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“Clean Slate” is the automatic erasure of criminal records. Criminal records often have a lifelong impact on people’s ability to secure housing, employment, licensures, education, and more. A criminal record should not be a lifelong sentence – Clean Slate erases low-level records to help people to meet their potential.

Yes. Anyone can apply for a pardon through the Board of Pardons and Paroles. People are eligible to apply 3 years after the date of conviction for misdemeanors and 5 years after the date of conviction for felonies. You can learn more here and seek assistance here.

We provide instructions on how to find your CT criminal record history on the CT Judicial Branch conviction search page. Alternatively, you can request your Criminal Record History from the Connecticut State Police. 

Your criminal record could be listed under an alias, a previous name, a misspelled name, or with an incorrect date of birth. If your criminal record does not appear, try another name that the police could have used. It’s also possible that your record has already been erased; erased records will not show up in a database search.

Your eligible offenses will be erased. You can apply for a complete erasure from the Board of Pardons and Paroles. 

No. If your record has been erased, you are legally entitled to say that you do not have a criminal record. When a criminal record is sealed, you can deny it ever happened. If your record is sealed and an employer asks you about it, you are allowed to deny that you were arrested or convicted.

Note: If your record has only been partially erased, you cannot legally claim that you do not have a criminal record. 

The Clean Slate law in Connecticut is designed to automatically erase a person’s eligible convictions. It is NOT designed to erase a person’s entire criminal record if there is more than one conviction in that criminal record. However, if all the convictions in a person’s criminal record are eligible for automatic erasure, they will all be erased.

There will be circumstances in which some convictions are erased and others are not. This means that the convictions on your criminal record, which are not eligible for erasure, will be available if someone conducts a background check.

If you have more than one conviction on your criminal record, and you are trying to determine which convictions may be eligible for automatic erasure under CT’s Clean Slate law, you must look up EACH individual conviction to determine if it will be erased.

Currently, the best method of checking conviction eligibility is using the judicial website as directed by this site. However, once the Clean Slate law goes into effect, it is unclear as of yet how people can easily confirm that their conviction has been erased (absent a background check). It is a question we will continue to ask of the State. We anticipate that everything won’t happen all at once on January 1, 2023, so it is possible there will be a lag time on automatic erasure for many eligible convictions.

There is much that remains unknown about how the implementation process with Connecticut’s Clean Slate law will work. CONECT is in communication with the State agencies overseeing the implementation and will be gathering information to share on this site as we learn it. 

One thing to keep in mind is that if you look up a conviction on the judicial system after January 1, 2023 and you don’t find it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that conviction has been automatically erased from your record. It could certainly be the case that it has been, but it could also be a website error, or the conviction could not be showing up for some other technical reason.

Connecticut’s Clean Slate Legislation only applies to convictions in Connecticut. If you live out of state, but your conviction history is in Connecticut, you may be eligible for Clean Slate depending on your specific convictions. If you currently live in Connecticut and your convictions occurred elsewhere, they will not be erased under Connecticut’s Clean Slate legislation.