Maryland legislators have approved a final bill requiring state officials to shield from public view records of low-level marijuana convictions which have been pardoned, as well as to expand the eligibility to expungement for other crimes.
Bill Ferguson, Senate President (D), authored the bill that cleared the Senate in December and was passed by the House last week with 101 votes to 38. The bill now goes to Gov. Wes Moore (D) requested that this measure be submitted at the beginning session.
According to the proposed rule, Maryland Judiciary Case Search cannot “indicate in any manner the existence of records for a charge of possessing cannabis in an electronic record case if that charge led to a conviction which was pardoned later by the Governor.”
Moore pardoned more than 175,000 cannabis-related convictions last year. The records would have been blocked under the new bill on his desk. Although pardons are a formal act of forgiveness by the executive branch, they do not remove records.
Paul Armentano, NORML’s Deputy Director, said on Tuesday that hundreds of thousands of Americans are burdened by the stigma associated with a conviction. Most Americans, as well as a growing list of states, do not consider this behavior to be a criminal offense.
He said: “Our senses of justice and fairness require that our elected officials and courts act quickly to correct the wrongs done by the cannabis criminalization and prohibition in the past.”
NORML reports that Maryland has issued over 350,000 pardons for cannabis related offenses, and more than two million expungements.
The governor spoke in February about the new bill that the legislature passed. He said it will allow people to get their marijuana criminal records expunged if they violate the terms of probation or parole.
The governor stated that “a cornerstone of this effort will be to ensure that we combat this myth that each sentence must be treated as if it were a lifetime sentence.” “And that’s why I introduced legislation this session to build upon the historic cannabis-pardons I signed last year into law, which was the largest pardon granted by a state in the history of the United States.”
The bill would broaden the types of criminal offenses that are eligible for expungement, and eliminate the requirement that a person must first complete “parole or probation” as well as any mandatory supervision, before they can petition a judge to have their criminal record expunged.
The proposal instead would only require that the person complete their sentence, and then wait for a specific number of years depending on the type of conviction.
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Maryland House bill allowing adults to produce marijuana edibles or concentrates at home has been forwarded to the governor. A companion Senate version is also making its way through the Maryland legislature.
The measures will no longer consider possession, cultivation, and distribution of cannabis that is more than 50 pounds to be a crime punishable with a minimum mandatory sentence of 5 years. The misdemeanor would carry a maximum of 10 years in prison and/or $50,000.
This bill was advanced about a week after Maryland’s Senate approved a law to prevent firefighters and emergency workers from facing penalties for using medical marijuana while off duty.
Employees could not be “disciplined, terminated, or treated in any other discriminatory manner” by employers based only on positive results of THC metabolites.
In January, officials in Maryland’s most populous county separately said they were moving to loosen marijuana policies for would-be police officers in an effort to boost recruitment amid a staffing shortage.
The governor, in his State of the State speech in February, touted legislation which would increase the chances for people to get their criminal records expunged for marijuana. It allows people who broke the conditions of their probation or parole, to petition the court to remove those records.
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Mike Latimer is the photographer.
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