A Shenandoah County School Board candidate has a felony conviction in Pennsylvania that he did not disclose on a form he filed to run for office. He says it was expunged. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
L.M. "Mike" Scheibe II is running for a school board seat in District 1 of Shenandoah County. He advocated for the reinstatement of Confederate names on two local schools last year.
Last week, the Northern Virginia Daily reported that Scheibe had several misdemeanor criminal convictions in his home state of Pennsylvania. But he also has a felony conviction on his publicly available record. In 2004, Scheibe pled guilty to a third degree felony of criminal trespassing. He was sentenced to a minimum of eight months in prison. In Pennsylvania, unlike Virginia, felons' voting rights are restored after their release from incarceration. So this criminal record doesn't preclude someone from running for local office. However, according to the Virginia Department of Elections, they do have to disclose it in candidacy forms.
Media Relations Specialist Brian Tynes told WMRA via email that under Virginia law, "anyone with a felony conviction would need to attest that their rights have been restored."
WMRA obtained Scheibe's certificate of candidate qualification on Monday night via a FOIA request. He marked that he had not ever been convicted of a felony or other crime that would preclude him from holding office, and left a line blank for the date of his restoration of voting rights.
Scheibe told WMRA in an email that he got the felony conviction expunged, and "it's not supposed to show up anymore on court records." We asked for documentation of this but did not receive it by airtime.
According to the Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, the only convictions that can be expunged are low level and juvenile offenses, or convictions that are 10 years old if the offender is at least 70 years old and has not been arrested since. Scheibe is 53 years old.
