New Jersey state police’s expungement backlog of 46K cases spurs lawsuit

The New Jersey Office of the Public Defender filed a class-action civil rights lawsuit Monday against the state police for the agency’s “extreme delays” in removing expunged criminal offenses from background checks.

State police have fallen up to two years behind in processing more than 46,000 expungement orders, according to the lawsuit. That failure means police have illegally disclosed criminal histories that judges have ordered sealed to potential employers, landlords, and others who run background checks, costing people jobs, housing, professional licenses, and other opportunities, the lawsuit charges.

Meredith L. Schalick is director of Rutgers Law School’s expungement law project, where attorneys and law students have helped hundreds of people since 2018 get criminal expungements. Since 2018, delays have grown from about four months to almost two years, Schalick said.

“This increased delay is unacceptable and inexplainable given that the New Jersey State Police received $15 million from taxpayers to improve and modernize their expungement processing systems in 2019,” Schalick said in a statement. “New Jersey can do better for people seeking a second chance, and the New Jersey State Police should be held accountable for failing to do their job.”

Spokespeople from the state police and state Attorney General’s Office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit’s six unnamed plaintiffs allege they have lost out on jobs and other opportunities because of the state police’s failure to process court expungement orders in a timely manner.

They include a man barred from volunteering as a coach on his son’s football team because of offenses a judge ordered expunged in December 2021, a man “chilled from” applying to casino jobs because of police’s six-month delay in processing his expungement order, and a woman whose criminal record was revealed and “flagged for investigation” in September when she applied for a massage therapy license, even though a judge had ordered her record sealed one year earlier.

Two other plaintiffs say they haven’t been able to apply for jobs and a third hasn’t been able to buy a gun because their expungement orders, issued between March and July of this year, remain unprocessed.

The delay also impacts human trafficking victims whose trafficking-related offenses were expunged under New Jersey’s vacatur law, which allows courts to vacate convictions if crimes were committed by someone who was trafficked, said Karen Robinson, managing attorney of Newark-based Volunteer Lawyers for Justice.

People can’t even find out when the state police process their expungement orders because the agency no longer issues confirmation letters, and the courts system removed that notification feature from its website, Robinson said.

The plaintiffs want a judge to order state police to be more timely in processing expungement orders.

New Jersey’s expungement statute is almost a century old, and lawmakers expanded it several times since to give reformed offenders a better chance to succeed. In 2019, Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law under what his administration dubbed its “clean slate agenda” that expanded expungements for people convicted of all but the most serious crimes and who haven’t committed new offenses in 10 years.

Alexander Shalom is director of Supreme Court advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

“While we should be striving to avoid saddling people with the burdens of incarceration and criminal convictions, where we cannot, expungements lift barriers to employment, housing, and family stability that keep people from full re-entry after incarceration and disproportionately harm people of color,” Shalom said in a statement. “When the State Police fail to timely process expungement orders, they violate the law and undermine those laudable policy objectives.”