PROVIDENCE — Over the strong objections of the attorney general and state police, a key House committee has approved a bill to forever remove thousands of crimes from the public record so convicted criminals can tell state licensing boards and prospective employers — with impunity — that they have never been convicted of a crime.

Lawmakers have considered — and rejected — similar bills every year for the last decade. They have each died under fire from one governor after another and law-enforcement officials.

But this year, an advocacy group for released convicts has teamed with the criminal-defense lobby, the public-defenders office and a group of minority legislators to convince the lawyer-dominated House Judiciary Committee to approve this year’s version of the bill to rewrite the state’s criminal history.

One such bill is now headed to the full House for a vote. A second — allowing the removal of multiple misdemeanor convictions from a person’s criminal record — is up for a hearing and possible vote in a Senate committee tomorrow after a House version stumbled.

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, or 10 years after completing a sentence for a felony.

The bill that cleared House Judiciary on a unanimous vote on Thursday night goes farther and, in so doing, contradicts a recent Supreme Court ruling.

It would eliminate the waiting period — and the notion that expungement is limited to first offenders — in cases where the accused has pleaded guilty or no-contest to a crime and a judge has opted to give the offender a deferred sentence. In such cases, the bill would “automatically quash and destroy” all public records of such crimes as soon as the deferral period — which usually runs five years — has ended. Deferred sentences are not uncommon, especially in cases where a defendant has negotiated a plea that spared the state a trial.

Such was the sentence given, for example, to one of the admitted co-conspirators in the Lincoln bribery scandal, the executive secretary for the Barrington police chief who pleaded no contest to embezzling town money, the admitted accomplice to a gunpoint robbery in Waterplace Park who traded testimony for a reduced sentence, the former director of operations at Amtrol who pleaded no contest to stealing $186,000, and the assistant Ashaway fire chief who stole prescription drugs from a home in his fire district.

Judges have handed out deferred sentences to stalkers, domestic abusers and, in at least one case, an admitted child molester.

The notion: if they stay out of trouble, they stay out of jail. Advocates of the “quash and destroy” bill sponsored by Representatives Joseph Almeida, D-Providence, Grace Diaz, D-Providence, Nicholas Mattiello, D-Cranston, and Frank Ferri, D-Warwick, say it will remove an unfair “stigma” that keeps rehabilitated criminals from getting good jobs and licenses to enter certain professions such as nursing, social work and auto repair.

But the state police and Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch cited other concerns about erasing the records of people who, in exchange for 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.”

As “one of the few states that allows for the expungement of an adult offense,” Lynch said, “Rhode Island already has one of the nation’s most liberal expungement statutes.”

LAST YEAR ALONE, judges used the current law to remove 4,360 misdemeanors and 625 felonies from the public record, according to a report generated by the judiciary at The Journal’s request. In all, the courts have removed 28,417 criminal cases from the public record since the year 2000.

The bill to “quash and destroy” the records of cases involving deferred sentences was sparked by a November state Supreme Court decision that ran contrary to the way a number of the state’s judges had been handling deferred-sentence cases.

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 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 Supreme Court disagreed, saying: 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.

In a statement that he gave lawmakers, Public Defender John J. Hardiman and Assistant Public Defender Michael A. DiLauro labeled the high-court decision “absurd.”

Their argument: “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.”

There was no debate within the House Judiciary before the unanimous vote in favor of the “quash and destroy” bill. Those voting aye included the chairman, Donald Lally, D-Narragansett; Timothy Williamson, D-Warwick; Gregory Schadone, D-North Providence; Edith Ajello, D-Providence; Jon D. Brien, D-Woonsocket; David Caprio, D-Narragansett; Bruce J. Long, R-Middletown; Nicholas Mattiello, D-Cranston; William J. McManus, R-Lincoln; J. Patrick O’Neill, D-Pawtucket; Amy G. Rice, D-Portsmouth; Joseph H. Scott, D-Exeter; and Donna M. Walsh, D-Charlestown.

Tomorrow, the Senate Judiciary will consider two versions of another bill aimed at giving judges a power they do not have now to erase multiple misdemeanors — including domestic-abuse convictions — from someone’s record.

In a letter to lawmakers, District Court Chief Judge Albert E. DeRobbio told lawmakers that judges would like the opportunity: “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.”

“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.

The House Judiciary Committee stopped just short of a vote on a matching bill, introduced by Schadone, after several of the lawyer-legislators on the committee disagreed on what it actually did.

“While Governor Carcieri has not specifically reviewed this year’s expungement bills,” spokesman Jeff Neal said, “he continues to believe that Rhode Island’s expungement law is already liberal enough. As a general policy, he does not see any reason to broaden it.”

kgregg@projo.com