File Destruction Helps Get A Clean Criminal Record Check

File Destruction Helps Get a Clean Criminal Record Check

by

Ned Lecic

When a person charged with a criminal act is acquitted in court, no criminal record is issued. This does not mean, however, that no record remains of the charge. In Canada, the police retain a record of the arrest and the courts keep records of a trial even after a person is found not guilty.

Having a record of any kind may come back to haunt a person at some point. The fact that they were acquitted may not suffice to exonerate them in the sight of a third party; a person who has been found not guilty may actually have committed the crime, but possibly there was not enough evidence to convict them. Therefore, even when a person is acquitted, society does not know if that person may really have been guilty. Two historical examples serve to illustrate this fact: — Lieutenant Colonel By, a British military engineer who came to Colonial Canada in 1826, building the Rideau Canal and the nearby town then called Bytown, but now the Canadian capital of Ottawa, was accused by the British treasury board of misusing funds allotted to the project. He was acquitted, but spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name before society. — In 1994, retired football player O. J. Simpson was charged in California with murdering his estranged wife Nicole and her boyfriend Ronald Goldman. A year later, he was acquitted in a jury trial; however, it is widely believed that Simpson was actually guilty, and that the reasons for his acquittal included a racially biased jury and the case being discredited by the Los Angeles police apparently planting a pair of gloves as evidence to increase the chances of a conviction. It will therefore benefit an innocent person to minimize the chances that anyone will ever discover the fact that they were charged. One aspect of this is getting police files expunged. An arrest record or court file does not normally show up during a criminal record check, so in many cases, this will not cause a problem for a person who has to get a background check done for a security clearance (for employment or other purposes). Nonetheless, criminal record checks in Canada can be done on four levels of security, ranging from Level 1, which only checks for criminal records for which a pardon has not been granted, to Level 4 (normally requested when asking for a security clearance to work with vulnerable people such as children), which also includes a record of all outstanding charges and a check on local police databases, court and law enforcement agency databases. As long as an official record remains, there is a chance that at some point, the fact that a person was arrested and charged will be disclosed in a given situation. Fortunately, a person who was charged at some point can apply to have police records destroyed. The procedure, known as file removal or file destruction, involves approaching the Canadian Police Information Centre, the arresting police department and the courts with a request that the documents relating to one’s charges be destroyed. Although the criteria for obtaining this are not as stringent as those for applying for a pardon, as with a pardon, there is some bureaucracy involved. Often, a person will delegate the task to a pardons agency, which will file all the necessary paperwork, relieving the person of the burden of wasting time on removing what is essentially an incriminating record of their innocence.

Ned Lecic is a writer from Toronto, Canada. He works for a

pardons

agency.

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File Destruction Helps Get a Clean Criminal Record Check