FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT WWW.QNS.COM MARCH 1, 2018 • THE QUEENS COURIER 23
New state law will help Queens woman
get fresh start after drug conviction
BY ANGELA MATUA
amatua@qns.com / @angelamatua
Queens resident Jane Smith* got in
trouble with the law while in high school,
and the episode ultimately altered the
course of her life. Now, she’s hoping a
new state law will help set her back on
track.
Approximately 15 years ago, Smith was
at a local bar when she attempted to sell
drugs as “a favor for a friend.” She was
charged with a felony and served a 30-day
jail sentence. (* Editor’s note: Th e woman’s
real name has been changed to protect
her identity.)
“I was young,” she said. “I wasn’t really
hanging out with the right people and
I certainly made a mistake, which backfi
red pretty seriously on me.”
Soon aft er, Smith attended college and
was deciding between becoming a nurse
or a teacher. But she quickly found out
that her felony charge would bar her from
pursuing those careers.
“At that juncture I started to think
about what I really want to be,” she said.
“I started to disclose the fact that I had
a felony and everyone in the teaching
department said, ‘I really don’t think this
is an appropriate fi eld for you.’ Every single
person with authority that I asked if
teaching or nursing was for me, they said,
‘Don’t even bother.’”
Unlike other states, New York made it
impossible for those convicted of a felony
to seal or expunge their records. A criminal
conviction would remained on a person’s
record for life and would appear on
civil background checks.
Rick Collins, a founding partner at
Collins Gann McCloskey & Barry, has
worked for more than a decade to change
New York state law to enable “people to
have a shot at redemption.”
Collins worked as both an assistant
district attorney in the Nassau County’s
District Attorney’s offi ce and criminal
defense before opening a private fi rm.
Working in both sides of the courtroom
gave Collins a diff erent perspective,
he said.
“Particularly working as a criminal
defense lawyer, I began to see that the
justice system really has eternal eff ects
on people’s lives and the absence of some
mechanism to expunge or seal something
that happened many years before,”
Collins said. “In addition to potential
prison or jail fi nes, restitution, probation,
forfeiture of assets, there are collateral
consequences involving the ability to get
employment, housing, education, loans
and all the other things that so many of
us take for granted in our lives.”
Smith, who ultimately graduated with a
degree in psychology and sociology, organizes
children’s parties. She said every
aspect of her life was aff ected by the sentence.
“Th e judgement was immediate,” she
said. “Getting a career, self-esteem was
aff ected. I had trouble for a little while getting
in relationships. I was petty, numb. I
was an emotional wreck. I couldn’t really
get it together and see a serious future for
myself from that point on.”
Smith said she missed out on job opportunities
off ered by friends because she
feared disclosing her record and being
treated diff erently because of it. Just walking
into a job interview made her nervous
because Smith knew she had to eventually
disclose her felony.
“You’re worth as much as your felony
is,” she said. “You sold drugs? Th at
means you’re forever a drug dealer and a
loser. Th e worst part is your self-esteem
is destroyed, the way you are speaking in
the interview is aff ected, the way you’re
thinking is aff ected.”
Collins said cases like this are what
made him fi ght for so long to pass
Criminal Procedural Law Section 160.59,
a “groundbreaking change” that allows
certain people convicted of non-violent
crimes 10 or more years ago to seal their
records.
He was appointed by the chair of
the New York State Bar Association’s
Criminal Justice section to co-chair a
committee to look into New York’s position
on sealing criminal records. Th e
committee found that New York was
“behind the times” and that many states
in the country had passed legislation to
either seal or expunge their records.
Th ough the committee recommended
changes to New York state law in 2011,
the change in criminal procedure law was
not put into eff ect until October 2017.
“Changing a law or getting a law passed
is not easy these days,” Collins said.
“Politics has become very partisan and
in some ways dysfunctional and it’s hard
to get things done. It took a lot of eff ort
on the part of many people involved in
this issue.”
Th e law has the potential to help thousands
of New Yorkers, Collins said,
though some people believe it does not
go far enough and others think it goes
too far.
“For those people, nobody ever deserves
a second chance in life,” he said. “I disagree
with that and I think that our system
of justice and our country embraces
the possibility of redemption and that
people should have a chance at being part
of the social fabric even if they made a
mistake.”
Th e law outlines specifi cally who can
benefi t from it — predatory criminals,
sex off enders, violent criminals or career
criminals are not eligible to have their
records sealed. Th e law also requires a
10-year waiting period from the time of
the last conviction and the person cannot
have a criminal conviction during
those 10 years.
It is also limited to a person with one
felony conviction, a felony and one misdemeanor
conviction or two misdemeanors.
“Th is isn’t a situation where a person
gets convicted on Monday and tries to get
their record cleared on Tuesday,” he said.
It’s not a perfect law, Collins argued,
as certain crimes can still show up on
Google searches and in local papers. But
he said when he looks back on the high
points of his career, this is “one of the
most gratifying things for me as a lawyer.”
Since the law has passed, Collins has
received calls from people all across the
state who want to take advantage of it. A
man had a conviction dating back to the
1970s and although he was retired, wanted
to seal his record “for his own piece
of mind.”
“He had no contact with the criminal
justice system for all the decades since but
he told me that that conviction has been
a weight around his neck for all these
years … it was something he needed to do
before he died,” Collins said.
Another woman who had a drunk driving
conviction in 2005 “broke down on
the phone and cried” as she told Collins
her story.
Smith’s mother read about the new
law in a newspaper article and when she
told her daughter, Smith said she didn’t
believe her.
“When she told me that there was a
process for a sealing, I looked at her like
she had 10 heads and said the state of
New York is never going to do that,”
Smith said. “I lost hope. I didn’t think
New York was ever going to allow this as
a possibility.”
Smith provided a judge with an application,
which included several letters
from community members, friends and
family to prove that she has been an asset
to society since her conviction.
Th e Queens District Attorney’s offi ce
will then make a determination and send
it to a sentencing judge, who will make
the fi nal verdict. Th e judge can then hold
another hearing on whether her conviction
should be sealed or not, as a safeguard.
“Th ere’s something that needs to be
said about this whole situation,” Smith
said. “Th e aspect of hope. When you’re
young and hopeful and make some kind
of error in judgement and then you discover
that it changed the rest of your life,
you become hopeless and there’s not a lot
of resolve when things are so much more
black and white. It’s going to be one of
every million people with a conviction
who are going to be successful. We have
to fi ght harder than every person to get
mediocre success.”
But Smith said the passage of the law
has provided her with hope and a reason
to pursue her fi rst passion: teaching elementary
school.
“I want a career. I want a life and
acknowledge that what happened happened
and it’s time to accept it and
move forward,” she said. “We served
our time, cried the tears, apologized as
many times as one person can apologize
and acknowledged the mistake. I got to
believe that other people don’t want us to
apologize anymore either.”
Collins said Smith’s particular case can
take four to eight months to process and
that his fi rm has taken on 50 or more
cases like this since the law passed. He
expects the waiting period to become longer
as more New Yorkers fi nd out about
this opportunity.
“I think it’s time for the courts to kind
of catch up,” Smith said. “I understand
that there are serious issues — murder,
rape, big, serious problems. Getting in
trouble when you’re a kid or adult should
not allow for an entire life of misery and
torture.”
Photo by Jane Smith
A new law passed in New York allows some to have their criminal records sealed.