O<\/span>ne California District Attorney in San Francisco has made a move that could help the criminal records of thousands disappear or be reduced to misdemeanors, thanks to the Adult Use of Marijuana Act.<\/p>\n San Francisco District Attorney George Gasc\u00f3n has stated that the city will retroactively expunge or reduce misdemeanor and felony convictions dating back over 40 years, according to The San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>.<\/p>\n Under this new policy, San Francisco alone could see more than 3,000 misdemeanors dismissed and sealed, going back to 1975. Gasc\u00f3n also said prosecutors will review nearly 5,000 felony cases for possible resentencing. The process of clearing all the misdemeanors is currently underway, but due to the case-by-case basis of the felony convictions, those are going to take a bit longer.<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of waiting for people to petition \u2014 for the community to come out \u2014 we have decided that we will do so ourselves,\u201d Gasc\u00f3n told the Chronicle. \u201cWe believe it is the right thing to do. We believe it is the just thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Previously, people who wanted to clean up their records had to take part in a lengthy process that required time and money, which often proved difficult for people from lower-income communities that have been the most impacted by the War on Drugs. Despite the fact that Prop 64 applied retroactively to hundreds of thousands of cases, the vast majority of those people still live with a conviction hanging over their head because they haven\u2019t gone through the necessary legal channels to expunge the records. While many California cities have been hosting free expungement clinics<\/a>, the Associated Press reported<\/a> that fewer than 5,000 people have actually jumped through all the hoops required to clean their record<\/p>\n In San Francisco, Gasc\u00f3n\u2019s office is expecting that a lot of clerical work to go with the effort and he\u2019ll assign extra hands as needed. \u201cWe\u2019re hoping what we are doing here will not only benefit San Francisco,\u201d he told the Chronicle.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re hoping other elected officials around the state will say this is the right thing to do,\u201d said\u00a0Gasc\u00f3n.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n While the district attorney in San Diego also announced<\/a> that they would be working to overturn cannabis convictions, many district attorneys across the state said it just was too difficult to take the initiative themselves. In Mendocino, Sonoma and Sacramento County, district attorneys said that they didn\u2019t have the resources to comb back through records.<\/p>\n Most notably, in Los Angeles, District Attorney Jackie Lacey released a statement<\/a> on Feb. 2 that declared the office would need individuals to file their own expungement efforts. Lacey said that Los Angeles County has had an estimated 40,000 felony convictions involving since 1993.<\/p>\n In light of the difficulties for district attorneys to clear each record on a case-by-case basis, some advocates are calling for automatic records clearing. Cal NORML Deputy Director Ellen Komp says somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million Californians should qualify for automatic expungement or resentencing.<\/p>\n \u201cThe overwhelming majority of the misdemeanors were for possession of an ounce or less from before 2011, when the penalty dropped to an infraction,\u201d Komp told Cannabis Now. \u201cThese were supposed to be automatically expunged from people\u2019s records two years after conviction, but in many cases, Cal NORML legal committee attorneys have found this didn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Komp believes the trick will be figuring out how to force or fund the courts to research the cases and clear the records more widely, and not just in San Francisco and San Diego.<\/p>\n \u201cWe applaud Gasc\u00f3n\u2019s\u00a0move, and in places with a liberal [district attorney], this could work; however in places without one, [district attorneys] either won\u2019t review them or could deny them,\u201d said Komp. \u201cThere was language in Prop. 64 saying \u2018the court shall grant the petition to recall the sentence or dismiss the sentence because it is legally invalid unless the court determines that granting the petition would pose an unreasonable risk of danger to public safety\u2019 and that is subject to interpretation.\u201d<\/p>\n Komp went on to note California State Assemblymember Rob Bonta deserves credit for getting the ball rolling on this, after a constituent brought up the issue at a public forum. Bonta recently introduced a bill, AB 1793, that aims to automatically eliminate past marijuana convictions in California.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, do you have a cannabis crime on your record that you need help clearing?<\/p>\n The post CA District Attorneys Debate Clearing Pot Convictions<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
When Proposition 64 passed in November 2016, hundreds of thousands of people got the opportunity to clear their criminal records of marijuana convictions. But clearing those records hasn\u2019t been easy \u2014 and while cities like San Francisco are moving to proactively tackle the database, cities such as Los Angeles areContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[148,50,80,809,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23636"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23637,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23636\/revisions\/23637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
\nRead More: CA District Attorneys Debate Clearing Pot Convictions<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"