In its first year of legalizing marijuana, Missouri has cleared over 100,000 cannabis-related cases from court records, according to recent state data. However, some courts have missed the set deadline for erasing felony records due to the challenge of processing old cases spanning several decades.
“Completing this task will require more time, potentially taking years, especially for cases that date back a century,” stated Dan Viets, a Missouri NORML coordinator and co-author of the state’s 2022 constitutional amendment legalizing marijuana, in an interview with KVTI of St. Louis. “With over a century of marijuana prohibition, many older records exist only in physical form, not on any digital database, making it a labor-intensive process to find and process them.”
Viets highlighted in a press release from Missouri NORML that the automatic expungement feature is a crucial aspect of the marijuana legislation that voters passed with a 53–47 margin last year.
He pointed out, “The law not only stops roughly 20,000 annual marijuana arrests but also mandates the state to rectify the harm done to countless Missourians over the last century.”
Missouri’s extensive history of marijuana prohibition implies a significant effort is required to fully expunge all eligible cannabis offense records.
Missouri NORML explained, “Many of the older cases are not digitized. Finding and expunging these records will involve substantial manual work.”
The organization noted that funding for this expungement process comes from the state’s 6 percent sales tax on adult-use marijuana, as outlined in Article XIV of the state Constitution.
“The tax revenue generated has been more than sufficient to cover the costs of additional staff or overtime for employees in Circuit Clerks’ offices statewide,” the group stated.
According to the law, misdemeanors were to be expunged by June 8, while the deadline for clearing felonies was December 8.
“By Monday this week, the total number of expunged cases was over 99,000,” Viets told KOMU, adding that an average of more than 2,000 cases have been cleared weekly over the past year.
Viets mentioned that counties missing the deadline for felony expungements are not adhering to the state Constitution and could face legal actions.
He also observed that some smaller, rural counties, where there was less support for Amendment 3, have seen fewer cases expunged, suggesting a possible correlation.
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