The House Judiciary Committee holds hearings yesterday on bills that would make Rhode Island’s expungement law more liberal, including one sponsored by Rep. Gregory Schadone, D-North Providence, center.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE — One after another, advocates for the erasure of criminal records urged state lawmakers yesterday to give people a second chance, free of their sometimes messy pasts.

“By passing this legislative bill, you’re giving people opportunities to find better jobs so that they can get off the dole,” said Ramon Martinez, president and chief executive officer of the Hispanic advocacy group Progreso Latino.

Even Albert E. DeRobbio, chief judge of the Rhode Island District Court, sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee urging support for one in a trio of bills up for a hearing yesterday that were aimed at cleansing criminal records so people can tell prospective employers they have never been convicted, or giving judges discretion to lift the prohibitions against people with records obtaining licenses to work, for example, as travel agents, movers, auto mechanics and nursing assistants.

Current law allows the expungement of a single, nonviolent offense from the record of a first-time offender five years after he or she has completed a sentence for a misdemeanor; 10 years after completing a sentence for a felony.

Aiming his comments at a bill that would allow the expungement — or permanent sealing — of multiple misdemeanors from an individual’s record, DeRobbio said: “I would ask the committee to consider the reason that Rhode Island has had an expungement procedure: it is to give defendants who have amended their lives an opportunity to remove the indicia of their previous offenses.”

“Human nature being what it is, many people who come before the court seeking expungement of misdemeanor records did not make one mistake, but several,” he wrote. “Under current law, such persons can never be granted relief by the court.”

By the time they come to court seeking expungement of their records, DeRobbio said, they are often people in their mid-to-late 30s or older with steady jobs and families who are “desperate to clear their records so they can obtain promotions or occupational licenses or to avoid the embarrassment of having their children (who know how to use the Internet better than their parents) find out about their past sins.”

“I firmly believe that fairness demands that people who have amended their lives be given an opportunity to remove the stigma of criminal convictions,” the judge wrote.

But an aide to Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch conveyed his “strong” opposition to passage of a law that would allow the blanket removal of multiple crimes — such as repeat drunken-driving and repeat domestic abuse — from a person’s record.

Lawyer-legislator David Caprio, D-Narragansett, said someone could stay out of trouble for five years as required, and then lose the opportunity forever by getting into another “mishap.” Shouldn’t a judge have the discretion to expunge a record in such a case, he asked.

Lynch’s state lobbyist, Joee Lindbeck, said the attorney general is willing to talk to lawmakers about a narrower approach, but “this language isn’t the way to do it.”

She also handed the lawmakers a letter from Lynch reminding them that Rhode Island is “one of the few states that allows for the expungement of an adult offense,” and “our law allows convicted criminals … to declare to an employer that he/she has never been convicted of an offense.”

Last year alone, judges removed 4,360 misdemeanors and 625 felonies from the public record, according to a report generated by the judiciary last week at The Journal’s request. In all, the courts have removed 28,417 criminal cases from the public record since the year 2000.

In addition to North Providence Democrat Gregory Schadone’s bill, the House Judiciary Committee yesterday also listened to testimony — but did not vote — on a bill sponsored by Rep. Joseph Almeida, D-Providence, to “automatically quash and destroy” the records of admitted criminals who had been given deferred sentences, after the deferral period.

In recent years, judges have handed out deferred sentences in a number of notable cases. Such was the sentence given, for example, to one of the admitted coconspirators in the Lincoln bribery scandal, to the executive secretary for the Barrington police chief who pleaded no contest to embezzling town money; the East Providence police officer who accidentally killed his commanding officer when he thought he was “dry firing” his rifle; an admitted accomplice to a robbery at gunpoint in Waterplace Park; and the assistant Ashaway fire chief who stole prescription drugs from a home in his fire district.

The notion: stay out of trouble for up to five years, stay out of jail.

Similar to a bill introduced by lawyer-legislator J. Patrick O’Neill of Pawtucket, Almeida’s bill was sparked by a November Rhode Island Supreme Court decision in a case involving a man seeking to wipe a robbery off his record, and a woman seeking to cleanse hers of a drug charge followed years later by a series of lesser charges, including simple assault. “Because they never were actually sentenced,” their lawyer argued that “they had not been convicted of any offense and therefore all records involving their arrest and plea should be erased.”

But the court ruled that neither met the basic criteria for after-the-fact expungement of a nonviolent crime from the record of a first offender who has stayed out of trouble. The high court also stunned some lawyers, and judges, by ruling that a no-contest plea is “a conviction for purposes of weighing who is and is not eligible for expungement, even when it has been followed by a deferred sentence.”

kgregg@projo.com