Legal Question in Criminal Law in Michigan

Re: criminal law background checks

A "conviction" occurs when there's been a guilty plea or a trial verdict of guilty.

But, Michigan's criminal history database (maintained by MSP) has 3 columns/categories. The categories are "arrest" (what the police lodged the person on in jail), "charge" (what was issued by the prosecutor), and "disposition" (what the outcome of the charge was).

The first two categories can show something short of a conviction that might be available to some people on criminal history checks, and people might assume that the person was convicted when he might have been arrested and not charged, or arrested and charged but the case was dismissed. One fault of the criminal history system is incomplete or inaccurate information about the disposition/outcome. A LOT of CCHs have empty disposition boxes for at least one charge on the person's history. It depends on the courts to accurately send outcome/disposition info to MSP. This is getting better with electronic communications between jails and prosecutors and court ... and MSP.

So, it's possible that someone has seen your CCH with the arrest and/or charge info. That cannot be "cleared" or deleted. BUT, if the disposition information is wrong, THAT can be corrected by the court re-submitting the disposition info to MSP so the CCH is updated.

CCH information is 'filtered', depending on the requesting party's right-to-know. When the public asks MSP for a CCH (like thru its on-line I-CHAT service), your $10 gets Michigan convictions only. NOT "disposition unknowns". Also, some cases are worked out with non-public records (like HTYA, MCL 333.7411, MCL 769.4a, etc), and those are also filtered out of the info given to the public.

I recommend that you order your own CCH thru MSP's web site's ICHAT service and if info is wrong, go back to the court(s) to have the court clerks send the correct info back to MSP.