Old Pot Convictions May Go Up in Smoke

District Attorney Jackie Lacey has asked a judge to dismiss and seal the records of some 66,000 marijuana-related convictions for about 53,000 individuals dating back to 1961.

Lacey announced the move Feb 13, about 10 months after she first pledged to erase the cases.

A nonprofit group, Code for America,  worked with LA County and four other counties to generate the list of  cases that could potentially be dismissed from data provided by the California Department of Justice. Statewide, software created by Code for America has identified 85,000 convictions that might be purged in L.A., San Francisco, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties.

Lacey said the request would bring much-needed relief to communities of color that disproportionately suffered the unjust consequences of our nation’s drug laws. About 45 percent of the convictions being lifted were for Latinos and 32 percent for African-Americans.

Lacy said the dismissals go beyond the relief called for under Prop. 64 — the 2016 measure that legalized recreational marijuana — and a follow-on implementation law known as AB 1793, which required past pot cases to be dismissed or re-sentenced by July 1 of this year.

instead of only reducing the charges from felonies to misdemeanors in accordance with the law, Lacey requested dismissals of all the convictions. This covers felonies and misdemeanors.

The requested dismissals include 62,000 felony cases filed in L.A. County since 1961. Lacey also seeks dismissals of about 4,000 misdemeanor cannabis possession cases  prosecuted by city attorney offices in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Torrance, Pasadena, Inglewood, Burbank, Santa Monica, Hawthorne, Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach.

Individuals have had the right to petition a court to dismiss their cases, but few have because the process is costly and confusing.

The types of cases that are not eligible for dismissal are cases in which people used children to sell pot, and those in which individuals created concentrated versions of cannabis by cooking down and processing marijuana.

The law doesn’t distinguish the amount of pot. If you were convicted of moving large amounts of cannabis, you may have been  charged with other counts like conspiracy or money laundering. Those charges do not go away.

Lacey said those who were jailed only on pot-related charges have already been released in L.A. County. If the judge grants the District Attorney’s request, the recent cases will be processed most quickly. Older cases dating back to the 60s and 70s could take a few months.

People with old cannabis convictions don’t need to do anything to make their pot offenses go away. Once approved by the court, the dismissals are automatic.

The L.A. County Public Defender’s office has set up a hotline for people to verify that their cannabis-related convictions were erased.

Details: 323-760-6763.