Colorado’s Clean Slate Act Goes into Effect

As of July 1, 2024, Colorado’s Clean Slate Act, or Senate Bill 22-099, is officially in effect. This comes in the wake of several other states that enacted new legislation, giving individuals with criminal records a better chance to fully reintegrate into the workforce and society. Colorado expects to automatically seal more than 100,000 court records under the new law, mostly misdemeanors and petty offenses. Below is a brief timeline relating to the Act: 

• February 1, 2022 - Colorado SB22-099 was introduced in the Colorado legislature 
• May 31, 2022 - The Governor of Colorado signed the bill with some changes from the original language 
• July 1, 2024 - The Colorado Clean Slate Act went into effect. 
• Future Quarterly Reviews - Ongoing process to identify and seal eligible records.

Eligible records under Senate Bill 22-099 

The Clean Slate Act mandates that the Colorado Judicial Department automatically seals eligible records. The first data scrape, conducted after the law took effect on July 1, 2024, identified over 140,000 cases eligible for sealing. Below is an overview of records that are eligible and ineligible for automatic sealing in most situations. 

Eligible crimes: 

• Misdemeanors and Petty Offenses - It must be at least seven years since the final disposition of the case. 
• Eligible Felonies - At least ten years must have passed since the date of the final disposition of all criminal proceedings against the defendant, or the release of the defendant from supervision concerning a criminal conviction, whichever is later. 

Ineligible crimes for automatic expungement: 

• Domestic violence 
• Child abuse 
• Unlawful sexual behavior 
• Serious or violent crimes, including:  

• • Murder 
  • Kidnapping 
  • Sexual assault 
  • Aggravated robbery 

• • Trafficking children 

Other exemptions include but are not limited to: traffic offenses, DUI, bodily injury, animal cruelty, identity theft, assault, menacing, indecent exposure, robbery, and certain burglaries.  

For details on inclusions and exclusions, refer to the Colorado Clean Slate Act or Senate Bill 22-099 here. 

Process for automatic expungements 

Records of qualifying criminal records will be inaccessible and sealed from public view during the background check process for most employers. If a person whose record is sealed commits a crime within the specified waiting period for expungement, the record will no longer be eligible to be sealed. 

As part of the initiative, there are also several requirements the Colorado state government will be required to follow: 

• Quarterly Lists - The Colorado Judicial Department must create a list of all records eligible for automatic sealing four times a year. 
• District Attorney Review - These lists are then sent to district attorneys across Colorado's 22 judicial districts. The district attorneys have 45 days to raise any objections to records in their regions. 
• Background Checks - Once qualifying records are sealed in the judicial system, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation is required to remove them from publicly accessible court records. Although the government, including prosecutors, can still access these records, they will no longer appear in standard court record searches. 

How this affects hiring and background checks

The approval of Senate Bill 22-099 will allow eligible convictions to be sealed from public view in Colorado. Similar initiatives have resulted in clean slate laws in other states. These initiatives have had positive outcomes, making it easier for individuals to clear their records and reintegrate into society.  

This new law is a positive step towards giving citizens with past criminal convictions another chance, but it may also impact hiring, onboarding, and record retrieval speed as qualifying expungements are processed. Employers operating or hiring in Colorado should review Senate Bill 20-099 and other second chance and clean slate laws as the employment landscape changes and consult their legal counsel. 

As other variations of clean slate laws become more common across the United States, Verified Credentials continues to monitor the status of these updates and provide updates as they become available.