San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón announced on Wednesday that city prosecutors will retroactively apply a California law legalizing marijuana to thousands of cases automatically, dismissing and sealing cases spanning across several decades.
Under Proposition 64, California legalized the recreational use of marijuana across the state in 2016, and individuals previously convicted of marijuana-related offenses gained the right to petition courts to recall or dismiss their cases. Now, San Francisco is taking the legalization movement one step farther, automatically expunging thousands of these convictions and requiring courts to review thousands more.
This comes as welcome news to thousands of Californians whose criminal histories may have left them ineligible for certain jobs or government benefits. Instead of having to petition for a day in court or a case dismissal themselves, approximately 3,000 of these individuals will soon have their misdemeanor convictions automatically wiped clean, according to Gascón.
“While drug policy on the federal level is going backwards, San Francisco is once again taking the lead to undo the damage that this country’s disastrous, failed drug war has had on our nation and on communities of color in particular,” Gascón said, according to CNBC.
The full impact of this policy shift is still difficult to assess, potentially affecting tens of thousands of cases. Gascón stated that some of the cases set to be overturned date back to 1975. Gascón also announced that district courts will review and re-sentence thousands of felony marijuana cases, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The Drug Policy Alliance estimates that 5,000 people have already applied for expungement since Proposition 64 passed in November of 2016, according to The Hill.
Millions of individuals have misdemeanor and felony convictions related to marijuana in the state of California, and the vast majority of them will be unaffected by Francisco’s retroactive legalization.
Still, proponents of marijuana reform hope that Gascón’s announcement could be a significant first step in the direction of much broader changes. In an attempt to implement a similar policy across the entire state, California Assembly Member Rob Bonta introduced a bill on Jan. 9 that seeks to provide every Californian “automatic expungement or reduction of a prior cannabis conviction.”
If Assemblyman Bonta’s bill becomes law, implementing the sweeping changes it mandates would take several years and millions of dollars.