PSA for U.S. nursing hopefuls with criminal charges

[TuesdaysChild]

I am **not** an attorney, but I did work in criminal court for several years as a court reporter so I'm aware of the existence of this process. If you believe any of this may apply to you and feel you would like to try to have records expunged before applying to nursing school, you should contact a criminal attorney in the county where you were adjudicated and consult with them further about your specific case and details.

I've seen this inquiry come up both on here and I hear it in real life, so I wanted to share a helpful piece of information for nursing school hopefuls who have criminal charges in their background. This does not apply to everyone. This is generally meant for people with relatively minor charges, including a felony, that were isolated offenses and a reasonable amount of time has gone by since adjudication.

Many people outside the legal field have no idea that there is a process called expungement that you can initiate in the jurisdiction of your original offense to have charges removed from your adult criminal record. Guidelines vary by state and county, but generally it applies to charges that were non-violent and "relatively" minor. A "sufficient amount of time" since adjudication is also subjective and will vary between jurisdictions. Typically, if it was a couple years ago, that might not be a qualifier for expungement because it hasn't been long enough to establish isolated offense, but you should still consult with an attorney in any case.

Just consider me a little birdie alerting you to the fact that there is such a thing called expungement and it can be voluntarily initiated by you. Expungement is specifically designed to provide relief to minor offenders who basically just did something dumb as a young adult and it's interfering with their otherwise law-abiding adult lives. Again, if this possibly applies to you, talk to an attorney and hopefully get the ball rolling. If you did something stupid as a kid, it doesn't necessarily have to haunt you for the rest of your life.