If you were to be charged with a criminal offense it would be a good idea to see if there is anything your Attorney Allentown can do to help you get it expunged from your record as part of your plea agreement. An expungement, also commonly referred to as an expunction, is a court ordered process that allows the record of your arrest and/or your criminal conviction to be sealed. This just means that it would be erased from the public eye.
After your record as been expunged, the conviction and arrest would just cease to exist. Your Attorney in Allentown might refer to the process as setting aside your criminal conviction. This means that there is no reason for you to disclose this information to anyone either. If you’ve ever filled out an application for a job, you might remember that one of the questions wants to know if you’ve ever been convicted of a crime. If you have been convicted of a crime and it was expunged, this is not information you would need to disclose to your potential employer. Even if your employer were to run a background check they would not be able to find that you were arrested, convicted, or expunged.
It is still a good idea to make sure you speak to a lawyer at a law firm such as Drake Hileman & Davis to ensure that you have a clear understanding of what being expunged means. Just because your criminal record is no longer in the public eye it does not mean that it has been completely erased either. If you were ever to get charged with a serious enough crime, there could be grounds to unseal your criminal history to see what you’ve been charged with in the past. In this situation, the record would still not be made public. The information inside of your record would just be used for the legal situation at hand. Despite the fact that a previous crime has been sealed, it can still be used as evidence. An example of this would be if the prosecutor was trying to disprove your credibility by stating that you do have a criminal past.
