Will a Conviction Stay on My Criminal Record in Illinois? Facing criminal charges in the state of Illinois? Andrew Russek and Joshua Boardman, skilled attorneys from Combs Waterkotte, discuss everything you need to know about Illinois criminal charges, including DUI, drug charges, sex crimes, conspiracy, violent crimes, gun charges, and more.
Interview Transcript
Scott Michael Dunn: A criminal charge, does it just sit on my record and my criminal record forever?
Andrew Russek: There are opportunities, if you already passed the level of conviction, there are opportunities, I’ll let Josh speak about it more, for expungement or for otherwise removing them from your record.
Joshua Boardman: Yeah, so in the state of Illinois, my general advice is that felonies are often not expungeable. Now you can pursue avenues to explore sealing records. There are felonies relating to cannabis possession and things like that. As the legislation has become more, let’s call it marijuana friendly, charges for felony charges for marijuana are selected into categories that are expungeable. But one of the big distinctions in the state of Illinois is once it’s reached that post conviction versus what happened to a case prior, was it dismissed? If so, perhaps you could expunge the arrest record. Obviously, if the case is gone, you don’t have an arrest record. but it’s still important to be aware of arrest records that are out there in the event that you have a, you’re deeply scrutinized for your employment or things like that. So there are opportunities for expungement in the state of Illinois for a certain number of misdemeanors and then also felonies that have been dismissed and you want to get rid of arrest records.
Dunn: So, just for the sake of clarity, I can clear, seal, or expunge my criminal record in Illinois?
Boardman: The truthful answer on this is you should contact a criminal defense attorney because under the expungement or sealing statutes in Illinois, my process is someone will come to me and say, hey I was convicted of this crime and then what I’ll do is I’ll go to the statute and see is it eligible. Was it a violent crime? If so, it’s likely precluded from ever being eligible from expungement. You’ve got to go, you try to get it, have it removed perhaps through a governor’s pardon or something like that. So to say generally that I have a criminal record but I can either seal or expunge it, that’s not always the case. It’s important to find somebody that can walk through the categories or classifications of what’s eligible and what’s not.
