Access to criminal records will be restricted as the county embarks on a yearlong process to seal records from public view as part of a statewide effort to implement the Clean Slate law.

Gov. Tom Wolf signed the law last year. It orders all counties to begin hiding certain cases from being accessed by the public.

The cases include ones that were dismissed, summary judgments, nonviolent crimes committed more than a decade ago as well as more recent misdemeanor charges that resulted in less than two years of incarceration.

Outstanding balances must be paid for a case to be sealed. The state has been given until June 2020 to complete the task of sealing an estimated 30 million statewide criminal records.

For Butler County, the clerk of courts, which handles criminal records, has finished the first two batches of sealing 50 offenses, according to Lisa Weiland Lotz, who heads the department.

There is no way to determine how many county residents will have their records sealed, Lotz said, but she noted there were several thousand offenses that could be removed. The effort will target complete digital records dating to 1994, when computers were introduced to the county's clerk of courts, Lotz said.

She also noted that complete index files from 1988 will be targeted. Cases that are older than 1988 still might appear on the list if there was any activity, such as a probation violation, when the clerk's office went digital in 1994.

Lotz said they are tackling the task in phases. For now, they're looking at cases in which the charges were dismissed against a defendant and ones in which defendants completed the Accelerated Rehabilitative program.

Next, they will clean out misdemeanor convictions. She noted that people should not call the clerk's office with specific requests since they are going through the approved cases in an automatic process.

“It's too massive of a project. Too many cases. Everybody has to wait until next June,” Lotz said. “We're not taking any requests. It has to run its course. If you call, I'm going to tell you that you gotta wait. I won't be able to tell you if your case is eligible.”

Rather than target specific cases, Lotz said that each month the state will give them about 1,300 pages of offenses to seal from public view. On each page, she estimated, there will be 50 offenses.

In an effort to protect the sealed cases, the clerk of courts will be required to hold a tighter grip over how the public can view court records. A computer in the clerk of courts room is no longer available for the public to search the county's database of criminal records. If a record is sealed, it also will not appear on the state's website.

“It's going to make it impossible for us to show the public (our records),” Lotz said. “This is one of the unintended consequences, I think, of the Legislature's Clean Slate law. We have to pull back the public viewing aspect.”