PROVIDENCE — Many notable Rhode Island court cases have ended with “deferred” prison sentences.

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, and to the East Providence police officer who accidentally killed his commanding officer when he thought he was “dry firing” his rifle.

And these were not isolated cases.

Stalkers. Domestic abusers. The admitted accomplice to a robbery at gunpoint in Waterplace Park. The former director of operations at Amtrol, who pleaded no contest to stealing $186,000. The assistant Ashaway fire chief who stole prescription drugs from a home in his fire district. All received deferred sentences.

The notion: if they stay out of trouble, they stay out of jail. And if they are first-time offenders, state law already provides them an opportunity to wipe their criminal records clean five years after completing their sentence for a misdemeanor, and 10 years after completing their sentence for a felony.

But now, some of the state’s lawyer-legislators are pushing a measure that would “automatically quash and destroy” any public record of any crime that resulted in a deferred sentence, as soon as the deferral period ended, without any waiting period. In doing so, the measure would reverse a recent Supreme Court ruling on how these cases are supposed to be handled, a ruling that took some judges by surprise.

The lead sponsor is a criminal defense lawyer, Rep. J. Patrick O’Neill, D-Pawtucket, who argues that the destruction of any record of such cases is warranted because deferred sentences are generally given to “people who have made a mistake, accepted responsibility for it and moved forward.”

But the state police and Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch are concerned about wiping out the history of violent crimes under any circumstances. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last week, Lynch cited many more concerns about erasing the records of people who, in exchange for these no-jail sentences, had to “admit their guilt in court.”

Lynch said the automatic destruction of these records would allow many more admitted criminals to declare to a potential employer that they had never been convicted of a crime, “undermine existing statutes that require background checks” for job applicants, and “permanently erase the entire records of individuals who may now apply to work with our most vulnerable citizens — children and the elderly — without the standards and protections of the expungement statute.”

The bill is the latest entry in the annual drive by prisoner advocates, criminal-defense lawyers, black lawmakers and other representatives of the minority community to shorten the waiting period for the expungement — or permanent sealing and removal from public view — of criminal records.

One such bill introduced in this session seeks to cut the waiting time in half; another would allow people licensed by the Health Department to expunge their disciplinary records; a third, similar to what O’Neill has proposed, will be considered by the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. The opportunity to expunge a record is now limited to first-offenders who have committed a “nonviolent” crime, though, as Lynch reminded the lawmakers, many “serious crimes” — such as extortion, witness intimidation, assault with a dangerous weapon and domestic assault — are currently eligible for expungement under Rhode Island law.

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.

O’Neill’s bill to “automatically quash and destroy” the records of cases involving deferred-sentences was sparked by a November state Supreme Court decision on two consolidated cases.

The ruling, written by Supreme Court Justice Francis X. Flaherty, not only ran contrary to the way a number of the state’s judges had been handling expungement requests for deferred-sentence cases, it also defined what constitutes a conviction in a way that took some in the legal community by surprise. Here are the basic details, as outlined in the court narrative:

James Briggs pleaded no contest to second-degree robbery and received a five-year deferred sentence on Jan. 20, 1995.

After successfully completing the terms and conditions of his deferred sentence, he filed a motion to expunge the episode from his record. Superior Court Judge Susan McGuirl rejected his request on grounds he had committed a violent crime that was not eligible for expungement.

On that same day, May 4, 2004, McGuirl rejected a plea by Anna M. Mathias to expunge her record.

Mathias had pleaded no contest to a drug possession charge and received a five-year deferred sentence on March 4, 1996. She was subsequently charged and pleaded no contest to reckless driving, simple assault, driving on a suspended license and leaving the scene of an accident.

After looking at her history, the judge decided she too was ineligible for expungement, but for a different reason: she had lost her first-offender status by pleading no contest to another crime within 10 years.

“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 Superior Court judge 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 Supreme Court agreed.

In its November 16, 2007, decision, the court provided this rationale: since “we have reasoned that a plea of nolo contendere is an implied confession of guilt,” it follows that such a plea constitutes a conviction for purposes of weighing who is and is not eligible for expungement, even when it has been followed by a deferred sentence.

And lest there be any doubt, the decision also states that a nolo contendere — or no-contest plea — followed by probation also counts as a conviction under the expungement statute.

Neither Briggs nor Mathias qualified for a cleansed record because Briggs’ crime, second-degree robbery, is specifically defined as a crime of violence, thus disqualifying him for expungement of his record, and Mathias because her subsequent legal troubles eliminated her status as a “first offender.”

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Assistant Public Defender Michael A. DiLauro delivered a statement that labeled the high court decision “absurd.”

In a letter to the lawmakers, he and Public Defender John J. Hardiman wrote: “The reason that the Supreme Court’s decision is absurd is clear. Every criminal case that is adjudicated, whether it is via an admission or finding of guilt after trial, involves the imposition of a sentence. A ‘deferred sentence’ is an exception to that rule… No formal sentence is imposed. If successfully completed it is, from a legal point, a nullity.”

Until the November Supreme Court decision, however, Superior Court Chief Judge Joseph Rodgers acknowledges, different judges had different views about whether the 5- and 10-year waiting periods for expungement applied to such deferred-sentence cases. Some waived the waiting periods.

Scanning a recent summary of expunged cases, he said there were six that “appeared to be matters that should not have been expunged,” because the waiting periods had not elapsed or the case involved a violent crime.

Rodgers provided these details:

One involved a defendant handed a five-year deferred sentence for larceny over $500 by Superior Court Judge McGuirl on Oct. 29, 2001, whose record was expunged by Judge Vincent A. Ragosta on June 4, 2007. Another involved a five-year deferred sentence handed out by the late Judge William A. Dimitri Jr. on June 28, 1999 that was expunged by Judge Stephen P. Nugent on Jan. 18, 2007. Another involved what Rodgers described as a crime of violence — “larceny upon a person “ — that was expunged by Magistrate Joseph A. Keough.

Rodgers cited a notation in the docket for one of these cases as evidence the attorney general’s office at one point also believed deferred-sentence cases were eligible for special treatment. The notation said: “the state agrees to expunge upon successful completion” of the sentence.

“I believe Mr. O’Neill is correct that there were judges, until the Briggs decision, that believed a deferred sentence by its very name was not a conviction.… Other judges, consistent with earlier decisions of the Supreme Court, took an opposing point of view, “ he said.

“If nothing else,” Rodgers said, the Supreme Court decision “clarifies” the law as it stands.

With reports from staff writer Gene Emery

kgregg@projo.com