North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

With a teaser like that, who could resist reading more? The 2025 edition of my online guide to expunctions is now available on the School of Government’s website at https://www.sog.unc.edu/resources/microsites/relief-criminal-conviction/. It is a free resource on expunctions and other forms of relief from the consequences of a criminal conviction. Compared to previous years, the 2024 legislative session was relatively quiet on the expunction front, but the General Assembly made some important changes, discussed briefly below and in more detail in the revised guide.

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Expunging criminal record information can be like removing ants from under your refrigerator. Just when you think you’ve eliminated all the ants/information, there’s another trail. That’s how a talented attorney in this field described the process in her article of the same name here. It’s also an apt description for figuring out the legal requirements, procedures, and forms for obtaining an expunction, in North Carolina and elsewhere. Here’s my latest effort, the 2017 Guide to Relief from a Criminal Conviction in North Carolina.

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I am sometimes asked if a conviction for which prayer for judgment has been continued (a PJC) can be expunged. It’s a sensible question, given—as I’ll discuss in a moment—that […]

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