Expunging a misdemeanor conviction in Georgia
I am Attorney Ryan Locke , and I represent people who've been injured and people who have been unfairly convicted. 41 States allow you to restrict and seal some convictions after a period of time has passed. This is also called expungement. Today, Georgia becomes the 42nd state to allow you to do this. That's because today is the effective date of Senate Bill 288, which amended a portion of the law dealing with expungements. That portion is OCGA 35-3-37. And this is really exciting because before today there was no provision in the law that allowed you to expunge a conviction. You could use the First Offender Act to not be convicted. You could also use the conditional discharge to do the same thing. And there was a Youthful Offender Act that was passed a few years ago to let you kind of go back and use your first offender if you had never used it before, and if you had a conviction that you could have used it on, but for whatever reason, you didn't. But today is the first d...