A past conviction is keeping me from finding work. What can I do?

Charlotte North Carolina Criminal Defense Attorney Brad Smith of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question: A past conviction is keeping me from finding work. What can I do?

Question: "A past conviction is keeping me from finding work. What can I do?”

Brad Smith:

The North Carolina general assembly has recently passed a law that provides people that have been convicted of non-violent felonies of non-violent misdemeanors to expunge those offenses from their record after a certain period of time.

The statute requires you to obtain a number of references to show that you haven’t been convicted of any violent offenses since being convicted of that offense.

The statute does allow you to have been convicted of a variety of different traffic offenses.

But it allows you now to petition the court to obtain references, to obtain letters of good standing and to have that conviction removed from your record as long as it is a non-violent felony or non-violent misdemeanor.