Deferred Sentence Expungement Is When You Receive a Plea Deal
Video Transcribed: Faster, complete Oklahoma expungements now available for some deferred sentences. I’m Tulsa Expungement Attorney James Wirth, and we’re talking about a new case that has opened up the door to getting a complete expungement faster for people that are on deferred sentences.
All right, so first off, there’s a few different types of expungement, but primarily what we’re talking about today is Section 18 expungements, which is the complete expungement and deferred sentence expungements.
Deferred sentence expungement is when you receive a plea deal where you’re on a deferred sentence, you do your probation, you complete it, and upon successful completion, the case is dismissed and expunged.
Now, that expungement expunges the court case, but it does not expunge the arrest record. Most often with our clients, we want to follow up a deferred sentence expungement with a Section 18 expungement, which expunges both the court case and the arrest record. When it’s a Section 18 expungement under Oklahoma law, the events never happened. That’s always the better way to go.
Now, what Section 18 says is when you have a deferred sentence, once that is dismissed, if it’s a misdemeanor, you have to wait a year before you can do a Section 18 expungement. If it’s a felony, once it’s dismissed, you have to wait five years before you can do a deferred sentence expungement.
But what we see a lot of times is that people will complete the deferred sentence, but some courts set it for review, some courts do not. If the court does not set it for review, then it doesn’t automatically get dismissed and expunged. If the court does set a review, but the defendant doesn’t show up, then it doesn’t get dismissed and expunged.
A lot of people contact us down the road, they had a deferred sentence, no application to accelerate was filed, no allegations that they violated their probation, so there’s no indication that they didn’t complete it successfully. But nonetheless, the court has not entered the order finding it’s dismissed and expunged.
They retain my office, we file a motion for deferred sentence expungement, get it dismissed and expunged, and then we have to wait another year if it’s a misdemeanor to do a Section 18 complete expungement to get the arrest record expunged, or we have to wait another five years to do that if it’s a felony.
Well, we’ve got a new decision out from the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals, and that is V.C.B. v. State, and that’s 2020 OK CIV APP 69 that was decided and mandate issued on December 30th of 2020.
What this indicates is that even if there was an application to accelerate that was filed, as long as that wasn’t adjudicated against the defendant, it was either withdrawn by the state or it was dismissed or the defendant won on a hearing, then even in those circumstances, the date that the case was dismissed, even though the order dismissing it might be entered years later, for the purposes of determining eligibility for a Section 18 expungement, the dismissal is once the deferred sentence was done.
If you’re on a two-year deferred sentence and no review was set, and then you file with the court years later, you don’t have to wait to get the deferred sentence expungement entered and then go for Section 18.
You can say that it was automatically dismissed once the timeframe was up, once the two years were up. As long as a year for misdemeanors or five years for felony has gone by, you can go straight to the Section 18 expungement, get both the court case and the arrest record expunged.
Practically speaking, for some of our clients, this allows us to get their complete expungement does more quickly and more cheaply because we only have to do one court proceeding instead of two. But it can be a little complicated looking at the dates and how it applies.
If you’re not sure how it may apply to your situation and want to see if it entitles you to relief faster, sooner, cheaper, you’re going to want to talk to an attorney about your specifics. For that, you can go to MakeLawEasy.com.
