- November 19, 2024
- Criminal Defense
A criminal conviction can significantly affect the rest of a person’s life, even long after they have served their sentence. The stigma of a conviction can result in professional challenges and adverse effects on one’s personal life.
Impacts of Criminal Convictions on Professional Licenses
A criminal conviction can trigger disciplinary actions for individuals holding professional licenses, even if their offense had nothing to do with their job. In many licensed professions, ethical rules require license holders to uphold themselves to the highest professional, public, and personal standards. A criminal conviction can give licensing boards grounds to suspend or revoke a professional license. Suspensions and revocations more frequently occur following convictions involving crimes of violence, such as battery or sexual assault, or crimes of dishonesty, such as fraud or bribery.
Criminal convictions can also disqualify individuals from successfully applying for professional licenses. Industries where criminal convictions can trigger licensing issues include the healthcare, legal, financial, and accounting industries, all of which involve trust between the professional and their clients or patients.
Criminal records that appear on background checks can also negatively affect a professional’s employment applications, as employers may not want to hire someone who has committed crimes.
Personal Consequences of Criminal Convictions
A criminal conviction can also have personal consequences and create challenges for an individual’s life. For example, individuals on probation or parole may require permission from parole officers to travel out of the state. Criminal records can also create passport issues or restrict a person’s ability to travel outside the country, as border officers in Canada or other countries can deny entry based on a U.S. citizen’s criminal record. Finally, the stigma of a criminal conviction can cause family members and friends to distance themselves from a loved one convicted of a crime or make it challenging to make new friends once they learn of the individual’s criminal history.
Options for Professionals with Criminal Records
You may have options to mitigate or eliminate the stigma associated with a criminal conviction. A criminal defense attorney can help you pursue avenues of relief from a criminal record, such as:
- Direct Appeals – Immediately following a conviction, you may file a direct appeal to challenge alleged errors that occurred during the trial proceedings.
- Post-Conviction Relief – You may have a basis to collaterally attack your conviction by presenting evidence undermining its validity, such as newly discovered evidence proving your innocence or evidence of ineffective assistance of trial or appellate counsel.
- Expungement – You may be eligible to obtain an expungement of your criminal record, which seals the record from public access and prevents it from appearing in background checks. In many cases, a Michigan conviction may automatically receive an expungement of qualifying convictions after you spend the required waiting period offense-free.
Contact a Criminal Defense Lawyer Today
Don’t let a criminal conviction define the rest of your life. Contact The Law Office of John Freeman today for a confidential consultation with our team to learn more about your options for pursuing relief from the stigma of a criminal record.