When you are arrested and charged with driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, you are subject to a host of severe consequence. As we talked about recently, these consequences can be life-changing, and the person with the DUI needs to fight for his or her rights during the case to minimize the potential damage of the charges.
Once the DUI is on your record, though, how do you get rid of it? The DUI ruins your reputation and can make it very difficult to get a new job (or even retain your current one), let alone make it hard to find a place to live or to even get around town. So what can you do? You've paid your debt to society already -- why does this DUI keep haunting you?
Your best option may be to get an expungement of your DUI. What an expungement does is hide your DUI from most people and organizations, thus freeing you from the burden that the DUI places upon you.
At this point, it is important to note what an expungement doesn't do for you. Even though it hides your charge, the expungement doesn't permanently erase your criminal conviction. The charge is simply "sealed." It can become unsealed if you commit another crime. In such a case, the conviction would become unsealed to prove that you had committed a past crime.
Still, an expungement is a very useful action that can help people who have been convicted of a DUI to finally get past that unfortunate chapter in their life.
Source: FindLaw, "DUI Expungement," Accessed Oct. 1, 2015