{"id":76237,"date":"2024-06-12T05:55:32","date_gmt":"2024-06-12T13:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2024\/06\/12\/missouri-courts-have-spent-less-than-10-of-funds-earmarked-for-marijuana-expungements\/"},"modified":"2024-06-12T12:45:54","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T20:45:54","slug":"missouri-courts-have-spent-less-than-10-of-funds-earmarked-for-marijuana-expungements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2024\/06\/12\/missouri-courts-have-spent-less-than-10-of-funds-earmarked-for-marijuana-expungements\/","title":{"rendered":"Missouri Courts Have Spent Less Than 10% Of Funds Earmarked For Marijuana Expungements"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

\u201cWith something this important, I think we all feel better having experienced clerks working on it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent<\/strong><\/p>\n

Out of the $7 million Missouri lawmakers approved last year to help courts expunge decades of marijuana cases, state records show less than 10 percent of it was spent as of mid-May.<\/p>\n

Across the state, nearly 123,000 marijuana cases have been expunged<\/a>, according to numbers compiled by the Missouri Supreme Court. But court officials have said it\u2019s impossible to estimate how many more expungements the courts have to go<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Missouri county courts had a tight, one-year deadline<\/a> to clear all eligible marijuana offenses from people\u2019s criminal records\u2014a mandate set forth in the 2022 constitutional amendment that legalized recreational cannabis.<\/p>\n

In a push to meet it, court leaders urged legislators last year to approve $4.5 million for state courts to pay their employees overtime or to hire temp workers, along with an additional $2.5 million in a supplemental budget.<\/p>\n

Yet, court clerks statewide soon discovered that it\u2019s not a process more money can speed up.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Nodaway County Circuit Clerk Elaine Wilson says she never ended up asking for any funds.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody wants to work overtime because we all have families,\u201d said Wilson, who has a team of five people. \u201cAnd if you hire somebody off the street, you have to train them for what they\u2019re looking for. And I just don\u2019t want to take that chance of them missing something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson is far from the only clerk who felt that way.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith something this important,\u201d said Cass County Circuit Clerk Kim York, \u201cI think we all feel better having experienced clerks working on it. That\u2019s really the only way to know with 100 percent certainty.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it shows in the numbers.<\/p>\n

When the money became available last fall, about half of the state\u2019s 115 counties applied for money from the Circuit Court Budget Committee, which oversees the special assistance program. The counties asked for $4.1 million for labor costs, along with $100,000 in postage.<\/p>\n

As of May 15, those 62 counties had spent a total of $658,728 on paychecks and $18,290 on postage.<\/p>\n

About half of the counties that requested money spent less than $1,000 each.<\/p>\n

Crawford County spent the most on regular and overtime pay with about $91,000\u2014half the amount the county originally requested. Next was Jasper County with $63,000.<\/p>\n

Looking at expungement numbers statewide, more money didn\u2019t necessarily mean more cases reviewed or expunged. However, several clerks said they found it difficult to track the number of cases reviewed, so the state numbers likely don\u2019t reflect the accurate totals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Greene County Circuit Clerk Bryan Feemster estimates his team has reviewed more than 80,000 cases so far, though the state numbers show about 15,000.<\/p>\n

Greene County has a smaller team than some of the other larger counties, Feemster said, but he was able to hire retired clerks to come back and help with the task.<\/p>\n

That allowed the county to expunge the most cases in the state, with 5,800\u2014spending $57,500 to pay the part-time retired clerks as well as overtime for full-time employees.<\/p>\n

St. Louis County is close behind with 5,055 expunged cases, spending about $9,000 on labor costs.<\/p>\n

During the 2022 campaign in support of the recreational marijuana ballot measure, supporters touted \u201cautomatic expungements\u201d\u2014meaning people who have already served their sentences for past charges don\u2019t have to petition the court and go through a hearing to expunge those charges from their records.<\/p>\n

That means courts must locate these records on their own and make it as if past marijuana charges never existed.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet me be the first to tell you there is nothing automatic about that,\u201d said Betsy AuBuchon, clerk of the Missouri Supreme Court, during a House appropriations committee meeting in January.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a labor-intensive process, AuBuchon said, that requires someone with legal experience to look through court files. That\u2019s why most courts are relying on existing staff or retired clerks, if they\u2019re available.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s heavily frontloaded and probably not worth bringing in brand new full-time employees on the state dollar,\u201d she said. \u201cWe really need people who know how to do that work. We are getting through those as quickly as we can.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s particularly the case with paper records, Feemster said, because it\u2019s all manual.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom 1989 back, we\u2019re going through every single criminal record to find out whether there\u2019s something in there that might qualify,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it is, as you might imagine, very slow and tedious.\u201d<\/p>\n

By law, the special court funding for expungements must come from adult-use marijuana revenue, which includes sales tax and business fees. This revenue goes into the Veterans, Health and Community Reinvestment Fund, and lawmakers appropriated the $4.2 million for the courts out of this fund.<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s unspent by June 30 when the fiscal year ends, it will stay in the fund.<\/p>\n

State lawmakers approved $3.7 million for the upcoming fiscal year<\/a> that begins July 1.<\/p>\n

This story was first published by Missouri Independent.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\n

GOP Congressman Says \u2018Millions Of Marijuana Users\u2019 Own Guns And Shouldn\u2019t Face Prosecution Like Hunter Biden Did<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The post Missouri Courts Have Spent Less Than 10% Of Funds Earmarked For Marijuana Expungements<\/a> appeared first on Marijuana Moment<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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\nRead More: Missouri Courts Have Spent Less Than 10% Of Funds Earmarked For Marijuana Expungements<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWith something this important, I think we all feel better having experienced clerks working on it.\u201d By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent Out of the $7 million Missouri lawmakers approved last year to help courts expunge decades of marijuana cases, state records show less than 10 percent of it was spentContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":457,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76237"}],"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\/457"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76238,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76237\/revisions\/76238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}