Robert Kirschner killed a man on April Fool’s Day, stabbing him during a fight at a party he didn’t want to attend in the first place. “Wrong place, wrong time, self-defense,” he said. He was 18 years old; it was 1973.

It turned out to be a swerve in an otherwise straight life. Kirschner spent three years in a California facility for youthful offenders, after which a judge set aside his conviction — meaning, for most purposes, it was cleared from his record. During college, he unexpectedly found himself drawn to a career in criminal justice. He worked as a state parole agent and later started his own private security company. Over the years he has been licensed in a half-dozen states and teamed up with numerous police agencies, including the FBI.

So Kirschner was stunned when, in 2016, Texas regulators rejected his application for a private security license. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, which regulates the profession, his lengthy law enforcement résumé didn’t matter: Kirschner’s 43-year-old crime made him too great a risk to public safety.

When it comes to getting permission to work in security professions in Texas, he isn’t the only one who has been unable to outrun his distant past.

Jimmy Carter was still a new president when Wayne French was convicted of a Harris County burglary. The judge suspended the then-17-year-old’s sentence and placed him on probation. He was released from supervision early, in 1981. French’s only other brush with the law was a marijuana possession charge more than 30 years ago.

Yet last year, when he sought a license as an unarmed security guard, the public safety agency said the decades between French’s crimes and license application were insufficient to ensure the now 57-year-old could be trusted with the job.

Over the past decade, Texas and federal policymakers have passed an array of criminal justice reforms stressing rehabilitation and reintegrating convicts into society. By comparison, the Texas Department of Public Safety’s oversight of professions such as security guards and alarm systems sales is a laggard, criminal justice reformers say, a holdover from an era when some offenders were viewed as irredeemable.

In 2017, DPS denied more than 1,400 private security applicants because of their criminal histories.

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“What you did at 19 shouldn’t preclude you from anything you do at 45,” said Andrew Ward, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based advocacy group that has pushed for occupational regulation reforms.

Texas legislators have tried to get DPS to adopt more progressive approaches to how it evaluates ex-offenders for occupational licenses. Ten years ago, lawmakers instructed the agency to apply standards that weigh each applicant’s life story individually, accounting for the passage of time and mitigating circumstances, such as evidence of rehabilitation.

The agency has resisted, however, ignoring the rules used by other state occupational licensing agencies to evaluate applicants with a criminal past. In some ways, it has since made its assessment of ex-offenders even stricter and less flexible.

This year, as the Department of Public Safety undergoes its once-a-decade performance evaluation, state officials are trying again. In their report, so-called Sunset reviewers again criticized the agency’s regulation of occupational licenses, describing it as “overly criminalistic.” Legislators — again — have agreed, and once more have recommended the agency modernize how it evaluates applicants whose long-ago pasts have clearly passed.

‘I don’t smoke, I don’t drink’

Kenneth Crosby admits he was a wild teenager. In 1976 the then-19-year-old was convicted of aggravated robbery in Dallas, the latest in a string of crimes. “But,” he said, “I turned my life around.”

He took college courses in prison and has worked steadily since his release. He volunteers for a ministry that helps ex-offenders. “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I’ve been married 10 years in September and I’m a homeowner,” he said.

So when DPS rejected his application to be an alarm salesman in 2017, citing his 40-year-old criminal history, Crosby, now 63 and a grandfather, was baffled. “If I was going to do something,” he said, “I would’ve done it by now.”

In addition to ignoring legislators’ intent, DPS rules about permanently excluding ex-offenders from certain professions defy research describing how people with criminal records typically behave.

Studies have shown that after about seven years, offenders who’ve stayed clean have the same odds of committing another crime as someone without a criminal record. Other research indicates the older a person is, the less likely he or she is to break the law.

So people in their 60s whose only crimes occurred decades ago are statistically among the lower public safety risks, said Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at The George Washington University Law School.

Still, he added, even states that have recently pioneered prison reforms - including Texas - have been slow to replace restrictive occupational laws that can summarily exclude applicants with a criminal record. “It’s not what most people think of when they think of criminal justice reform,” he said.

Yet making it easier for former prisoners to find good work is a crucial component of the overhaul, Saltzburg said. A quarter to a third of all jobs are regulated in some way, and millions of American adults have a criminal past.

A good job is an essential component of preventing recidivism. As a result, in recent years, groups on both sides of the political spectrum have pushed to update occupational licensing laws to give ex-convicts a better shot at qualifying for the good-paying jobs typically subject to government regulation.

‘Cut-and-dry standards’

According to guidelines created by the National Right to Work Project, an advocacy group, occupational regulators should weigh each license applicant’s individual history and background rather than simply banning those who have committed particular crimes. Most Texas licenses already are evaluated that way.

The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which oversees 39 occupations, recognizes no crimes that automatically bar applicants from state-regulated professions. It instead relies on guidelines in the Texas Occupations Code that instruct regulators to consider factors such as the person’s age when the crime was committed, how long it has been since the conviction and his work and personal history in the time since.

For years, the Department of Public Safety didn’t apply those same rules, contending the security professions it regulated - private guards, locksmiths, alarm system sales and service — required stricter standards to better protect the public. But in its decennial 2009 review of the agency, the Sunset Advisory Commission noted DPS’s rigid approach was unfair to applicants with a criminal history who had demonstrated rehabilitation.

Legislators agreed the agency should adopt the individual-by-individual approach to evaluating applicants, and DPS was instructed to make the changes. But last year, when the Sunset investigators returned for the agency’s next 10-year evaluation, they discovered it hadn’t followed directions.

Instead, they wrote, the agency’s staff had continued denying applicants convicted of certain serious crimes using “rules that create cut-and-dry standards for disqualification” - no matter how much time had passed or compelling evidence the person had turned around his or her life.

The DPS media office did not respond to a request to make a representative from the Regulatory Services Division available for an interview to explain the department’s approach to permanently disqualifying crimes.

68 years old, still too risky

License applicants summarily rejected by DPS because of their criminal record may appeal to the agency for a second look. But those, too, typically are quickly denied, lawyers say.

“I was surprised at how perfunctory it was,” said Peter McGraw, an attorney for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. “It seemed like it wasn’t a real opportunity to present your case.”

The next step for a persistent applicant is to appeal to the independent State Office of Administrative Hearings. At that stage, a review of records shows, administrative judges often side with those who present evidence of their rehabilitation.

But the process can take up to two years and thousands of dollars in legal fees. “It’s booting you into this long, drawn-out and expensive procedure,” said Erica Smith, an Institute for Justice attorney. Some applicants give up, lawyers say, abandoning their pursuit of the license.

Administrative law decisions are considered advisory, and still must be accepted by the agency’s Private Security Board. The appointed members approve most of the recommendations, records show.

But not all of them. In October, an administrative judge concluded Rodolfo Gallardo had earned the right to be trusted as an alarm salesman. His felony sexual assault against a 26-year-old woman, for which he was sentenced to seven years of probation, was serious, the judge wrote. But it had occurred a quarter-century ago.

Since then, Gallardo, of Houston, had undergone counseling, kept a clean record and steady employment, and participated in community and church activities. “Mr. Gallardo,” the judge summarized, “turned his life around after his crime.”

Two months ago, however, the security board overturned the judge’s findings, concluding the now 68-year-old still posed an unacceptable public risk. “I wish this would change, but there’s nothing I can do about it,” Gallardo said. “Maybe in another life.”

DPS has made the rules it uses to summarily exclude applicants even more restrictive. The agency changed standards that once allowed certain felons to qualify for occupational licenses 20 years after their crimes. Now the disqualification is permanent.

It also tacked a new crime, burglary of a habitation, onto its list of permanently disqualifying offenses. That updated rule snagged Ted Brannum.

He was 17 years old when, in 1981, he broke into a Tarrant County house he thought was empty. “I done something stupid that I shouldn’t have,” he said.

The judge agreed, suspending his sentence and placing him on probation. Court records show a judge later set aside Brannum’s conviction. By the time he applied last year for a registration to work as an unarmed security guard, 37 years had passed since the crime.

According to DPS rules, however, that didn’t matter. The agency summarily denied Brannum’s application, and then rejected his appeal.

Six weeks ago, an administrative judge recommended Brannum, now 55, be allowed to become a guard. He said he has offers from two companies, awaiting final approval from DPS.

“I’m praying,” Brannum said. “I’ve always been good and lived right.”

‘Overwhelming evidence’ of rehabilitation

The hard-line rules at DPS have occasionally produced absurd-seeming results. In 2017, its staff cited the recently enacted burglary rule to reject Shayne Gatlin’s application to renew his locksmith’s license because of his teenaged 1980 burglary conviction - even though by then Gatlin had been working in the profession for more than 30 years, earning a top Better Business Bureau rating, court records show.

Perhaps no applicant has performed such a complete turnaround as Kirschner. Found guilty of second-degree murder, he was diverted to a program for youth with rehabilitative potential. Three years later the court set aside his guilty verdict.

He interned at the California Department of Corrections while still in college. After graduation, his former ward, the California Youth Authority (now the Division of Juvenile Justice), invited him to apply for a job. His previous life — “a partying hobbyist,” he said — helped him better understand and manage the young offenders. He retired after 28 years.

With the help of an FBI mentor, Kirschner also founded a security company, Threat Management and Protection, Inc. He later earned a master’s degree in business. He was even approved to work in Texas.

In 2008, DPS granted Kirschner his private security license, granting renewals every two years. Yet his 2016 form was rejected. Even though he’d built a new life in law enforcement in the four decades since his crime — and held his Texas license in good standing for nearly a decade — the Department of Public Safety’s new rule changing his crime from a 20-year disqualification into a permanent one suddenly rendered him ineligible.

The agency summarily denied Kirschner’s appeal, as well. Last October, an administrative judge concluded “the overwhelming evidence shows that Mr. Kirschner is not the same person he was in 1973 when he committed a very serious crime” and recommended DPS re-grant his license. In February, after two years of wrangling, it finally did.

In a recent interview, Kirschner displayed a thank you gift he’d recently received for assisting the FBI in a case. “They wouldn’t be playing with me,” he said, “if I weren’t credible.”