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Missouri Conviction Expungement
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Missouri Conviction Expungement Under RSMo 610.140
A past conviction can quietly cost you a job offer, an apartment, or a professional license years after the case closed. Missouri conviction expungement under RSMo 610.140 lets eligible people ask a court to close the record of an arrest, plea, trial, or conviction so that, in the eyes of the law, it is treated as if it never happened. At Wayman Law Group, we handle 60 to 80 or more expungement matters a year for clients across St. Louis City, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, and Jefferson County, and we know how to build a petition that holds up when a prosecutor pushes back.
What Is Missouri Conviction Expungement?
Missouri conviction expungement is a civil court process that allows a person to petition the court where they were charged or found guilty to close the records of that case. When the court grants the petition, it expunges the records connected to the arrest, the plea, and the conviction together, not just the conviction itself. The order restores the person to the status they occupied before the arrest, plea, trial, or conviction, as if those events had never taken place, which includes restoring the right to bear arms, the right to hold public office, and the right to serve on a jury.
This is a different remedy from arrest record expungement under RSMo 610.122, which applies only when you were never charged or the case was dismissed, acquitted, or otherwise thrown out. Conviction expungement under RSMo 610.140 is built for people who did plead guilty or were found guilty, and who have since stayed out of trouble for the required waiting period.
Am I Eligible to Expunge a Conviction Under RSMo 610.140?
You may be eligible if at least three years have passed since you finished every part of your authorized disposition for a felony, or at least one year for a misdemeanor, municipal violation, or infraction. That includes probation, so if you were sentenced to probation, the clock starts on the day your probation ended, not the day you were convicted or pled guilty. That waiting period is measured backward from the day you file the petition, so a conviction from many years ago does not disqualify you as long as your more recent record is clean.
Beyond the waiting period, you also need a clean record during that same window. You cannot have been charged with a new offense during the three years or one year immediately before you file, even if the conviction you are trying to expunge happened well before that period began. It does not matter how old the underlying case is. What matters is that the years right before you file are clean. Ordinary traffic tickets do not count against you here. The statute specifically excludes routine traffic violations under Missouri's traffic code from this clean record requirement, so a speeding ticket will not derail your petition the way a new misdemeanor or felony would. You also need to show that you have satisfied every obligation tied to the case, including fines and restitution, that you do not have pending charges, and that your conduct shows you are not a threat to public safety. Meeting those requirements, combined with pleading that you are not a threat to public safety and that expungement serves the public interest, creates a presumption in your favor. At that point, the burden shifts to the prosecutor to show why the court should not grant it.
What Offenses Are Excluded From RSMo 610.140?
Not every conviction qualifies. Missouri law excludes a specific list of offenses from this statute altogether, including any class A felony, any dangerous felony, any offense requiring sex offender registration, any felony where death is an element of the offense, felony assault, misdemeanor or felony domestic assault, kidnapping, and a long list of specific offenses covering public corruption, child abuse, arson, burglary, weapons offenses, and several others. Intoxication related traffic and boating offenses, including DWI and DUI charges, are also excluded from RSMo 610.140 entirely, since those are handled under the separate ten year waiting period in RSMo 610.130.
If your case involves one of these excluded offenses and it did not result in a conviction, RSMo 610.122 arrest expungement may still be available to you, since that statute has no offense based exclusions. If it did result in a conviction, expungement under either statute is generally not available, and a pardon may be the only remaining option.
How Do the Waiting Period and Lifetime Limits Work?
You can use RSMo 610.140 more than once, but not without limit. Over your lifetime, you can expunge no more than three misdemeanor offenses and no more than two felony offenses. There is no cap on infractions. If several counts were charged together in the same case, they generally count as a single offense against your lifetime limit, counted at the level of the highest charge among them. Ten counts filed under one case, for example, would generally count as one offense at whichever level the most serious count carries, not as ten separate offenses.
There is a separate exception for charges brought in different cases that arose from the same course of criminal conduct. This exception is difficult to meet. Courts generally expect the conduct to have happened on the same day, in immediate succession, and even then a court may still decide the exception does not apply. Because this determination depends heavily on the specific facts of your case, it is worth discussing your full history with an attorney rather than assuming that past charges will be treated as one.
What If You Were Arrested but Never Charged?
RSMo 610.140 is not only for people who pled guilty or were convicted. Subsection 7 of the statute covers an arrest that never led to charges at all. That petition can be filed no earlier than eighteen months from the date of arrest, provided that during those eighteen months you were not charged with a new offense and were not found guilty of any misdemeanor or felony. This pathway is separate from RSMo 610.122, and the two are easy to confuse.
The eighteen month pathway under RSMo 610.140 still runs through the same excluded offense list as conviction expungement, so it is not available for an arrest connected to a class A felony, a dangerous felony, or any of the other excluded categories. RSMo 610.122 works differently. It requires you to prove the arrest was based on false information and that there is no probable cause to believe you committed the offense, but it has no offense based exclusions and no waiting period at all. If your arrest involved a serious or excluded charge and the case was dismissed or you were never charged, RSMo 610.122 is usually the faster and more direct route. If the underlying offense is not excluded, the eighteen month path under RSMo 610.140 may be a simpler option once enough time has passed.
How Long Does a Missouri Conviction Expungement Take?
Most conviction expungement cases take about three to five months from filing to a decision, though the exact timing depends on how quickly the specific court can get the case on its calendar. By statute, the court must issue its order within six months of the petition being filed, so five months is close to the outer edge of what you should expect even in a busier county such as St. Louis City or St. Louis County. Unopposed cases where the judge decides not to set a hearing tend to move faster within that window, while cases that draw a prosecutor's objection or go to a full hearing tend to land closer to the six month deadline. After the order is issued, it can still take additional time for the Missouri State Highway Patrol and other agencies to update their records, so it is worth following up to confirm the central repository has closed the file.
Do I Have to Appear at a Hearing?
Every RSMo 610.140 petition is entitled to a hearing where the court can accept evidence and hear testimony, and any named victim has the right to be heard. Victim opposition does not come up in most cases, but it does happen, and when it does, it can change how the hearing goes. Whether you actually get a full hearing depends on what the prosecuting attorney does first. If the prosecutor files a written objection within thirty days of being served, the court must hold a hearing within sixty days of that objection. If no objection is filed within thirty days, the judge has discretion over whether to set a hearing at all. Do not assume your case will be decided without a hearing. If the prosecutor objects or a victim comes forward, expect a hearing, and expect your attorney to need to prepare accordingly.
How Do You File a Petition to Expunge a Conviction in Missouri?
You file in the circuit court in the jurisdiction where you were charged or found guilty, or, for an arrest that never led to charges, in the county where the arrest happened. The petition must include your full name, sex, race, driver's license number if you have one, current address, each crime you want expunged, the approximate date you were charged for each one, the county and municipality involved, and the case number and court for each charge.
Unlike RSMo 610.122 arrest expungement, a conviction expungement petition under RSMo 610.140 does not require a fingerprint card. That is one of several procedural differences between the two statutes that is easy to mix up if you are used to filing one type of petition and not the other.
You must name as defendants every law enforcement agency, court, prosecuting or circuit attorney's office, and central records repository that may hold a copy of the record. This typically includes the Missouri State Highway Patrol Criminal Justice Information Services division, the relevant sheriff's department, the prosecuting attorney's office, the circuit court, and any municipal police department involved in the arrest or the case. If you want a true expungement, meaning every copy of the record actually gets closed rather than just the copy at the courthouse, every one of these parties needs to be properly named and served. Leaving one out is one of the most common reasons a record stays partially visible even after a judge signs an order.
What Happens to My Record Once Expungement Is Granted?
Once the order is issued, every named agency must close its records related to the case, and the central repository is required to ask the FBI to expunge its own copy of the record. That request to the FBI is not a guarantee, since the FBI operates under separate federal authority, which matters if you are ever applying for a federal security clearance or federally regulated work. You are also protected from being found guilty of perjury or giving a false statement for not disclosing an expunged case in response to most inquiries.
There are limits. You still have to disclose an expunged offense when applying for a professional license, a gaming or firearms permit, certain jobs in banking, insurance, or emergency services, or any position where the law requires exclusion of people with your type of record. For most of these situations, an expunged offense is only one factor an employer or licensing board can weigh, not an automatic disqualifier. The exception is banking, insurance, and jobs where federal or state law requires the employer to exclude applicants with certain convictions. In those specific categories, an expunged offense can still result in automatic disqualification.
The right to simply answer no when someone asks about your criminal history also comes with a condition. You can answer no once your expungement is granted only if you have no other public record of a crime at that point. If you have a different conviction that was not part of this expungement, you may not be able to honestly answer no to a general question about your criminal history, even though the specific case you expunged is closed. This is worth discussing with your attorney if you have more than one item on your record.
An expunged conviction can also still be used as a prior offense if you are ever sentenced for a new crime later, so expungement does not erase the record for every purpose, even though it closes it for most everyday ones. If you are ever charged with a new offense after your expungement, you generally have to disclose the expunged case to that court when asked.
A Few Other Things Worth Knowing
Expungement under RSMo 610.140 restores the rights taken away as a result of your record, but it does not automatically restore federal firearm rights. Federal law can independently prohibit possession of a firearm based on certain convictions, and that prohibition does not always go away just because Missouri has closed its records, so this is worth discussing directly with your attorney if firearm rights matter to you.
RSMo 610.140 only reaches offenses that happened in Missouri and were prosecuted in a Missouri court. It cannot be used to expunge a conviction from another state. It is also worth knowing that closing government records does not automatically update every private background check company. Those companies are not named parties in your case, so you may need to contact them directly after your expungement is granted to ask them to update or remove their listing.
What Mistakes Keep People From Getting Their Records Expunged?
The most common reason a petition gets denied is that the underlying offense is categorically excluded, so it is worth checking the exclusion list carefully before filing rather than after. The second most common reason is a waiting period problem, usually because of a more recent conviction or new charge the client forgot to mention or did not realize would count. The third is failing to satisfy every financial obligation from the original case, including fines and restitution that may have been paid down but never formally closed out. The fourth, and the one that causes the most frustration after the fact, is failing to name every agency and party that might be holding a copy of the record, which can leave a record technically expunged in one place but still visible in another. It is also worth knowing that if your petition is dismissed for failing to meet the criteria, you cannot simply refile the next week. The statute requires you to wait a full year from the date you filed the denied petition before trying again, so it pays to get the filing right the first time rather than treat it as a low stakes first attempt.
If you were convicted in St. Louis City, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, or Jefferson County, and you think enough time has passed, it is worth having someone review your full case history, including anything that might count against your lifetime limit, before you file. Matt Wayman and the team at Wayman Law Group evaluate expungement cases every week and can tell you early on whether your conviction is a strong candidate under RSMo 610.140.
Call (314) 400-9811 or visit our contact page to schedule a free consultation and find out whether your Missouri conviction qualifies for expungement.
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