Democrats in Albany just can’t stop rewarding criminals — at the public’s expense.
Their latest: a bill, called the Clean Slate Act, that would automatically seal criminal records, even for murders and out-of-state and federal criminal offenses after a certain amount of time.
Sex crimes (thankfully) would not be sealable, yet plenty of other violent and serious criminal offenses would be — in as little as three years after sentencing for misdemeanors and after seven for felonies.
The law would also bar potential employers and landlords from asking questions about prior convictions.
It’s the latest in a continuing stream of poorly thought-out criminal-justice-reform overreaches by Albany Dems.
Yes, New Yorkers believe in “second chances.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul and other backers say the bill will help ex-offenders qualify for jobs and apartments.
She even suggests it’ll address labor shortages around the state.
But it uses a nuclear bomb to kill a mosquito.
“Lawmakers propose to expand the range of sealable convictions, automating the process without adequate consideration of logistics, risks, limitations or public-safety effects,” warn the NYS District Attorneys Association’s Morgan Bitton and Robert Conflitti.
Notably, New York law already provides ways to seal criminal records; if the law needs tweaks, fine — make them.
But New Yorkers don’t need yet another sweeping reform that only leaves them in more danger.
Indeed, you’d think after the disastrous effects of the bail-reform, Raise the Age and Less Is More legislation, Albany would put more thought and planning into its hare-brained criminal-justice schemes. Nope.
By depriving the public of information it wants (if it didn’t want it, you wouldn’t need a law to seal it), Clean Slate only compounds the damage, particularly of LIM — which lets unhinged and unrepentant parolees who violate the terms of their release from prison remain free to prey on the law-abiding.
Less Is More left Waheed Foster, a deranged vagrant who committed a vicious subway assault on Elisabeth Gomes that left her disfigured and blind in one eye, free after he was arrested twice for misdemeanors in August 2022.
Under Clean Slate, Foster’s monstrous criminal record would be sealed from public view.
The bill is now expected to pass before this year’s legislative session ends next week.
Hochul should use the remaining days to prove she won’t tolerate more progressive overkill that threatens public safety.
Or she can let out-of-control progressives steamroll her yet again.
