Fulton County Summit To Clear Some Minor Arrest Records
“About 30 years ago, I went into a restaurant and I didn’t have enough money to eat,” said Terralynn King.
She went to jail that night. She said at the time she had a drinking problem and was charged with disorderly conduct. She’s 53 now and has put five kids through college. She said finding work has been a huge struggle with that arrest on her record.
“You get paid less,” King said. “You have to do menial jobs. You get paid under the table. You have to encourage people in recovery not to go backwards and rob somebody.”
If you’re arrested for a minor offense, even if you’re not convicted, that arrest stays on your record. Getting that record expunged is a process that takes months – or sometimes, years.
But this weekend, Fulton County is offering a way to get it done in a day.
King is one of an estimated 5,000 people in Fulton County eligible to get their arrest records expunged. Prosecution and defense staff, along with law enforcement and court officials, plan to set up what they’re calling an expungement summit at a community center next to Ebenezer Baptist Church.
“The people whose records we will expunge on Saturday have not been convicted. And yet they live under this dark cloud. And so they don’t have access to jobs, housing, student aid,” said the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer, who is helping to coordinate the summit.
He said the expungement was as much about public safety as criminal justice reform.
“If people do not have access to legal employment – a means to eat legally, it doesn’t take a genius to know that some of those people will resort to illegal means of eating,” Warnock said.
Fulton County Commission Chair John Eaves said the event is modeled on summits in Chicago’s Cook County.
“We are paving new ground, uncharted areas in terms of doing this in the South, where incarceration is incredibly high,” Eaves said.
Since August, the county has held two pre-screening events to help streamline Saturday’s planned expungements. Eaves estimated around 300 attended those and hopes many hundreds more will be served this weekend.
Vertice Hudson, 28, said he was fired from a concierge job after being arrested five years ago.
“And it wasn’t like I had a DUI or I was doing anything wrong. I just hadn’t went to the DMV in Indianapolis, Indiana and renewed my license. So, a little step that I missed,” said Hudson. He spent a month in jail for the offense, which contributed to him losing his job.
Hudson said the arrest is a challenging thing to talk through during job interviews, something that adds to the ordinary nervousness of that process.
“I went through a series of about twenty questions about why this little issue was on my record. It’s been five years and it’s like ‘Why isn’t this gone?’” said Hudson, who now works at the airport.
Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard said the private business community has a parallel role to play in ensuring fairness when it comes to arrest records.
“You know, it does not make sense to bar someone from employment, to restrict someone from an opportunity to earn a living, based upon a minor incident,” he said, noting that government “ban the box” initiatives can only do so much.
Howard urged even people with outstanding warrants to participate.
“If you got a traffic warrant, don’t be afraid to come down. Because we’re not even going to look for that information,” he said in response to fears he’d heard expressed that the summit may be a kind of mass-arrest scheme.
The event will start at 10 a.m. Saturday, and last until every comer is served. Eaves said he anticipates holding more summits in other Fulton County jurisdictions in the future.
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