Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s decision to issue mass pardons for low-level marijuana crimes is part of an emerging but growing effort to address inequities in the criminal justice system caused by a drug now available in many parts of the country is legal.
Experts and civil rights advocates said the historic movement, led by the Biden administration and officials in liberal-leaning states, reflects an unevenly applied prescription that often does not go far enough to clean up the records of those convicted and left behind in states. with a more conservative leadership.
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Twenty-four states and DC have legalized recreational use of marijuana by adults, with more than half of Americans now living in a jurisdiction where they can legally purchase the drug. Advocates and government officials have increasingly pushed to end the lingering consequences for people convicted of marijuana-related activities that no longer violate the law, especially in the Black and brown communities that are disproportionately targeted of the war on drugs.
But the patchwork of remedies is complicated by state law, politics and bureaucracy. Most Republican-led states still ban recreational and, in some cases, medicinal use of cannabis. And even the most aggressive measures to automatically expunge criminal records do not guarantee that people, once charged with marijuana possession, will not use that record against them when they seek employment or housing.
The Biden administration began a major push to pardon those with minor marijuana convictions in 2022, when the president pardoned about 6,500 people convicted on federal possession charges. In December, he expanded those pardons to thousands more and called on governors to follow suit, stoking hope among advocates that has grown even stronger with Maryland’s pardon announcement this week.
“I’m optimistic that those dominoes will fall,” said Sarah Gersten, executive director and general counsel of the Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit that advocates for an end to incarceration for marijuana-related crimes. “Hopefully this is just the first step in a much bigger moment for cannabis justice.”
Cynthia W. Roseberry, director of policy and government affairs focused on justice issues for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the pardons for low-level marijuana crimes in Maryland and some other states are a “good first step, but it’s a small step. “to address what she described as systemic, racial inequality in the criminal justice system.
“This is really a signal that elected officials are starting to listen to the people,” Roseberry said. “The people want people to do more, and I think elected officials have to be brave enough to follow the people in that way.”
More than two million Americans have had their cases dismissed or pardoned in recent years Paul Armentanodeputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, known as NORML, which is closely monitoring such efforts across the country.
Moore’s (D) action in Maryland will affect about 100,000 people. But while mass pardons from him, Biden and Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) have drawn the biggest headlines, legislative and voter-approved measures to stamp out such cases are having a bigger impact, Armentano said.
That’s because while pardons amount to forgiveness for a crime, expungements alone erase the record of convictions, which can still pose a barrier to people seeking employment, housing or social services.
States that used to rank high in marijuana arrests but have legalized the drug, such as New Jersey, New York and California, have expunged hundreds of thousands of low-level cases in recent years, Armentano said. But in states like Florida and Texas, where marijuana remains illegal for recreational use, law enforcement officers continue to arrest people for low-level marijuana violations. According to FBI statistics, there were nearly 209,000 arrests for marijuana possession nationwide in 2022.
Legal experts warn that state-level evictions don’t always happen automatically — noting that people often don’t have the time or resources to petition the courts to have their cases thrown out.
Maryland will automatically expunge the records of people whose only charge was marijuana possession, accounting for about 40,000 of the 175,000 charges Moore pardoned this week, the governor’s office said.
The pardon comes as the Justice Department moved to move marijuana to a less restrictive category of controlled substances, a historic policy change that does not fully legalize the drug at the federal level but could broaden access to medical cannabis and spur scientific research into can stimulate its effect. health benefits and risks.
Public opinion on marijuana has also changed substantially, with a 2023 Gallup poll showing that 70 percent of Americans – and more than half of Republicans and conservatives – now support legalization.
While cannabis policy is not a top issue for most voters, some Democratic strategists have said the issue could boost their candidates in November. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has expressed inconsistent positions on marijuana policy in the past, and his campaign has remained silent on the issue in recent months. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said he supported states making their own decisions on whether cannabis should be legal.
A number of Republican-led states, including Ohio, Montana and Missouri, have decriminalized the drug.
Under Missouri’s 2022 constitutional amendment that legalized marijuana, expungements for marijuana-related crimes were supposed to be automatic and completed under a tight deadline. More than 123,000 cases have been deleted. But not all of them actually disappeared. Clerks were overwhelmed by the number of prosecutions, old records were difficult to find and some cases were labeled as possession of a controlled substance, not marijuana, said Sydney Ragsdale, an attorney at the University of Missouri expungement clinic in Kansas City. School of Law.
Many cases still show up on certain background checks involving government jobs because the data is not completely destroyed, Ragsdale said. Courts have also refused to overturn violations of local ordinances involving marijuana, even though they carry prison sentences.
“In Missouri, municipal violations are not technically a crime. But at the same time, they are considered crimes by the FBI. And so they come up with criminal background checks,” Ragsdale said.
Kamisha Webb, 46, was charged in 2004 with violating a marijuana possession ordinance in Lee’s Summit, Mo., a charge she still disputes. She only pleaded guilty to a traffic violation. Webb, a civilian investigator from Kansas City, Mo., said she previously lost two federal jobs because of the arrest, which still shows up on some background checks even though it was technically dropped in recent months.
“It has been very humiliating and crippling to see those vacancies disappear,” said Webb, who is asking an appeals court to completely clear the record.
Other states have also confronted the gap between their policy goals and the realities of this country’s complex legal system.
When New Mexico legalized marijuana in 2021, the law provided for an automatic ban on some low-level cannabis-related crimes. But officials found that many exclusions were not so clear, said Serge Martinez, a law professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law.
In some cases these involved convictions for other crimes. Some were recorded in rural sheriffs’ offices. For more complex cases, the state is now asking people to file for deportation instead of expecting it to happen automatically, Martinez said.
“It’s a reflection of the fact that these policies are sound and great until the rubber hits the road and we have to deal with the nuts and bolts.”
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