“High Time for Marijuana Expungement”
Any state that legalizes or decriminalizes marijuana should automatically include an expungement provision that clears the criminal record of individuals who engaged in activities deemed lawful under the new legalization or decriminalization laws. This is the thesis of my new article, “High Time for Criminal Justice Reform: Marijuana Expungement Statutes in States with Legalized or Decriminalized Laws.” At the federal level, Senator Cory Booker’s recently reintroduced Senate Bill 597, the “Marijuana Justice Act of 2019,” would do just that: remove marijuana from the Schedule of Controlled Substances and expunge records of marijuana possession and use convictions. At the same time, some local governments are focusing on more efficient and expeditious expungement processes. Earlier this year, the San Francisco District Attorney partnered with Code for America to identify and process eligible marijuana cases, including past convictions dating back to 1975. The Denver District Attorney launched “Turn Over a New Leaf Program,” which helps individuals who committed now-repealed marijuana-related offenses vacate the records of their convictions. While Colorado has a marijuana sealing statute (Col. Rev. Stat. § 24-72-710 allows sealing of misdemeanor marijuana possession or use offenses if an individual files a petition, pays a filing fee plus $65, and proves that the offense is no longer considered a crime), the New Leaf Program has attorneys from the Denver City Attorney’s Office guide individuals through the process and ask courts to vacate, dismiss, and seal convictions for marijuana offenses that are no longer illegal.
However—as I document in my article—of the ten states that have legalized, only four states have enacted marijuana-expungement legislation; of the thirteen states that have decriminalized marijuana, only three have enacted marijuana-expungement legislation. My article includes charts compiling the status of expungement statutes in states that have legalized or decriminalized recreational marijuana and includes a model marijuana expungement statute. My article draws on previous scholarship in this area by Professor Douglas Berman (Leveraging Marijuana Reform to Enhance Expungement Practices) and CCRC fellow David Schlussel (The Mellow Pot-Smoker: White Individualism in Marijuana Legalization Campaigns).