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Should US Marijuana Laws Address Past Drug Convictions?
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FeedSource: [AlJazeera] collected from rss-bot logs
Time: 2018-01-01 07:32:55 UTC
Original URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/marijuana-laws-address-drug-convictions-171218160824468.html [aljazeera.com] using ISO-8859-1 encoding.
Title: Should Us Marijuana Laws Address Past Drug Convictions?
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Should Us Marijuana Laws Address Past Drug Convictions?
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story [aljazeera.com]:
In California, legalisation scheme allows people previously convicted of a cannabis offence to apply for resentencing.
Christopher Dean Smith was arrested on a cannabis farm in northern California in 2014.
Smith, now 28, said he was with a friend on the property in the town of Chico, about 145km north of Sacramento, when two vehicles pulled up. Federal law enforcement agents approached the pair and told them to get on the ground.
Smith was arrested and accused of cultivation of cannabis plants and possession with intent to sell a controlled substance.
He told Al Jazeera he was not working on the farm at the time, but after fighting the charges in court for a year, he accepted a deal and pleaded no contest to cultivation.
He was sentenced to three years of probation, which came with a series of restrictions. It also put a felony on his criminal record.
"Since I've had the charges on my record, it's completely changed everything that I've had going for me. I lost my place. I lost my job," Smith said.
"Honestly, I didn't know how much of a negative impact it would have on the rest of my life."
The state of California legalised recreational cannabis use in November 2016, and it will become legal state-wide on Monday. That means anyone 21 and older will be able to buy cannabis from a licensed store, known as a dispensary.
The resentencing provisions of Proposition 64, California's cannabis legalisation initiative, have been in effect since last year, said Eunisses Hernandez, a policy coordinator at the Drug Policy Alliance, a group working to end drug prohibition. But few people know about the resentencing provision, which applies to people who are currently imprisoned or out on parole, Hernandez told Al Jazeera.
Individuals who apply for resentencing may be released from prison or have the charge on their criminal record reduced. Felonies may be lowered to misdemeanours, misdemeanours to infractions, or infractions to an outright dismissal of charges.
Resentencing will likely affect thousands of lives, since at least 500,000 marijuana-related arrests have been recorded in California over the last decade, Hernandez said.
Between 2001 and 2010, more than eight million marijuana-related arrests were recorded in the United States, 88 percent of which were for possession, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released in 2013.
Individuals with a recorded criminal conviction face thousands of barriers across all areas of life.
"If you got convicted of a simple possession of marijuana [charge] ... that could prevent you from getting jobs, getting housing, getting supportive services," Hernandez said.
Black people are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than white people, even though both groups consume the drug at similar rates, according to a report by the ACLU.
California is one of fewer than a dozen US jurisdictions that have passed motions to legalise recreational cannabis use in the past decade. The others include Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, Maine, Washington state, Washington, DC, Nevada and Massachusetts.
More states have already legalised medical cannabis, requiring people to have permission from a doctor to buy the drug. By contrast, when recreational use is legalised, customers do not need a special permit.
The US state of Oregon, which legalised recreational cannabis use in 2015, also passed legislation that allows people to apply to have their possession convictions erased from a computerised criminal history database, under certain conditions.
Several groups in the US have urged authorities to include changes to drug-related criminal offences in their efforts to legalise recreational cannabis.
Proponents of cannabis legalisation feared that allowing people with past drug convictions to get out of jail or reduce their sentences would lower the chance that the laws would pass at all. "There was, in many cases, a reluctance to bring this up," he told Al Jazeera.
Today, opponents of resentencing provisions often argue that retrying these cases puts "a very, very large potential burden on the courts", Sterling said.
Law enforcement officers may also contend that a guilty plea to cannabis possession may follow the dropping of more serious charges, such as possession with the intent to distribute - "and so to make a blanket change without looking at all of the underlying facts of the arrest would mean that more serious offenders would have their records expunged", Sterling said.
Ultimately, Sterling said it is most important to make sure people who may be affected by a resentencing law are aware that the law exists in the first place.
"The key thing, I think, is the ability for people to re-enter the economy and society free of those encumbrances," he said. "We would also say they are eligible to vote, they are eligible for jury duty, that all of their civil rights are restored."
Meanwhile, Christopher Dean Smith, who now works as a chef in California, said getting his felony drug conviction expunged or reduced would allow him to go back to what he loves.
"I can go back into the industry for recreational marijuana, which is one of my passions ... helping people," he said.
And for Smith, that would ultimately be "a second chance".
