rep. Shae Sortwell, R-Two Rivers, also expressed concern about excluding vandalism from the bill. He said it seems like the sort of crime that should be forgivable for someone who’s “turned their life around.”

Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard and one of the bill’s authors, said he agreed with the concerns about judicial discretion, but he didn’t believe the amendment would make a dramatic impact on the bill.

Lawmakers voted 8-6 to pass the amendment prior to unanimously to approve the bill.

The committee also passed a bill requiring out-of-state offenders who move to Wisconsin to provide a DNA specimen to state crime laboratories during the executive session. A public hearing on seven criminal-justice bills that came out of a task force on racial disparities followed. Follow @WLJReporter