California legislature takes one step closer to easing marijuana convictions
If passed, Assembly Bill 1793 would require marijuana convictions to be reviewed by July 2019
It may soon be easier for Californians with marijuana convictions to have their offenses reduced or records cleared. On April 17, the state assembly’s Public Safety Committee unanimously approved AB 1793. The bill now moves on to the Assembly Appropriations Committee for further scrutiny.
If this passes, the legislation would require the California courts to review the criminal history database for the entire state, identify all eligible marijuana convictions and automatically reduce or expunge them before July 1, 2019.
“The role of government should be to ease burdens and expedite the operation of law — not create unneeded obstacles, barriers and delay. This is a practical, common sense bill,” Assemblymember Rob Bonta said in a press release. He introduced the bill in January of this year. “These individuals are legally-entitled to expungement or reduction and a fresh start. It should be implemented without unnecessary delay or burden.”
Technically, there is already a process in place to clear or reduce the classification of cannabis-related crimes. In November 2016, Californians passed Prop 64 — the Control, Regulate, and Tax Adult Use of Marijuana Act — making national news as the state became one of eight to legalize the sale and responsible use of recreational marijuana for adults.
Somewhat less discussed, Prop 64 also allows many to petition for the reduction or expungement of previous marijuana convictions, depending on the gravity of the crime. This aspect of the law is a proverbial “my bad” from the state of California to the many residents affected by marijuana convictions over the past several decades.
“[Clearing my record] is so important. I was convicted at age 21 and it affected me until I was 30,” said Ingrid Archie. Up until a year and a half ago, she was one of roughly a million people in the state with marijuana crimes on their record.
Archie was released from prison in 2005 after serving 17 months for a cannabis-related felony. She soon got a job working at Verizon and was making good money until, several years into working there, Archie’s drug conviction came back to haunt her. The company added a policy that it would no longer employ felons. In 2009, Archie was fired after a background check.
“I didn’t think that years later I would’ve gotten laid off for [my record],” she said.
Losing her job and steady income meant Archie also lost her home and car. Her conviction prevented her from participating in her children’s school events and chaperoning their field trips, she said, describing the restrictions of a felony conviction as an “invisible wall.”
With the help of Eunisses Hernandez, a policy coordinator for the Drug Policy Alliance, Archie submitted a petition to expunge her record at 12:01 a.m. the night the Prop 64 passed. Within a few weeks her felony was cleared. It wasn’t long after Archie started working as a legal clinic coordinator with A New Way of Life, an organization that helps formerly-incarcerated women get back on their feet.
Despite the quality-of-life benefits of marijuana record reclassification or expungement, less than 5,000 people in the state had filed petitions by the end of 2017, according to the California Judicial Council.
“That is just a drop in the bucket of people who could benefit from this,” said Hernandez.
She called Prop 64 one of the largest criminal sentencing reforms in the history of the United States. Yet most people who are eligible to clear their records either don’t know they can, or don’t have the resources to navigate the petition process. Marijuana record reclassification can be time consuming and expensive, especially if a lawyer is needed.
In an effort to mitigate this issue, the Drug Policy Alliance holds monthly “expungement fairs” all around Los Angeles. There they offer free legal assistance and attorneys to help navigate the system.
“At these clinics, [the attorneys] are able to do three things: they are able to pull up people’s entire LA criminal record, they are able to fill out all the documents that are necessary for each case depending on what the case qualifies for, and finally they will walk the client through what they need to do and where they need to mail documents,” Hernandez said.
While advocates are in favor of these efforts to relieve the cannabis conviction burden, some say it’s not enough.
“What it’s really going to come down to is for counties to step up and take responsibility to help their constituents through this process,” said Hernandez. “That’s what really needs to happen, because it can happen now. We don’t need to wait on bills.”
San Diego and San Francisco have taken the initiative to proactively go through their records to identify eligible marijuana convictions and automatically reclassify them. Los Angeles has not taken that step.
In February, however, LA County Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Hilda S. Solis co-authored a unanimously approved motion for the county to develop a plan to ease marijuana conviction resentencing. Ridley-Thomas is pushing for change because of what he sees as bigotry in how drug laws have historically affected low-income residents of color, including in his district, which encompasses most of South LA.
“The war on drugs led to decades-long racial disparities in cannabis-related arrests and convictions,” he said in a public statement. “We have a responsibility now to seek widespread reclassification and resentencing for those with minor cannabis convictions on their record. For many, this is the second chance that was due to them and has been a long time coming.”
Ridley-Thomas has acknowledged that, although the board of supervisors’ approval is a step in the right direction to repair the damage inflicted by the war on drugs — the process is not perfect. Nor are the new county efforts yet in place.
State Assemblymember Bonta believes AB 1793 will provide a simpler and more expedited pathway to cleaning up the records of eligible persons statewide. However, to undo decades worth of marijuana convictions would presumably take countless hours of labor. California law enforcement has made over 2.7 million cannabis related arrests between 1915 and 2016 according to the San Francisco District Attorney’s office.
“Since most courts have only recently digitized court records, court staff may need to search through storage facilities and warehouses manually to look through thousands of case files searching for past marijuana convictions,” said Bonta in a news conference earlier this year.
He has acknowledged Assembly Bill 1793 would require extensive work from the California court system, but Bonta suggested the bill would streamline the expungement process, making it cheaper for taxpayers in the long run compared to multiple one-off petitions like Archie’s.
The Assembly Appropriations Committee hearing on AB 1793 is scheduled for May 2. If it passes, the bill will go back to the state Assembly for approval before moving onto the state Senate committee process.
For those interested in petitioning their marijuana records in advance of the state legislature’s decision, the forms can be downloaded off of the California courts website.
