By Vicente Vera
"I was different. I was outspoken. I was angry. I was all those ugly thoughts inside. And at 13, [my parents] opened the door and they said, ‘Get out,’ ” said Diana Carreras, speaker at the opening session of San Jose State’s Record Clearance Project.
She spoke of a lost childhood riddled with abuse that many people would balk at sharing so openly, let alone to a class of college students.
Carreras, a mentor at the SJSU student-facilitated expungement outreach
center, discussed her history of homelessness to 20 students in Clark Hall on Thursday.
She turned to the drug PCP as a way of numbing everything she could feel. It was her drug use that eventually caught the attention of the criminal justice system.
“Getting arrested, I would say, saved my life,” Carreras said.
While her criminal record would complicate her life for years, she said it ultimately took her off the streets.
Carreras credited the Record Clearance Project with helping expunge her record and giving her a job as a full-time mentor in 2019. Thus, she said she was free from the lingering troubles of her earlier life.
Black’s Law Dictionary defines expungement as the “process by which record of criminal conviction is destroyed or sealed.”
Describing herself as a victim of circumstance, Carreras said she deserved a second chance at life and finding a career.
What seemed to be a repetitive cycle of being sold from trafficker to trafficker ended when Carreras became a prisoner to something completely different – her rap sheet.
That’s when Carreras turned to the Record Clearance Project to expunge her record.
“Expungement pretty much opened the door, and let me run out and slam it back shut behind me,” she said in a later interview with the Spartan Daily. “I’m free. I’m happy.”
More than 540 people have had convictions dismissed in court with the help of the Record Clearance Project’s student volunteers and lead attorney Margaret “Peggy” Stevenson, according to figures provided by the Record Clearance Project.
Stevenson also teaches the Courts and Society class in the Justice Studies Department.
“I’ve never charged clients because all our clients have meritorious cases and are, by definition, unable to hire an attorney on their own financially,” Stevenson said to her students during the orientation session on Thursday.
She founded the project in 2008 to give people exiting incarceration access to free legal services that could expunge their criminal records, said Omar Arauza, a student assistant and justice studies senior who works closely with Stevenson.
When Arauza enrolled in the project last spring, he was fresh off an internship with the Crime Strategies Unit at the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office.
“I realized that if I were to join [the Record Clearance Project], I could get an internship pretty easily and I’d be able just to knock out that requirement,” Arauza said. “But pretty shortly after being involved with the program I realized how much of an impact it really had to the community.”
As a student assistant, Arauza works with other paid legal aides, assistants and mentors in the center’s office, located in the Justice Studies Department in MacQuarrie Hall.
Mountains of documents and file cabinets crowd the narrow space, but Arauza and his coworkers said that the office will move into the Student Services Center once Associated Students take back the A.S. House.
Many clients pass through the Record Clearance Project seeking its assistance.
However, the program does not have the resources to help everyone.
Clients are chosen carefully by program leaders who determine which cases are eligible for expungement and which clients are the most willing to engage in the tedious court process that comes with it.
“When it comes to interviewing and when it comes down to getting that information that is
necessary, it may be hard on their side for them to talk about,” Arauza said.
Both he and Carreras explained how the stigma of having a criminal conviction stops people from seeking expungement.
“People need to know that there are people like me, to this day, out there,” Carreras said. “Not everybody’s bad. Not everybody ends up a drug user or, in certain situations, in jail. Not everybody’s there because they planned it that way or wanted it.”
Justice studies senior Elizabeth Gonzalez said the program’s goal of helping people like Carreras was what made her return to volunteer for a third consecutive semester.
“I feel, kind of, some emotional connection to it because I have family members that do have records and unfortunately, they can’t get them expunged,” Gonzalez said.
However, Arauza believes that some people misinterpret the objectives of the project.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, so you help people get out of jail?’, which we don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t call them criminals. I call them people, and that’s just something that I don’t think is going to be widely accepted by most people.”
At age 62, Carreras said she is at the happiest stage of her life now that she is surrounded by a large family.
“The one thing my father wanted to make sure to [tell] me is, ‘You’ll never have a decent job like your mother. You’ll never work [at] the same place as your mother.’ ”
Carreras continued, “Guess what dad? My name is Diana. I’m a mentor here at San Jose State, where he claims my mother had her great job.”
