Holcomb’s approval of Senate Enrolled Act 47 comes as the Indiana Supreme Court is considering a case in which a man was denied an expungement after his felony conviction was reduced to a misdemeanor.

The Indiana Supreme Court heard oral arguments last month in the case, Naveed Gulzar v. the State of Indiana, 19S-XP-673. Gulzar was convicted of Class D felony theft and successfully petitioned to have the conviction reduced to a misdemeanor in 2016.

Gulzar faced a setback, however, when the Elkhart Superior Court denied his expungement petition in 2018, ruling the five-year waiting period had not yet been completed because it began anew in 2016 when the conviction was reduced.

A divided Indiana Court of Appeals panel affirmed the trial court in September, but the justices took Gulzar’s appeal after dissenting Judge John Baker called the majority’s holding “unjust and ill-advised.”

Senate Enrolled Act 47, which easily passed both legislative chambers, gives statutory effect to Baker’s dissent. It provides that the five-year waiting period for an expungement in cases such as Gulzar’s begins on the date of the felony conviction, not the date it was reduced to a misdemeanor conviction.

The new law also amends the expungement statutes in several other ways. Among them:

• Companies that provide background checks will be required to periodically review their records and remove those relating to expunged protection orders in the same manner as expunged convictions are removed.
• A person may now expunge protection order records in connection with the denial of an ex parte petition for a protection order.
• Law enforcement, probation and community corrections agencies may inquire about an applicant’s expunged records and are permitted to refuse to employ a person whose records have been expunged.
• Specifies the procedure to expunge records of a collateral action entered in a different county than the county that issued the expungement order.