Jesse James Rupp is an outlaw.
At least, that’s what the state of Arizona told him after he applied for a job. Rupp, who lives in Washington County, is trained as a corrections worker. He worked at the Missouri state prison in Potosi for a while earlier this year.
Missouri’s Department of Corrections, like many state prison systems, is struggling to recruit and keep employees. Staffing is down, and that increases the danger on the job. Missouri has long had some of the lowest pay for corrections workers in the country, though it has taken steps to improve in the past few years. Rupp quit this summer and started looking for a better job.
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He found the one he wanted in Arizona. That state is hiring “traveling corrections workers,†sort of like the traveling nurses who became so popular during the height of the pandemic. The pay is good, and the company takes care of lodging and transportation.
But there’s a problem.
After a background check, the contractor for the state of Arizona told him it couldn’t hire him because of a 2012 misdemeanor assault on his record. Rupp was dumbfounded. He knew about the case, which involved an interaction with an ex-girlfriend in 2011. He lived in St. Francois County at the time. That’s where he lived when I first came across him. Rupp was a frequent critic of the prosecutor in that county at the time — Jerrod Mahurin — whom voters later removed from office. Rupp, by the way, was named after his great-great-grandfather, Forrest James. He isn’t related to the more famous Missouri outlaw who shares his first and middle names.
A few years after pleading guilty to the assault charge, Rupp sought an expungement. That’s a legal process by which a case can be completely erased from a person’s record. There are a lot of reasons why people seek expungements, but housing and jobs are among the most common. A simple search that shows a conviction lacks the context of the full court file.
“People make assumptions,†Rupp says.
The process has gained prominence recently after the passage of Amendment 3, which legalized recreational marijuana and also allowed for the expungement of old drug possession cases.
The circumstances of Rupp’s original case were questionable enough that the prosecutor who replaced Mahurin didn’t object to Rupp’s filing seeking an expungement. In 2020, a judge approved the order expunging Rupp’s old case. As far as the law is concerned, he has no record.
Otherwise, the Missouri Department of Corrections wouldn’t have hired him in the first place. And he would have been lying when he filled out the form applying for the job in Arizona.
“I wouldn’t lie on a state form and have it notarized,†Rupp says.
So how did this happen?
Rupp still isn’t entirely sure, but the culprit lies somewhere between the clerk of the St. Francois County courts and the Missouri State Highway Patrol. The highway patrol runs the Missouri uniform law enforcement system, known as MULES. When a person’s record is expunged, the judge’s order goes to the highway patrol, which is supposed to remove the old criminal record from the system.
Rupp says the highway patrol told him they never received the order from the judge that expunges his record. The old case doesn’t show up on the publicly searchable system run by the Missouri courts, but apparently it still shows up in MULES. Rupp has since made sure the law enforcement agency has the order.
But there’s another step in the expungement process that sometimes is equally important, according to attorneys who work in expungements. After making sure the criminal case is erased from reporting systems, it’s also important to check third-party background check companies, which sometimes contain old information.
It’s sort of like cleaning up a bad credit report.
That’s what Rupp is doing these days, trying to fix what should have been fixed in 2020, so he can figure out if he can get his next job.
“I’ve lost a lot here,†Rupp says. “The state didn’t have any objections to my expungement. Missouri Department of Corrections didn’t have a problem. They ran me through the system and everything else. I did not have any issues at all. But now I want a job in Arizona and all of a sudden I have a problem? I don’t get it. I really don’t.â€