Record restriction in Georgia: who actually qualifies

By Ben Sessions on October 27th, 2026 in Criminal Defense

Georgia does not expunge records. It restricts them.

The word people bring to us is “expungement.”

That word left Georgia law in 2013. What replaced it is called record restriction, and it does something narrower than the word expungement suggests.

Expungement implies deletion. Restriction is access control.

Under O.C.G.A. § 35-3-37, a restricted record still exists. It sits in the Georgia Crime Information Center exactly where it sat before. What changes is who is allowed to pull it — the record becomes unavailable to private persons and businesses, which is the population that runs background checks on job applicants, apartment applications, and volunteer forms.

That is a real benefit. It is the benefit most people actually need.

It is not erasure, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Restricted is not invisible. Here is who still sees it.

Start here, because it prevents the disappointment that follows a granted petition.

The statute keeps the record available to criminal justice agencies and judicial officials. Prosecutors see it. Courts see it for sentencing purposes in a later case. Defense attorneys and public defenders can access it. The Judicial Qualifications Commission can. So can you.

The statute also carves out situations where a restricted record may still be used to disqualify someone from employment or appointment to office, and it does not override federal disclosure requirements that apply to certain regulated employers.

So a restricted record is not a clean record for every purpose. It is a clean record for the ordinary commercial background check.

Understand which one you need before you spend a year pursuing it.

If your case ended without a conviction, restriction is usually automatic

This is the part of Georgia law that works well, and most people do not know it applies to them.

For arrests on or after July 1, 2013, non-conviction dispositions are restricted by operation of law. Nobody has to file anything. A charge closed by the arresting agency without ever being referred for prosecution, a case the prosecutor dismisses or nolle prosses, an acquittal, successful completion of a drug court, mental health court, or veterans treatment court program — these carry restriction with them.

The statute puts the agencies on a clock. The arresting agency notifies GCIC within 30 days of the decision to restrict, and written notice goes to the person within seven days after that.

Where a case is simply never referred to a prosecutor, restriction attaches after a waiting period: two years for a misdemeanor, four years for a felony, and seven years for a serious violent felony or a sexual offense involving a victim under 16.

For arrests before July 1, 2013, the process is manual. You apply to the arresting agency, on the form GBI publishes for that purpose, and the prosecutor decides.

The exceptions to automatic restriction catch more people than the rule does

Here is where cases go sideways, and it is worth reading twice.

Automatic restriction does not apply to charges that were dismissed or nolle prossed as part of a plea agreement that produced a conviction on another charge arising out of the same transaction.

Read that against how criminal cases actually resolve in Georgia.

A person is arrested and charged with four counts. Three are dropped, one is pled. The three dropped counts feel like they should disappear. They do not, because they were dropped in exchange for the plea on the fourth.

The same logic reaches the reduction people most often ask us about. A DUI charge reduced to reckless driving is a conviction on the arrest. The DUI count that went away went away as part of the deal.

Other exceptions in the statute pull in cases where the prosecution was barred from introducing evidence after a suppression ruling, where the conduct was part of a pattern prosecuted elsewhere, and where a trial produced acquittal on some counts but not all.

None of that is intuitive. All of it is in the code.

SB 288 opened a door for misdemeanor convictions — two of them, once, ever

Before January 1, 2021, a misdemeanor conviction in Georgia was permanent as far as GCIC was concerned.

Senate Bill 288 changed that, and it is the most significant second-chance legislation Georgia has passed in a generation.

The requirements are specific. You must have completed the terms of your sentence. You must not have been convicted of any crime in any jurisdiction for at least four years before you file — and nonserious traffic offenses do not break that four-year run. You file a petition in the court that sentenced you. The court weighs the harm to your privacy against the public’s interest in the conviction remaining available.

Then the limit that surprises everyone: the statute caps you at a lifetime maximum of two convictions, counting a series of misdemeanors arising from a single incident as one.

Two. For your life. Not two per decade, not two per county.

A long list of offenses is excluded outright — family violence offenses, sexual offenses, offenses against minors, sexual battery, peeping tom, and most theft offenses, with narrow room for shoplifting and refund fraud.

SB 288 also created a route for some felony convictions, but only after a pardon from the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, and not for serious violent felonies or sexual offenses.

DUI convictions are not eligible. Not this year, not in four years.

We handle more DUI cases than anything else, so we get this question constantly, and the answer does not have a workaround in it.

The misdemeanor restriction provision excludes any serious traffic offense in violation of Article 15 of Chapter 6 of Title 40. DUI lives in that article. So does reckless driving. So do fleeing, homicide by vehicle, and serious injury by vehicle.

A DUI conviction in Georgia cannot be restricted. A reckless driving conviction that came out of a DUI arrest is in the same excluded article.

First Offender treatment is likewise unavailable for DUI.

What that leaves is the disposition itself. A DUI arrest that ends in dismissal, in a nolle pros not traded for a plea on the same incident, or in an acquittal is a non-conviction disposition, and non-conviction dispositions restrict.

Which means the work that determines whether this arrest follows you is the work done on the case while it is open. Not afterward. We cover what a conviction does to your record on our page on how a DUI affects your record.

First Offender is a different machine, and it runs at sentencing

People conflate First Offender with record restriction. They are not the same thing, and they do not happen at the same time.

Under O.C.G.A. § 42-8-60, a court can accept a guilty plea and defer proceedings without entering a judgment of guilt. Complete the sentence and you are discharged without an adjudication of guilt. That is a better outcome than restriction, because there is no conviction to restrict — but violate the terms and the court can adjudicate you guilty and sentence you to anything the offense allowed in the first place.

It is a one-time status, and it is not available for DUI.

We cover what First Offender protects, what it does not, and the retroactive petition route in a separate post on First Offender treatment in Georgia. See also our post-conviction relief page.

Restricting the GCIC record and sealing the court file are two separate steps

An order restricting your GCIC history does nothing to the paper in the clerk’s office.

The clerk’s file is a separate custody, and the statute provides a separate mechanism: the court may order the criminal history record information held by the clerk restricted and unavailable to the public, on a finding by a preponderance of the evidence that the record has already been restricted and that the harm to your privacy outweighs the public interest in access.

People who complete a First Offender sentence have a parallel petition available for the same purpose.

Neither one touches the private sector. Commercial background check databases scraped the record when it was public, and they are under no obligation to re-scrape it. Neither is the news site that ran your name, or the mugshot aggregator that indexed it.

That cleanup is its own project, and it is the part nobody warns you about.

The realistic timeline

Automatic restriction is the fast path, and it still is not fast. The agency has 30 days, notice goes out within seven after that, and disputes over what the record shows have their own 60-day and 30-day windows built into the statute.

A misdemeanor conviction petition under SB 288 is slower. It is a court filing, the prosecutor gets involved, and it sits on a criminal calendar with cases where somebody is in custody. Those get called first, and they should.

A sealing petition after First Offender discharge carries a 90-day period for the court to rule.

Then the background check vendors have to catch up, and they update on their own schedule.

Plan on this taking months. Plan on doing it once, in the right order, with the right filing. There is no partial credit here — a petition that names the wrong disposition or the wrong court gets denied, and under the misdemeanor provision you have a limited number of shots.

Talk to someone who handles these cases

The most valuable version of this conversation happens before a case is resolved, not four years after. Whether an arrest can ever be restricted is usually decided by how the case ends, and that is still in play while the case is open.

We handle criminal cases throughout middle Georgia from our office on Mulberry Street in Macon.

Start with our criminal defense overview, our page on post-conviction relief, or the Georgia DUI hub if the arrest was a DUI.

About the author: Ben Sessions is a founding partner of Sessions & Fleischman, LLC and a Board Certified DUI Defense Specialist through the National College for DUI Defense.

Free consultation. Call (478) 254-2665.