The Texas Legislature meets for its bienniel session starting in January, but legislators have already begun prefiling bills. One of the bills I will have an eye on is HB 293, filed by State Representative Harold Dutton of Houston, which pertains to expunctions of records following criminal cases. As of the summer of 2007, the Texas Supreme Court issued a decision which effectively imposed a waiting period to get an expunction following a dismissal or acquittal in a misdemeanor case of two years from the date of the offense.
In other words, if you were arrested for a misdemeanor on say January 1, 2008, and a prosecutor decided on January 10, 2008 to dismiss your case due to insufficient evidence, you would still have to wait until January 1, 2010 to be eligible to expunge the arrest from your record. And in the meantime, while you are trying to job-hunt and otherwise get on with your life, the arrest would keep popping up on a criminal background check.
As I understand Representative Dutton's bill, the expunction provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure would be amended to eliminate the waiting periods. We currently have many clients whose cases have been dismissed who are hanging in limbo waiting to get their records expunged. The Dutton bill would sure make life a lot easier for some very deserving people. Stay tuned.