Can An Arrest Affect My Current and Future Employment?
By Dan Noll on August 22nd, 2016 in
One of the first questions people have when they’re involved in any time of legal proceedings, meaning they’ve probably been arrested,maybe not charged with anything but arrested and brought into the County jail or Springfield Police Department is how will this arrest potentially affect my employment? First of all, we’re talking about employment here in the future. How it affects your employment right now is difficult always to know but the affect of being arrested does have a substantial impact on the employer. Whether it’s a misdemeanor or a felony, it really can affect and determine whether or not you will be hired in an action. The question you have to ask yourself is in terms of how do I proceed forward?
Number 1, am I innocent on these charges? That is a situation you have to look at. Am I guilty of these charges? It may be anything from a traffic case to something more serious. I think if we lay them out in order to get some type of a resolution, it may not have a long term effect of your employment. There are a number of options one has if they have been charged.
If we have the opportunity to take the case from the inception and deal with it with the state’s attorney’s office or sometimes with the U.S. attorney’s office, we can affect what you are charged with and how it’s perceived in the final analysis by any court. Most of the time, police don’t just go out and start arresting people for the heck of it, they do it because of some basis or cause. It may be you’re charged with something that you’re not guilty of but you may be guilty of a lessor charge. For instance, they may say you were driving while you were intoxicated. You’re acquitted of that charge but you may have an improper lane usage or some other charge or contributing to an accident, things of that nature. What you have to think about then is to determine how that will impact upon me?
Number 1, thinking about what effect you’ll have is are you acquitted? Do you plead guilty or do you plead guilty and it’s a situation that you have some type of conditional discharge or some other disposition where we eventually can look for an expungement of the charge or an expungement on the entire proceedings and that happens quite often, frankly. That fact that you’re charge does have a significant impact on employment, your present and future employment, so don’t take that lightly. You really have to figure out from you’re own common sense, quite frankly. If you were in that position and you’ve all filled out employment applications before and 1 of the things they ask you, “Have you ever been charged? If so, where? And under what circumstances?” It’s a situation that if you have been charged and it’s expunged, I tell my clients very simply, “Yes you were charged but it’s been expunged so you have no charges against you now.”
Those are some issues that you have to think about in terms of your future employment which can be substantially affected by any charges you may be looking at right now.