Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s decision to offer mass pardons for low-level marijuana crimes is part of a nascent but growing effort to remedy inequities in the criminal justice system wrought by a drug that is now legal in many parts of the country, the Washington Post reports.
Experts and civil rights advocates said the historic movement, driven by the Biden administration and officials in liberal-leaning states, reflects an unevenly applied prescription that often does not go far enough to clear the records of those who have been convicted and has lagged in states with more conservative leadership.
Twenty-four states and D.C. have legalized recreational adult use of marijuana, with more than half of Americans now living in a jurisdiction where they can legally buy the drug. Advocates and public officials have increasingly pushed to put an end to the lingering consequences for people convicted of marijuana-related activities that are no longer against the law, especially in Black and Brown communities that have been disproportionately targeted by the war on drugs.
But the patchwork of remedies has been complicated by state laws, politics and bureaucracy.
For instance, most Republican-led states still ban recreational and, in some cases, medical use of cannabis.
And even the most aggressive measures to automatically clear criminal records do not ensure that people once charged with marijuana possession won’t have that record used against them when they seek jobs or housing. The Biden administration began a major push to forgive individuals 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, stirring hope among advocates that has grown even stronger with Maryland’s pardon announcement this week.
“I’m optimistic those dominoes are falling,” said Sarah Gersten, executive director and general counsel for the Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit that advocates for ending incarceration for marijuana-related crimes. “Hopefully, this is just the first step in a much larger moment for cannabis justice.”
More than 2 million Americans have had their cases expunged or pardoned in recent years, said Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, known as NORML, which closely tracks such efforts across the country.
While pardons issues forgiveness for a crime, expungements actually erase the record of convictions. That can have a greater impact for removing the barriers to housing, jobs, and social services. That process can be complicated.
Maryland will automatically expunge records just for people whose only charge was misdemeanor marijuana possession — which accounts for about 40,000 of the 175,000 charges Moore pardoned this week, according to the governor’s office.
While a constitutional amendment in Missouri was supposed to automatically expunge marijuana-related crimes, not all of them have disappeared, due to court clerks being overwhelmed by the number of prosecutions, old records being hard to find, and some cases that were labeled as possession of a controlled substance, not marijuana.
“In Missouri, municipal offenses aren’t technically a crime. But at the same time, they are considered crimes for the FBI purposes. And so they come up on criminal background checks,” said Sydney Ragsdale, an attorney with the expungement clinic at the University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law.
A similar situation is playing out in New Mexico.
Kamisha Webb, 46, was charged with violating a marijuana possession ordinance in 2004 in Lee’s Summit, Mo., an accusation she still disputes. She pleaded guilty only to a traffic violation. Webb, a civilian investigator from Kansas City, Mo., said she earlier lost out on two federal government jobs because of the arrest, which remains visible on some background searches even though it was technically expunged in recent months.
“It’s been very humiliating and very crippling to see those job opportunities disappear,” said Webb, who is asking an appeals court to completely purge the record.