Four years later, California courts are failing on key promise of marijuana legalization
California voters legalized marijuana in 2016, positioning the state as a national leader on drug reform. The Adult Use of Marijuana Act, or Proposition 64, allows Californians to purchase and consume regulated cannabis products. For many, buying weed has now become as routine as buying groceries.
Yet one important promise of legalization remains unfulfilled. In addition to legalizing cannabis use and sales, Prop. 64 was supposed to create a path to clearing past convictions for marijuana-related crimes like possession, sale, cultivation and trafficking. Four years after Prop. 64’s passage, however, the state has fallen short.
Today, thousands of Californians could still be rejected by an employer, denied a loan, disqualified from housing or deemed ineligible for public benefits because of marijuana convictions that remain on their records. Under state law, such convictions should have been removed.
Assembly Bill 1793, authored by Democrat Rob Bonta of Alameda, was designed to help affected Californians clear their records. The bill created an automatic expungement process that gave the state Department of Justice and local prosecutors until last July to reduce, dismiss or contest marijuana convictions.
Unfortunately, courts in most of California’s 58 counties — which must take the step of clearing old convictions before the process is complete — were given no such deadline and have not prioritized the issue. Now, as many as 113,000 residents may still have marijuana convictions on their record in the court system.
Opinion
This is an inexcusable failure by California’s justice system.
Companies conducting background checks typically pull criminal data from the court database, but Bonta’s bill did not require the courts to act. Until every California court updates its records, the mission to clear marijuana convictions remains unfinished.
“In retrospect, that’s something we could have or should have done,” Bonta said in an interview.
Courts in some counties have taken the final step to expunge old marijuana convictions, say representatives of Code For America, a tech non-profit that helped some counties automatically clear eligible convictions through a program called Clear My Record. Their initial research found that courts in Sacramento, San Francisco and smaller areas such as Mono and Sierra counties have completed the process. A spokesperson for the Judicial Council of California said it’s likely others have as well.
But the vast majority of California’s counties have not, said Code For America program manager Alia Toran-Burrell.
“This work is far from complete,” she said, acknowledging that the COVID-19 pandemic had worsened the strain on courts. “But given that we are in an economic crisis and people with convictions are way behind in terms of access to jobs, getting people’s records cleared is incredibly important.”
The economic implications are just one aspect.
Communities of color were hurt the most by the racist War on Drugs, which disproportionately sent Black and Latino people to prison on drug charges, tearing families apart. Black Americans were nearly four times more likely to be arrested on pot charges than their white neighbors as recently as 2010, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Clearing these convictions is a crucial step toward righting this historic wrong.
Yet even as marijuana sales in California generate billions of dollars in revenue for state and local governments, the effort to clear old convictions has stalled. Now it’s up to the executive officers of the counties’ respective courts to devote staff and resources to complete this process. Many Californians are currently struggling with housing and job security as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. Outdated pot convictions should not provide an extra barrier to survival.
California’s elected leaders must amplify this issue and apply public pressure to ensure that the courts comply with state law by expunging all eligible marijuana convictions
