George Gasc\u00f3n must clean up a mess, a blunder not of the San Francisco district attorney\u2019s doing. To fix it, the police chief-turned-TED-talk-giving prosecutor is turning to a familiar Silicon Valley trope: the algorithm.<\/p>\n
When California voters approved Prop. 64<\/a>, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, in November 2016, they allowed for past marijuana-related convictions to be cleared from the record books, but some restrictions applied.<\/p>\n Records would not be cleared automatically. Paperwork needed to be filed. And paperwork does not get filed by itself \u2014 you need a lawyer for that. And lawyers do not get hired by themselves \u2014 for that, you need money, a lack thereof often being the very reason a minor marijuana offense has brought you into court in the first place.<\/p>\n Little wonder, then, that more than a year after Prop. 64 passed,\u00a0fewer than 250 out of almost 8,000 cannabis ex-cons had successfully had their records cleared.<\/a><\/p>\n Aware of this iniquity, earlier this year, Gasc\u00f3n announced that his office \u2014 which, yes, did the work in the first place that created the records \u2014 would do the work to eliminate the records, and would start combing through decades of marijuana convictions to find cases eligible to be expunged.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s a lot of paper \u2014 a phone book\u2019s worth, for those of us old enough to remember the White Pages. Under current U.S. senator and rumored 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, San Francisco prosecutors pressed charges in 2,500 to 3,000 marijuana cases a year.<\/p>\n Through this week, his office has prepared 962 motions to dismiss, his office told reporters, with roughly 5,000 more cases to review.<\/p>\n So here\u2019s Gasc\u00f3n, three months later, staring at a pile of paper. To keep his pledge to purge records, Gasc\u00f3n is pursuing a shortcut of sorts.\u00a0As the San Francisco Chronicle reported this week,<\/a>\u00a0Gasc\u00f3n has enlisted a troop of nerds from Code For America, the government-efficiency nonprofit.<\/p>\n Code for America will devise an algorithm \u2014 the same order of tasks that improves your Google searches and performs nearly every other function that led you to read this article on your digital device \u2014 to identify convictions eligible to be expunged.<\/p>\n In this way, computers will do in seconds the job that would take Gasc\u00f3n\u2019s relieved paper-pushers months or longer. They are then free for other, better, less soul-crushing things than combing dusty paperwork for crimes that \u2014 in retrospect, and probably at the time \u2014 shouldn\u2019t have been pursued in the first place.<\/p>\n Gasc\u00f3n has already begun a trend of sorts in proactively scrubbing the record books for cannabis convictions. Following his lead, prosecutors in Seattle and other marijuana-friendly major American cities announced similar plans. This is the idea with the algorithm gambit.<\/p>\n \u201cWe heard from prosecutors from around the state saying they\u2019d like to [expunge records] but don\u2019t have the resources,\u201d Gasc\u00f3n told the newspaper, adding that from now on, any district attorney who doesn\u2019t follow suit and get the machines out prefers to keep marijuana offenses on the books \u2014 thus putting every pro-prohibition prosecutor on the spot.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat Code for America is doing is going to basically draw a line between those that can\u2019t and those that won\u2019t,\u201d he added. \u201cAnyone that talks about not having the resources \u2014 once we get this product online \u2014 is basically telling us, \u2018I won\u2019t do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Such stakes are clear,\u00a0but aren\u2019t likely to shame some old-school law-and-order types in action. Still, at least you\u2019ll know where they stand \u2014 not that there was much doubt before.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>,\u00a0have you ever been in trouble for cannabis?<\/p>\n The post San Francisco DA Works to Clear Marijuana Records<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
George Gasc\u00f3n must clean up a mess, a blunder not of the San Francisco district attorney\u2019s doing. To fix it, the police chief-turned-TED-talk-giving prosecutor is turning to a familiar Silicon Valley trope: the algorithm. When California voters approved Prop. 64, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, in November 2016, theyContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2780,50,4312,216,4313,90,2111,151],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26294"}],"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\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26294"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26295,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26294\/revisions\/26295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: San Francisco DA Works to Clear Marijuana Records<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"