As a lawyer and former public defender, ensuring we have a justice system that is fair to everyone is important to Speaker McClinton.

Over the past several years, Pennsylvania has made meaningful, bipartisan improvements to the justice system – where sentences frequently did not fit the crime and a person’s skin color and socioeconomic status determined the type of legal representation they received and the severity of punishment handed down.

Speaker McClinton has led the movement to underscore rehabilitation and fairness under the law while maintaining public safety.

Under the leadership of House Democrats, Pennsylvania has:

• Expanded it’s Clean Slate law to make more nonviolent, low-level crimes eligible for limited access sealing so these offenses don’t show up on a person’s background check for employment, housing, or education. Once someone has served their sentence and reformed their life, it should be easier to find a house or job, not harder.
• Secured funding for indigent defense – the first time state dollars flowed to counties to help absorb some of the costs of providing free legal counsel to those that cannot afford an attorney on their own – a bedrock of our judicial system.
• Updated our state’s probation system to focus more on helping Pennsylvanians avoid incarceration for minor technical violations, so they can stay on the right path, and empowering judges to consider a person’s individual challenges and needs when setting probation conditions instead of a “one size fits all” approach.