NJ Clean Slate Law

As of June 15, 2020, New Jersey has updated its expungement law, under the “Clean Slate” provisions.

The Clean Slate law provides:

• Drug-related offenses resulting in a conviction are considered Disorderly Persons offenses for purposes of expungements.
• Having more than one drug offense is no longer a bar to seeking to an expungement.
• You can now expunge up to five drug offenses.
• You can now expunge five Disorderly Persons offenses instead of 4.
• The waiting period for an expungement has been lowered from six years to five years.
• Municipal court dismissal are now automatically expunged so long as they are not part of a plea deal. Prior to this a separate application was necessary.
• You can file for an expungement even if you had an expungement previously. Prior to this, you could only have one expungement ever.
• Now, if an individual avoids criminal activity for 10 years, they can apply to have their entire criminal record expunged, so long as it does not contain any statutorily non-expungable offenses. This can include multiple indictable offenses. This is what is referred to as the “Clean Slate” provision. The State is in the process to making this become an automatic expungement.

In introducing clean slate expungement, New Jersey still retains the “traditional” expungement path that has been in place for a number of years. If you qualify under this form of expungement, you will be able to achieve relief much sooner than waiting for clean slate eligibility to be satisfied.