Peggy Murray proudly hung the court order on the wall of her bedroom. With just a little paperwork, she had erased the felony conviction that held her back when her family needed her most.

Determined, Murray looked for a way to scrub her record. In September, a public defender helped her file a petition under Proposition 47, a criminal justice reform law that reduced some low-level felonies to misdemeanors. A judge approved Murray’s request on Sept. 26. Just like that, she was a felon no longer.

“I did something wrong. I paid the price,” Murray said. “Now, I’m going to do something right and change everything. I think everybody should have that chance.”

Murray’s conviction is one of nearly 200,000 felonies that were resentenced to misdemeanors through Prop 47 as of September, according to a groundbreaking analysis by USA TODAY Network-California journalists. The reduction of these convictions will unshackle many Californians, increasing access to better housing, higher paying jobs and countless other benefits and programs that are off limits to felons. Some law enforcement officials have warned that erasing these felonies may embolden prolific criminals, but an extensive review of court records suggests that these repeat offenders are far outnumbered by people like Murray, who had a single conviction standing as a barrier in her life.

“For those people whose only mistake in life was getting a felony drug conviction or a petty theft conviction, this is absolutely life changing,” said Stanford law expert Michael Romano, one of Prop 47’s authors, when presented with the statewide estimate for the first time. “It can be huge for getting a job or housing or benefits, or even just clearing their own conscience.”

Despite the dramatic impact of erasing felonies, some former felons whose cases were retroactively resentenced will be slow to seize their newfound opportunities because they don’t know their conviction has changed. In at least a few California counties, felonies were downgraded in bulk without any involvement from the defendants.

In these counties, public defenders rushed to file as much Prop 47 paperwork as possible, deciding there was no time to track down former clients before petitioning to have them retroactively resentenced. The cases were initially racing against a three-year deadline, but the window to reduce felonies was extended to 2022 in September.

“It’s our obligation – our duty – to try to give them this benefit that they may not know about,” said Christine Kroger, a deputy public defender in San Joaquin County, where more than 5,400 felonies have been reduced, but many defendants are likely unaware. Kroger said she would try to notify her clients that their records have been changed, but because so many are transients, most of their contact information is out of date. Other public defenders said they mail notification letters, but many are returned.

“Hopefully they will eventually find out,” Kroger said.

Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014, took broad steps toward ending long-term incarceration for low-level offenders. The law reduced drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, increased the threshold for felony theft and released at least 13,500 inmates out of state and county prisons. Ever since, the impact of the law has been debated by politicians, police, academics and the public.

However, far less attention has been paid to the retroactive aspects of Prop 47, which allowed anyone with a felony conviction for theft or drug possession to petition a county judge to downgrade it to a misdemeanor. Even if the crime occurred decades ago, and the sentence was long served, criminal records could still be changed.

Until now, it’s never been clear how often this actually happened because no California agency was required to track the number of felonies reduced on a county or state level. This story is the first to measure one of the most dramatic, and yet least studied, impacts of Prop 47.

To calculate an estimate, reporters from four newspapers – The Desert Sun, The Ventura County Star, The Record Searchlight and The Salinas Californian – compiled records from courts, prosecutors and defense attorneys in 21 counties that account for more than 70 percent of the state's population. Reporters also studied more than 1,300 pages of handwritten case notes borrowed from a judge in Riverside County and compared data with the Judicial Council of California, which counted all Prop 47 petitions filed but had no idea how many were approved.

Based on the totality of those records, a statewide estimate could be reached – of the 279,000 felony reduction petitions that had been filed as of September, about 71 percent, or 198,000, were granted so far.

For those who no longer have any felony convictions, the gains are dramatic. First, housing options improve because many landlords are reluctant to rent to felons and felons are sometimes disqualified from public and subsidized housing. Secondly, employers often ask applicants to disclose felony convictions but are much less concerned with misdemeanors. Felons are also unable to join the military without a recruitment waiver, and it can be much harder to obtain any form of professional license, regardless of field. Finally, restrictions are even more severe for California felons who have since moved to other states, some of which deny felons the right to vote or access food stamps.

Considering all these barriers, the erasure of so many felonies is huge progress towards reversing a “statewide nightmare” of over-sentencing, said Chris Hawthorne, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Hawthorne praised public defenders who filed Prop 47 petitions unilaterally – saying it would have taken far too long to contact all clients first – but stressed the impact is severely muted if former felons are left out of the loop.

Job applicants are likely sabotaging themselves by disclosing convictions when they don’t have to, Hawthorne said. Eligible voters may have skipped the election, unaware their voting rights had been restored. Some are living as if they still have felonies hanging over their heads.

“They should know,” Hawthorne said. “If we think it’s better for people not to be convicted of felonies who don’t deserve it, then we should finish that sentence and also say it’s a good idea they know so they can actually take advantage of those rights.”

The largest number of out-of-the-loop defendants is likely in San Diego County, which processed more Prop 47 petitions than anywhere else in California, but did so in a more unorganized manner than any other county.

As of June, about 45,000 Prop 47 petitions had been filed in San Diego, but close to 20,000 were redundant or ineligible. Officials said the county’s overzealous public defender’s office didn’t do enough to research cases or consult with clients, then buried the courthouse in foot-high stacks of petitions.

It took months for clerks and judges to work through the backlog, said Michael Roddy, executive director of the San Diego Superior Court.

“I think there are people walking around today who don’t know their cases changed,” Roddy said. “In our county, where they were filing 2,000 to 3,000 petitions a month, I imagine there are a sizable number of people who just don’t know.”

Ironically, San Diego’s ineligible petitions led to a funding boost for the county courts. Last year, when the state Judicial Council divvied up $21.4 million to help courts cope with the extra workload of Prop 47, San Diego got the largest share because it had processed the most petitions – $4.6 million, or one-fifth of the money. Roddy said the money reimbursed the courts for overtime pay from the prior year.

The San Diego Public Defender’s Office has since scaled back its Prop 47 filings, and now it only petitions to reduce a conviction if requested by the defendant, said Jane Gilbert, a supervising attorney.

In San Joaquin County, digital records have identified 41,000 drug defendants who could be eligible. Kroger, the deputy public defender, keeps her desk covered in lists: Clients who might be eligible; clients with just one felony; people who’ve died recently, so she doesn’t mistakenly file on their behalf. Boxes of rap sheets are stacked at her feet, and another box waits for her at home. Slowly, she is working her way into the office basement, where case files are kept on card catalogs and microfilm dating back to 1968.

The work is tedious, but lopsided sentences inspire Kroger to keep going. In one case, a man had been branded a felon for stealing bales of hay. In another, just a pillow.

“I don’t care what your background is,” Kroger said. “You shouldn’t go to prison for a $2 pillow or 10 bales of hay.”

Kroger felt the results of her efforts last month when a visitor stopped by her office. Marcella White, 68, had been denied access to senior housing because of a single felony on her record.

Kroger had made that felony vanish. White called her an “angel” and gave her a long hug.

“This gave me an avenue to say ‘You know what, I’m not my past,’” White said. “I didn’t want to die with a felony on my record.”

Julio Hoyos, a man in a wheelchair with a penchant for heavy jackets, had been caught shoplifting five times in only seven weeks. He swiped cologne and hair clippers from Marshalls. He took propane, mascara and a ski mask from Target. Clothing from Wal-Mart. Headlights and box cutters from another Target. Finally, he stuffed six tequila bottles in a backpack and smuggled them out of a supermarket.

Well, not anymore.

Hoyos, 44, a prolific thief in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, had 17 felony convictions erased during a single court hearing last September, the most of anyone in Riverside County, where journalists were given unprecedented access to court records on Prop 47 cases. He has been re-arrested about a dozen times since then, but almost always on charges that are now reduced to misdemeanors.

If Prop 47 allowed thousands of reformed felons to free themselves from their criminal pasts, Hoyos represents the other end of the spectrum, where the reduction of felonies has empowered thieves to steal more. Repeat offenders once faced exaggerated punishment because their felony priors stacked extra years onto new sentences. But now that those priors are reduced to misdemeanors, extra years are gone.

“The most I can sentence him to (for the same theft) is 180 days in county jail, of which you only serve half,” said Becky Dugan, assistant presiding judge of Riverside County Superior Court. “No matter what his prior record is like, no matter how many times he’s done this offense before, that’s what I can sentence him to now.”

Dugan’s concerns are echoed by law enforcement officials across the state, who bemoaned how Prop 47 emboldened thieves in more than a dozen interviews. State crime data shows that property crime increased 8 percent in 2015 but remains historically low. The single largest contributor to rising property crime was a 12 percent increase in car theft, which has no direct link to Prop 47 reforms.

Dugan, who has spent 29 years on the bench in Riverside, has been processing Prop 47 petitions since the day the initiative took effect. The state didn’t require courts to track their Prop 47 case, but Dugan started doing it anyway – jotting notes about each petition into a yellow legal pad.

Two years later, she has filled 31 pads, which sit on her desk in a towering stack. Dugan’s notes contain details on Prop 47 petitions, particularly repeat offenders, which are not available anywhere else. Her notes were instrumental in the process of estimating the number of felonies erased statewide.

In Riverside County alone, 7,300 people had reduced about 9,300 felonies as of July, according to Dugan’s notes. About 200 defendants, whom Dugan called “frequent fliers,” had filed five or more petitions each, but the majority of petitioners had only one felony downgraded.

If the rest of California follows the patterns of Riverside, the 198,000 estimated convictions erased across the state represent about 155,000 people.

“I’m very big on trying to confirm that what we are doing is helping,” Dugan said, looking fondly at the stack of notepads. “I think this data may help as we look at Prop 47 maybe two, three or four years down the road and see the percentage of defendants that returned to court. What did we do? Do we do anything?”

Statewide, an estimated 198,000 felony convictions have been downgraded to misdemeanors since Proposition 47 was enacted in 2014, according to a groundbreaking analysis of public records by USA TODAY Network journalists. This analysis is the first to measure one of the most dramatic, and yet least studied, impacts of Prop 47. Here is how we did it, step by step:

To start, reporters filed public records requests seeking data on Prop 47 cases in nearly every county in California. Requests began with public defenders, many of whom kept some records on the number of cases in which defendants had filed petitions to reduce sentences. In counties where public defender records were insufficient, additional requests were sent to court house administrators or the district attorney’s office.

Some counties responded with incomplete or estimated totals, which were excluded from analysis. However, 21 counties provided data on how many Prop 47 petitions had been filed and granted since the law took effect. More than 70 percent of the state population lives in the responsive counties.

County records were used to calculate an average passage rate for Prop 47 petitions – about 71 percent. This rate was then applied to a separate total kept by the Judicial Council of California, which had counted all petitions filed for budgetary reasons but had no idea how many of those petitions were approved. The council had tallied 279,235 petitions as of September. If 71 percent of those were approved, then an estimated 198,256 felony convictions were reduced statewide.

However, it was still unclear if repeat offenders who filed multiple petitions amounted to a large portion of the statewide total. To measure, journalists reviewed handwritten judge’s notes of more than 13,000 Prop 47 cases from Riverside County, which revealed that most defendants only filed one petition for a single felony. If the rest of California follows the same patterns of Riverside, the 198,000 convictions erased across the state represent about 155,000 people.

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