Who gets a clean slate? Northeastern research reveals gaps in California’s expungement system
This Northeastern program analyzed critical inequities among Californians with a criminal record who seek a second chance.
Effron “Donnie” Veal was 24 years old when he was convicted in 1996 for shooting a man in the legs in San Jose and sentenced to 34 years in prison.
He spent the next 23 years behind bars but was granted early release in 2019 at the age of 47 as part of California’s “85% rule,” which allows inmates with good behavior to be considered for release after serving the majority of their sentence. He re-entered society with little education, job history or familiarity with 21st-century technology.
He told Northeastern Global News (NGN) that he wanted to hit “a master reset button” and eliminate parts of his record that could be used as barriers to employment and housing. “This is huge to restoring a person’s confidence and ability to reintegrate,” he said.
For many, a sealed record can be the difference between gaining fair access to employment or housing opportunities and remaining trapped in what Sarah Lageson, associate professor of criminal justice and law at Northeastern University, calls the “collateral consequences” of a past arrest or conviction.
“It’s really just a legal document that a person doesn’t really have any control over shaping, so it’s not even about the facts,” Lageson said. “It also impacts people’s ability and feeling that they can volunteer, or they can spend time with their kids on school trips.”
Veal, who was not one of the case studies included in the fellowship, knew he needed to have his record sealed to gain access to the kind of life he envisioned and set about finding ways to do that. He familiarized himself with the state’s record relief system, the legal pipeline through which residents with criminal records can petition a judge to seal or clear their prior convictions and arrests.
It was during that search that he learned about The Access Project (TAP), an Oakland-based legal services organization. TAP is also one of the organizations that participated in an inaugural program under the Mills Institute’s 2025-2026 Innovation Lab Grant initiative at Northeastern University. That program placed two first-year students at the center of Bay Area legal aid services — the kind Veal sought to help him clear his record.
The Oakland-based fellowship, called Bridging the Expungement Gap: Race, Gender, and Access to Clean Slate Relief in California, was led by Northeastern professors, and provided students the opportunity to collaborate with local community partners to forge new pathways for marginalized groups with limited access to critical services.
Oakland fellowship freshmen Maya Schnur and Nikki Liu were able to use datasets and in-person observation to analyze race- and gender-based disparities within the California record relief system.
Schnur and Liu — both politics, philosophy and economics majors on the pre-law track — used a large data set from TAP to create original infographics for two of Lageson’s research papers.
The graphics showed numerous imbalances in sentences and relief outcomes across race and geography for community college students with criminal records. For example, white students were about 8% more likely to be granted probation than Latino students, and 18% more likely than Asian students, Schnur and Liu discovered.
The students also found a 60% gap in custody length between white students and those from other racial groups. White students with a felony-level case were in custody for a median 300 days, while Black, Asian and Latino students in the same offense category were held for a median 480 days.
The California attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the research findings and states’s options for expungement of criminal records.
Veal, who is Black, secured a job in 2023 at Cabrillo College as the coordinator for its Rising Scholars Program, a collaborative initiative with TAP to provide legal aid to system-impacted community college students.
He said he was inspired to seek record relief alongside his students, both to motivate them at the beginning of their journeys and to find closure on his own.
Though California has some of the most robust avenues for record relief in the country, a wide range of challenges persist, such as complicated paperwork requirements and the difficulties of writing a compelling plea to a judge. This is particularly true for applicants who belong to traditionally marginalized groups, Lageson said. Veal experienced such obstacles.
And Liu witnessed some of those challenges firsthand when she journeyed to the Bay Area Legal Clinic’s office in April to sit in on a second-round session between a law student and client seeking relief.
The client — who could not be named due to a non-disclosure agreement — came to the clinic with her young son, “maybe 3 to 4 years old,” Liu told NGN. A clean slate for the mother would mean access to better-paying jobs, Liu said, and she also expressed concern about losing custody of her son.
Liu said she could see how stressed the mother became when trying to watch her child while, at the same time, answering difficult questions about her past that the law student was using to write an effective plea on her behalf.
“So, I kind of babysat while listening in on the session,” Liu said. “I didn’t expect that.”
Lageson said Liu’s experience demonstrated the gendered aspects of how the legal system can impact people’s lives.
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“It’s not just statistics. It’s also thinking about the other people that can be involved in a primary caregiver’s orbit when they’re trying to seek legal services,” Lageson said.
Veal’s case finally gained traction in December 2025, he said, and a judge that month expunged Veal’s record given all the work he had done to shore up his education and establish a career path.
He felt like he was floating when he left the courthouse, he said. “It just felt so surreal.”
Upon completion of the fellowship, Schnur and Liu presented their findings at the inaugural Oakland Showcase, an on-campus event featuring research, co-op work and creative endeavors from a number of departments. Schnur said they were recognized for the justice-driven approach to their research.
Schnur said her participation cemented her passion for the intersection of law and civil rights, leaving her confident that she can make a real impact.
“The reason I want to go into law is because I want to be able to see the change that I’m making in people’s lives,” she said. “Being able to see that process and see how grateful the client was for the lawyer’s help… it was something that I am so excited to be able to hopefully do in my future.”
