The Justice Department’s new rule reviving a process for restoring certain rights to people with nonviolent felony convictions rightly recognizes that, instead of lifetime scarlet letters, we must narrowly tailor the collateral consequences of a conviction. Starting Monday, Americans with a nonviolent federal conviction can avail themselves of this process. Although the Second Amendment is at issue, the principle it illustrates is far broader: People who have served their time in prison and demonstrated years of law-abiding conduct deserve a real path back to full citizenship. To fully deliver on this principle, legislation going well beyond this rule change will be necessary.
The rule corrects a three-decade anomaly created in 1992, when Congress defunded the rights restoration process and left a statute on the books that no agency could implement. At the direction of Attorney General Todd Blanche, the department has built an application process with reasonable eligibility rules and case-by-case review that keeps violent offenders and sex-offender registrants outside its reach. Yet the only comprehensive fix is a congressionally enacted expungement law, which unlocks not just Second Amendment protections but other constitutional rights and full access to employment and housing.
