Over the years, things started looking up for Debra and she was eventually able to turn her life around. She found a job. She got married and then had two children, leaving her old life decades behind her. In fact, when she came to our office seeking assistance with sealing her criminal record, Project GRACE staff attorney, Carlton Martin, says, “She had not committed a crime in almost 20 years.”

Latosha was then faced with the dilemma of needing to find another job, but with something on her criminal record from much earlier, she was worried about her chances of getting hired elsewhere. Over the years, she’d never even tried. She explains, “I’ve kind of been stuck at the same job for like 16 years, but I always stayed there because of my background. I didn’t think I could go nowhere else.”

They are seeking the most expeditious and least costly way to put past mistakes behind them, not justify them. They want to pick up and move on for the sake of not only themselves, but for the sake of those who depend on them. In my experience at the Help Desk, those who need expungement are not all the same: men, women, young, old, rich, poor, white, black, Hispanic, educated, uneducated, people of faith, people without a faith connection. They are all different. But what they do have in common is a desire to build a future for themselves that is reflective of who they are today, rather than of their choices yesterday.