Expunging a Misdemeanor Offense from your Criminal Record in Ohio

Ohio expungement attorney Joslyn explains expunging a misdemeanor offense from your criminal record in Ohio. Joslyn Criminal Defense Law Firm has extensive expertise helping clients seal their criminal records so that they can effectively erase their past mistakes and move on with their lives. Contact Joslyn Criminal Defense Law Firm at (614) 444-1900 for a consultation with one of our experienced attorneys regarding the sealing of your record in Franklin County and surrounding counties, including Pickaway County, Madison County, Delaware County, Licking County and Fairfield County in Ohio.

Expungement is a process where an individual can have a prior criminal conviction, or a nonprior criminal conviction even a dismissed or a case that they were found not guilty on removed from public record. Now to do this, it has to be an eligible offense. And under Ohio law it depends on the degree of charge and the type of charge to determine whether someone is eligible. Luckily because of certain recent law changes, they’ve expanded the eligibility of a lot of people to remove prior convictions from their record. Previously if you’ve been convicted of more than one misdemeanor you couldn’t have them removed from your record. Under current law, you can now expunge an unlimited amount of misdemeanors as long as they are qualified misdemeanors. Generally that means that they’re not traffic offenses, or traffic oriented, that they’re not crimes of violence, and that they are not sex offenses. Generally speaking, all other offenses, as misdemeanors are expugnable, in an unlimited number. Now to further qualify, a certain amount of time has to have passed for a misdemeanor, specifically one year. And that needs to be from the close of the case. Now importantly, and something that’s frequently overlooked, the close of the case means that that’s the completion of any supervision, any sentence that was imposed, and the payment of any court costs. A common mistake that is made, is someone has served a sentence or a penalty on a misdemeanor conviction, much more than a year has passed, but they forgot to pay court costs. And unfortunately, under Ohio law, it’s one year from when the payment of court costs and the conclusion of all penalties have been served. So it’s very important that if you’re trying to expunge a misdemeanor record that it’s eligible, both the type of charge, the length of the period of time, and that it has in fact been closed for one year.