Records to be confidential

610.120. Records to be confidential — accessible to whom, purposes. — 1. Except as otherwise provided under section 610.124, records required to be closed shall not be destroyed; they shall be inaccessible to the general public and to all persons other than the defendant except as provided in this section and chapter 43. Closed records shall be available to: criminal justice agencies for the administration of criminal justice pursuant to section 43.500, criminal justice employment, screening persons with access to criminal justice facilities, procedures, and sensitive information; to law enforcement agencies for issuance or renewal of a license, permit, certification, or registration of authority from such agency including but not limited to watchmen, security personnel, and private investigators; those agencies authorized by chapter 43 and applicable state law when submitting fingerprints to the central repository; the sentencing advisory commission created in section 558.019 for the purpose of studying sentencing practices in accordance with chapter 43; to qualified entities for the purpose of screening providers defined in chapter 43; the department of revenue for driver license administration; the department of public safety for the purposes of determining eligibility for crime victims' compensation pursuant to sections 595.010 to 595.075, department of health and senior services for the purpose of licensing and regulating facilities and regulating in-home services provider agencies and federal agencies for purposes of criminal justice administration, criminal justice employment, child, elderly, or disabled care, and for such investigative purposes as authorized by law or presidential executive order.

2. These records shall be made available only for the purposes and to the entities listed in this section. A criminal justice agency receiving a request for criminal history information under its control may require positive identification, to include fingerprints of the subject of the record search, prior to releasing closed record information. Dissemination of closed and open records from the Missouri criminal records repository shall be in accordance with section 43.509. All records which are closed records shall be removed from the records of the courts, administrative agencies, and law enforcement agencies which are available to the public and shall be kept in separate records which are to be held confidential and, where possible, pages of the public record shall be retyped or rewritten omitting those portions of the record which deal with the defendant's case. If retyping or rewriting is not feasible because of the permanent nature of the record books, such record entries shall be blacked out and recopied in a confidential book.