KY woman jumped through hoops to expunge her criminal record. She wants to make it easier
When Selena Coomer began going to the Kentucky Capitol five years ago to support a group advocating for criminal justice reform, she hoped her personal story would connect with lawmakers.
A Louisville resident and person in recovery, Coomer remembers telling a then-senator about her struggles and triumphs to overcome addiction and get her life back on the right path.
“You know what I think we should do with people who do drugs and steal?” Coomer recalls the former lawmaker saying. “I think we should cut off a finger. And if they do it again, cut another finger off.”
This is the person who makes our laws, Coomer thought at the time. But instead of letting the interaction deter her from advocating further, she made a commitment to return to Frankfort each year to champion change for others overcoming addiction.
Coomer works with the Clean Slate Initiative, a non-profit that aims to pass laws to automatically clear criminal records for eligible people who have completed their sentence and remained crime-free.
The Kentucky Clean Slate Initiative hopes to further legislation in this year’s session to automate the state’s systems to expunge records of eligible individuals with specific misdemeanor and non-violent, low-level felony convictions.
It’s similar to House Bill 569 introduced in 2024, which didn’t receive so much as a committee vote. This year’s proposal does not currently have a sponsor and therefore has not been filed as a General Assembly bill.
The expungement process is one of the challenges — and later triumphs — that Coomer faced.
More than 1 million Kentuckians have a record
Sober for more than a decade, Coomer needed to clear 13 pages of misdemeanors from her record in order to attend nursing school.
The process took a year, cost upwards of $400, and required help from a lawyer. Coomer later realized she was scammed on a fake expungement website on top of it all.
“I jumped through the hoops to get the expungement which opened my eyes to the burden of the process,” she told the Herald-Leader. “Starting over and figuring life out is not easy — it is not an easy process and to add all of that on top of what you have already done is very daunting.”
In Kentucky, 38% of adults — about 1.3 million people — have a record. Of those, 44% are eligible to have their record expunged, according to the Clean Slate Initiative.
Yet so many people who are eligible for expungement don’t pursue it, Coomer said. They don’t know where to start and often don’t have the means to see it through.
An electronic and automated system would streamline the process for individuals to have better job prospects, suitable housing and educational opportunities.
“They could pay more taxes, add more value to the community and their families,” Coomer said. “It is a family solution and a workforce development solution for the state of Kentucky.”
A larger workforce is something that would benefit Kentucky, which has one of the lowest workforce participation rates in the country at 58%, according to the Kentucky Center for Statistics.
But there are detractors, Coomer said, who assert that the state doesn’t have the capacity to automate because Kentucky’s court system is paper-based.
However, the Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts announced in October 2024 that they used $38 million of American Rescue Plan Act money to work toward fully digitizing the court system.
Some of the rebuff is simply a result of the surrounding stigma — much like Coomer faced from the senator on her trip to the Capitol in 2020.
“They want people to have a dog in the fight, she said. “It is hard to get sober and change your life and go from sucking the life out of everyone and everything to being a contributing member of society. It is super hard to do that — that is the buy in.
“But they say you are supposed to be doing that all along.”
