Thread by @JeffJacksonNC

In North Carolina, we just passed a major criminal justice bill *unanimously.*

This almost never happens - and if it weren't for the national uproar over the killing of George Floyd, it would not have happened.

YOUR VOICE MATTERS.

The bill - which has been signed into law - does a few things:

1) If you're found not guilty or the charge is dismissed, instead of having to hire an attorney and pay money to get an expungement, you get one automatically. No attorney, no fees. This is huge, and took years.

I was a prosecutor. Every day, folks would come to my courtroom with misdemeanors like trespassing on their neighbor's yard or making a harassing phone call to their neighbor. But often (very often) the neighbor would show up and tell me, "Nah, that's just Jimmy, we're fine."

Ok, great, I'll dismiss the case, everyone is free to go. Except the charge is now stuck on their record unless they hire an attorney and get it expunged. But most of them don't, and then years later they apply for a new job and the employer sees an old charge and that's it.

That's why this has been a major issue that pretty much everyone in the state legislature has agreed we need to fix for years. The biggest roadblock was on the technological side, given how old the computer software is that our court system uses.

This new law gives the court system until late next year to solve that problem on a going-forward basis. The law isn't retroactive due to the technological issue BUT it authorizes DAs to submit expungement requests on their own, without needing a citizen to submit a petition.

2) When we raised the age of 16 to 18 last year, we didn't go back and make the 16 and 17 year olds who had previously been convicted as adults eligible for expungement. This fixes that. Very important, commonsense fix.

3) After seven years with no new convictions, you can now expunge nonviolent misdemeanor convictions from your record. So if you are convicted of an offense such as transplanting oysters taken from public grounds, unlawful sale of fish, unlawfully riding on a train...

permitting domestic fowls to run at large after notice, theft of shopping cart, intoxicated and disruptive in public, violation of a lawful curfew, unlawful taking of a wild turkey, obstructing a stream or drainage ditch, operating an unlawful bingo parlor...

or one of the hundreds of nonviolent misdemeanors we currently have on the books, you will now be eligible for expungement, assuming no other convictions in the past seven years.

All of this might strike you as pretty low-hanging fruit. And from an ideological standpoint, it is. Literally everyone agreed. But the hope is that this will create some momentum. There are other criminal justice bills pending that have at least some level of bipartisan support.

And, in addition to those pending bills, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd you're also going to see a new set of legislative proposals put forth.

Later this week I'm going to update you on where that effort stands.

On the Senate side, I want to personally thank one Democrat and two Republicans for helping to get this done.

Former Sen. @FloydMcKissick was a long-time champion of this bill. He worked with Sen. Warren Daniel and Sen. @SenDannyBritt to get it into a version that could pass.