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Video Transcribed: How to get a complete expungement in Oklahoma after a deferred sentence. I’m Oklahoma attorney James Wirth, and we’re about to talk about how to get a complete expungement after you’ve completed your probation and deferred sentence.
All right, so the first thing you need to know, something that a lot of people don’t know is that when you successfully complete your probation on a deferred sentence and go back before the court, and the court finds you successfully completed, and the court allows you to withdraw your plea of guilty and the court dismisses the case and expunges it, that that expungement actually only expunges the court case, does not expunge your arrest record.
So if anybody’s doing a more comprehensive background check, requests your OSBI background check, it’s going to show that you were arrested and that’s likely to lead to some questions. So you want to get the complete expungement after you get your deferred expungement.
And under those circumstances, you first do have to get the deferred sentence expungement completed. From that point, what you need to do is wait. You have to wait one year on a misdemeanor and five years on a felony.
Once that one year has gone by, or that five years as applicable, you need to file a petition for expungement with the court, give 30 days advanced notice of a court date to the interested parties, which includes OSBI, the prosecutor, the court clerk, and the arresting agency.
And you request the section 18 expungement and it’s either going to be subsection eight if it’s a misdemeanor, or subsection nine of title 22, section 18, if it’s a felony.
And you show up for that court date and demonstrate you qualify under the statute and then the burden shifts to the state for them to prove that the need for the public to know outweighs your personal interests.
And although that sounds like maybe that wouldn’t be that difficult. It’s actually incredibly difficult. Most of the time, the state doesn’t even try. They acknowledged that your need to get your record clean is paramount, that the public does not have a huge reason to know about what occurred in your life years ago. So most time, those can be granted.
From that point, you get an order of expungement. You file it with the court clerk, send it to those interested parties and OSBI charges you $150 to update their records. Once they update those, then when you pull your OSBI background check, it should show nothing.
When you call the court to see if you’ve ever had a case, a criminal case, they should say, “Nope, don’t see anything here.” Because once you have that section 18 expungement, it says that under Oklahoma law, those events never occurred. So if you need any help with that process, would like an attorney, have some questions about your qualifications, you can contact me, go to MakeLawEasy.com. Again, that is MakeLawEasy.com.
