Denver criminal defense lawyer / expanding record sealing

Some interesting news from New York State regarding record sealing. It appears the Bar Association is pushing for legislation that would allow those convicted of most misdemeanors and minor felonies to have their record sealed after after a statutory waiting period (five years for misdemeanors and eight years for felonies). Any Denver criminal defense lawyer will tell you that it's considerably harder to get your record sealed in Colorado. Basically no convictions can be sealed except for deferred judgments (which technically aren't convictions at all, they are dismissals) and a narrow set of minor drug related offenses. Denver criminal defense lawyers also would bemoan this policy, and with good reason. I don't see how it serves any real purpose.

For some reason the District Attorneys of New York are opposing this rule change. Again I have no idea how anybody is served by giving those convicted of minor offenses a lifelong criminal record. It seems pretty unlikely that this would have any deterrent effect. If you're not deterred by jail time or hefty fines, how would you be deterred by the possibility of it coming up in a background check when applying for a job 10 years later? And it's not like these crimes are going to indicate serious moral short comings. The New York law specifically excludes any crimes against the elderly or against children, and as stated above it's limited to relatively minor offenses.

I suppose an argument could be made for transparency. Employers may have a right to know if people they are about to hire has kept his nose clean. But that's pretty hard to justify in light of our other policies. Don't juries then have the right to know about all the evidence that's been suppressed at trial? Or about the defendant's criminal history? It just seems like the state makes these sorts of decisions all the time, and really the criminal record is more a form of continued punishment than any sort of transparency mechanism.