Colorado’s second-highest court clarified last month that defendants who are found not guilty by reason of insanity are eligible to have their criminal records sealed from public view.

Judges must seal criminal records if, among other things, a defendant is “acquitted of all counts” in a case. The question for the Court of Appeals was whether a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity functions as an “acquittal” for sealing purposes.

After prosecutors charged James Edward Papol in three separate El Paso County criminal cases in the mid-2000s, a judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity. Papol received psychiatric treatment through the state and was released from his commitment in 2021 to serve a different prison sentence.

Papol moved to seal his criminal records from his earlier cases, but District Court Judge Robin Chittum denied the request.

She acknowledged there were “not formal convictions” from those prior proceedings, but the “situations where sealing is authorized are very specific. They do not include cases where a defendant was found not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Representing himself, Papol appealed, citing a longstanding precedent that labeled insanity a “complete defense” to a criminal charge. A three-judge Court of Appeals panel agreed with him.

A verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity “operates as an acquittal of the charged offenses,” wrote Judge Stephanie Dunn in the May 28 opinion. “Thus, by amending the sealing statutes in 2019 to require that criminal justice records ‘shall’ be sealed when a ‘defendant is acquitted of all counts in the case,’ and by not excluding NGRI acquittals, we presume that the General Assembly intended to require sealing for all acquittals, including NGRI acquittals.”

The case is People v. J.P.