MINNEAPOLIS — As the Minnesota legislature finalizes a plan to legalize recreational marijuana moving forward, it is also looking back and working to help those who have been haunted by previous marijuana charges on their criminal records.
Bills that have passed the Minnesota House and Senate both call for automatic expungement of marijuana possession and other petty misdemeanors.
"Cannabis crimes that are not felony level and that were non-violent, did not a involve a weapon," said Leili Fatehi, campaign manager for MN is Ready.
According to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, roughly 66,000 Minnesotans will be automatically eligible to have those kinds of misdemeanors sealed, if the current legislation is signed into law.
Automatic expungement means those impacted will not need to do anything, but that does not mean the process will be immediate.
"Their record will be expunged as soon as it is identified, but that work of identifying the individual is going to take some time," Fatehi said.
Jana Hrdinova, who has spent years tracking state expungement efforts as Director of the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at The Ohio State University, says the process is time and labor-intensive.
"Especially when you are going backwards in history, that gets really complicated and it can take years to put it into practice," she said.
That's because the BCA, which is initiating the process in Minnesota, will not just be working with courts to seal convictions. Of the 66,000 Minnesotans eligible, just 9,800 of the cases resulted in convictions. Nearly 57,000 were cases that were stayed or dismissed.
"When you say, 'a person with a criminal record,' you imagine somebody who has been convicted, but that's actually not accurate," Hrdinova said. "People who have been arrested and charges were never proven or they were even dismissed, that stays on peoples' records."
To make matters worse, those past charges don't impact people equally. A 2020 study by the ACLU found that Black Minnesotans are 5.4 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession statewide, despite both groups reporting similar usage rates.
No matter who is impacted, eligibility is only the beginning of the process.
"There are different agencies that own these records and you have to notify all agencies that they have to close or seal their records," Hrdinova said. "You also have to let the person whose record was sealed, know that their record was sealed so that they don't continue to put on their employment application that they have an offense. Simply notifying people, when you might not have an updated address presents another level of challenge."
And it's not the only challenge, according to the BCA, there are an additional 230,000 Minnesotans with non-violent felonies, who will soon be eligible to apply to have their records sealed through a new Cannabis Expungement Board.
"That's a lot of people whose lives we'll hopefully be handing back to them," Fatehi said.
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