Promises of Marijuana Conviction Reform Remain Unfulfilled

On 4/20, the unofficial but widely recognized celebration of all things cannabis, activists remind celebrants there are still thousands of people paying a price for previous marijuana-related convictions. Many of those are for criminal acts which are no longer illegal.

Prior convictions for drug-related crimes can still make jobs, apartments and loans hard to get. In some cases, even volunteering at a child’s school events can be difficult.

After weed is legalized, convictions don’t always go away despite many state reforms that set up ways to seal those criminal records, expunge them from databases and in some cases review convictions for re-sentencing.

Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia all included methods to do some form of that in their marijuana legalization laws.

In Virginia, the marijuana advocacy group NORML says state police have sealed more than 394,000 cannabis-related possession and small distribution cases since Virginia legalized small amounts of weed and cannabis plants in 2021.

Maryland and D.C. also have expungement laws, but they’re not having that effect yet.

Maryland voters approved automatic expungement, which allowed convictions for simple possession to be wiped off the books. The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services has until July 2024 to get it done. Critics however point out there's no legislative framework for how they're supposed to do it or who's exactly eligible.

In D.C., courts are supposed to automatically seal records of convictions so bosses, landlords, banks and the rest of us can’t penalize people for them. Though the law went into effect last month, funding isn’t approved yet. That may happen in the next fiscal year depending on the D.C. budget.

“When a state legalizes, the job is not done,” Gracie Johnson with the Last Prisoner Project told the I-Team.

LPP is a nonprofit dedicated to cannabis criminal justice reform. Johnson, who works with state lawmakers across the country, told the I-Team it’s too soon to know when expungement may happen for everyone in our area.

“In a couple of different states, unfortunately, what we've seen is that it's taken them a couple of years to get those records completely cleared from all of the disparate criminal justice databases”

On the federal side, President Joe Biden announced automatic marijuana pardons last October. That pardon applies to possession cases in D.C. courts as well. It wasn’t until March that the feds posted a form to even apply for the automatic pardon certificate people were entitled to months ago.