AM I ABLE TO EXPUNGE MULTIPLE ARRESTS OF CRIMINAL CASES IN FLORIDA?
Many clients wonder about this if they have more than one criminal case to be expunged. Some even make an inquiry as to whether or not they can have their entire record or sealed–years later.
Much of the time, the answer is that it cannot usually be done. Florida law allows for the expungement or sealing of one arrest or incident of alleged criminal activity. However, it is possible to expunge or seal more than one arrest or incident of criminal activity if you can show that the episodes have a sufficient relationship or nexus. This is commonly known as the nexus requirement.
Our Florida Supreme Court has recognized the value of the expungement statute to society and its fairness to people who have been improperly accused. Florida law recognizes that the expungement and sealing statutes grant a substantive right to a defendant and exist to protect the defendant from having his or her record left open for the public to inspect and preclude some of the most basic rights that we all enjoy as citizens. However, the statutes regarding expungement and sealing were not intended to wipe clean a person’s entire history, but to protect someone from a long-lasting stigma of having an open public criminal record pertaining to a crime he or she did not commit.
The general law allows the expunction of only one arrest or incident of criminal activity to be expunged, with the exception that the court may order the expunction of a criminal history record pertaining to more than one arrest, if the additional arrest directly relates to the original arrest. If the court intends to order the expunction of records pertaining to such additional arrests, such intent must be specified in its Order. The criminal justice agency may not expunge any record pertaining to such additional arrests if the Order to Expunge does not articulate the intention of the court to expunge a record pertaining to more than arrest. This section of the statute does not prevent the court from ordering the expunction of only a portion of the criminal history record pertaining to one arrest or one incident of alleged criminal activity.
For example, there are situations where a person gets charged with several misdemeanors and one of the misdemeanor charges is upgraded to a felony, resulting in two different case numbers. However, the case numbers refer to the same event that happened at the same time and place and involving the same parties and/or actions. The language used by the court called for a temporal relationship or a nexus between the different case numbers charged. This has since become known as “the A.B.M. standard.” About a year or so later, in an important case known as Dinkins v. State, a defendant was arrested twice in 1993 and charged with a total of 23 different offenses that occurred over 21 days. Dinkins previously had a clean record and he obtained a Certificate of Eligibility from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for record expunction. The trial court noted that although he had been involved in multiple incidents over multiple days and concluded that the trial court lacked jurisdiction to consider his Petition. So, the appellate court considered the facts and circumstances and focused on the statutory language which stated, “the court may, at its sole discretion, order the sealing of a criminal history pertaining to more than one arrest if the additional arrest directly related to the first.
When the case first went before the appellate court, that court disagreed with the trial court’s reasoning that it lacked jurisdiction to review the Petition involving the multiple arrests of the multiple cases. The court reasoned that the statute did not contain a blanket prohibition against record expungement where a defendant had committed multiple criminal acts. The statute uses the phrase “any of the acts stemming from the arrest or alleged criminal activity,” suggesting that the Legislature contemplated multiple criminal acts. The statute also speaks to additional arrests directly related to the original arrest. Accordingly, they found the fact that multiple arrests alone, does not foreclose a criminal expungement in the Dinkins matter. The appellate court found that the trial court should have decided that the multiple arrests/cases met the A.B.M. standard and its inherent facts. Therefore, the action was vacated and remanded to the trial court for further proceedings. The Dinkins case showed that the situation is quite often not a black or white issue, if the deciding judge is given discretion in making the determination that other cases may be expunged if it makes complete sense in the totality of circumstances to do so.
