Court-ordered sealing of criminal history records

Plain-language summary

This is Florida's court-ordered sealing statute. Sealing makes your record confidential; it is not destroyed. Courts and criminal justice agencies keep access, as do you, your attorney and certain employers and licensing bodies, but the public loses it. With specific exceptions, you may lawfully deny the record exists.

The process mirrors expungement's, minus one step. First, FDLE must issue a certificate of eligibility. The statute sets what the application takes: a certified disposition of your case and a $75 processing fee paid to FDLE, unless FDLE's executive director waives it — no statement from the state attorney or statewide prosecutor, which only expungement requires. FDLE's own instructions add a fingerprint card, taken by law enforcement. Certificate in hand, you petition the court. The statute says "any court of competent jurisdiction"; in practice, file in the county where your original case was filed — that court already has your case file, so it can take up the petition directly. The judge may grant or deny it.

Sealing's test is broader than expungement's in one key way: it covers a case where adjudication was withheld. You were not adjudicated guilty, but the case did not end with no charge filed, a dropped or dismissed charge, an acquittal or a not-guilty verdict either. That middle ground is what sealing exists for. The disqualifying-offense list in section 943.0584 still applies, and so does the whole-record test: if a Florida court has ever adjudicated you guilty of a crime — or, when you were a juvenile, adjudicated you delinquent for a felony or for assault, battery, assault on a law enforcement officer, firefighter or other specified officer, carrying a concealed weapon, openly carrying a weapon, a weapon or firearm at a school event or on school property, destructive devices or bombs, unlawful possession of a firearm by a minor, exposure of sexual organs, arson, petit theft, neglect of a child, or cruelty to animals, unless that juvenile record has since been expunged — you do not qualify. You must be past court supervision for this case. And a sealing or expunction of any record before — under this section, section 943.0585 or the older sections it names — bars this one; each order covers one arrest or incident, in one proceeding, unless the court adds arrests directly related to it.

The exceptions to lawful denial are specific, and worth knowing. Certain job and license applications keep their right to the truth — work with children, the elderly, or disabled persons, and criminal justice jobs among them. You also cannot deny it as a defendant in a criminal case, in another petition to seal or expunge, when buying a gun from a licensed dealer, importer or manufacturer, or when asking to be appointed a guardian. And after 10 years sealed, a record may qualify for court-ordered expungement under section 943.0585.