Chapter 113: Without Prejudice
Paragraph 106 remanded the matter to the county for such further proceedings as the People deem appropriate.
That sentence means the county now had to decide whether to try me again.
For nine weeks, on paper, I was a person charged with vehicular homicide and awaiting trial.
Nobody told me that.
I worked it out myself from the docket, on the public terminal at the courthouse, on a Tuesday.
The case had been reopened as an active matter. Status: pending. Next event: none scheduled.
I sat in front of that screen with my hands in my lap for about four minutes.
On the twelfth of June the District Attorney filed a nolle prosequi.
Two pages.
The People decline to proceed further in this matter. Dismissed without prejudice.
Without prejudice. Those two words are the ones I want to explain, because nobody explained them to me.
A dismissal with prejudice is final. The case is dead and cannot be brought again.
That is not what I got.
A dismissal without prejudice is not. It means the People are stopping, not that they are wrong.
Homicide has no limitation period in this state. There is no year in which it expires.
So the file is closed and can be opened, and it will still be capable of being opened when I am eighty.
I asked Brandt why they would not do it with prejudice. She answered in eleven words.
“Because with prejudice is an admission and nobody signs an admission.”
“Would a judge make them?”
“No. Charging decisions are theirs. That is not a place a court will go.”
“So it just sits there.”
“It just sits there. In practice nothing happens. In principle it is not over.”
I have learned to live inside the space between practice and principle. Most people never have to.
Then there was the record, and the record is the part that surprised me, and I had a certificate.
I had thought vacated meant erased.
It does not. Nothing in that system erases. It amends, and it appends, and it keeps.
The conviction entry was amended, not deleted. The arrest remains. The charge remains. The disposition now reads vacated, dismissed.
I paid twenty-eight dollars for a copy of my own state repository record in July.
It came in nine days. Four pages, window envelope.
I opened it standing at the mailboxes with my thumb, because I did not want to carry it upstairs first.
Line four. Arrest, date, agency, charge, disposition. All of it there, in order, exactly as it always was.
The only difference in six years was one word at the end of the line.
Then I did what I tell people to do now, which is check the private ones as well.
The state repository is not the problem. The problem is the resellers who bought the state's data in 2020 and never buy it again.
I ordered two reports from two of them, at nineteen dollars each, on a public computer at the library.
One had me as convicted, with the sentence, and no mention of the vacatur anywhere on it.
The other had me as convicted and had my sentence wrong by a year in the wrong direction.
There is a process for disputing that. It involves writing letters, and enclosing certified copies, and waiting.
I wrote nine letters that August.
Two companies corrected the entry. Four never answered. Three answered and did nothing.
The 2019 news article is still the first result for my name. It has a photograph of me at twenty-four on the courthouse steps.
There is no procedure for that. Newspapers are not databases and nobody has any power over an archive.
To get the record itself sealed, I had to file a separate case, in a separate court, with a separate number.
Petition to seal. Filing fee two hundred and eighty-seven dollars, and no waiver available, because a sealing petition is civil.
Notice must go to the District Attorney, who has thirty days to object, and may object for any reason.
Then a hearing, if they object. Then an order, if you win. Then the order must be served on eleven separate agencies.
The clinic estimated six to nine months. It took eleven.
In September I applied for a job at a title company, doing exactly what I do, for twenty-two dollars an hour.
I got to the second interview. I told them about the record before they ran it, because you always tell them first.
The woman was decent about it. She said she would speak to her manager. She called back on the Friday.
She said the underwriter's guidelines were a bar and there was nothing personal in it.
I believe that was true. It is usually true, and it makes no difference at all.
I said thank you and asked her to put it in writing, and she did, and I filed it, because I file everything.
That evening I took the four-page repository record out of the envelope and read line four again.
Arrest. 16 October. County Sheriff. Vehicular homicide. Vacated, dismissed.
Eleven months later, after the sealing order, that line came off the state copy.
It is still on two commercial databases as of this writing, and I have stopped writing to them.