Depending on your state, you may be able to get your convictions expunged. Commonly referred to as "set aside", expungment clears the crime from your CCH (Combined Criminal History) for the state that you were convicted in. If you've ever been arrested (in any state) for anything higher than a Violation (i.e. Misdemeanor or Felony), it will be on your CCH. If you were not convicted it will only show up as an arrest, not a conviction. The arrests with no conviction cannot legally be used against you in any way.
Once it is cleared off your CCH, no private company, local, county or state law enforcement agency can find it on an initial records check. It will still be in the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) computers, but that never goes away. It gets sent to the NCIC center for crime statistics reporting and then becomes property of the federal gov't. The good thing is it can take up to a year or more for the federal NCIC results to come back, and the only people that can request that info are criminal justice agencies.
Some of the problems that might come up depend on the degree of felony you were convicted of. Take my state (Oregon) for example. There are 3 kinds of felonies in Oregon, class A, class B, and class C (A is the worst). In Oregon, you can only get a class C felony expunged, due to the fact that a Class C felony can be punished alternatively as a Class A misdemeanor. Class A and Class B are permanent no matter what. I'm not sure what state you were convicted in, but I suggest checking on the laws pertaining to expungment in your respective courts. You will probably be able to get the help you need by contacting your closest state court's office. If you want to pay for the assistance, there's a few place on the net to find help, for example
www.clearmyrecord.com . I'd just contact your court though, much cheaper and usually quicker. They will at least be able to tell you if you qualify for record expungment or not.
One more thing. If you do get your state record expunged, check with the local agency and county that you were arrested by. They will possibly have the records still in existance on their own system or in hard files. They should be notified by the state court, but I'd check anyway. Once you get notice that your conviction has been expunged, request a copy of your CCH (combined criminal history), which is usually available through the state police for a fee. You should be able to see if it's been cleared or not.
This process is usually slow, but it's the norm in most states. It won't go away overnight, but you will have the peace of mind provided by knowing that it is gone from your criminal history.
And before someone chimes in with some sarcastic comment about how the information I've given is not right I'll let you know that I work in law-enforcement. I have been a dispatcher working extensively with the LEDS and NCIC databases, and am now a deputy sheriff. I deal with CCH's (almost daily) and answer expungment questions quite a bit.
I hope the information helps you and anyone else looking to clean up mistakes from their past. I don't believe that something you did 25 years ago when you were a different person should have negative effects on your success today. Good luck.
West_Coaster
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