Will your NJ marijuana conviction be overturned?

James Nash | NorthJersey

Show Caption Hide Caption Video: Legalizing marijuana in New Jersey What are some of the pros and cons of legalizing marijuana in the state?

New Jersey lawmakers, civil rights groups and even some prosecutors say that if the state legalizes marijuana, hundreds of thousands of past convictions for the drug should disappear from criminal records.

But they learned Monday that the matter is easier legislated than done.

For starters, there's the question of what kinds of marijuana convictions should be retroactively forgiven. Possessing small amounts, sure, they agree. But what about sharing or selling the drug? Or related crimes, such as child endangerment when police find marijuana in a home with children?

Then there are the technical and technological questions of how or even whether to erase convictions from the 1970s and 1980s, when courts mostly used paper records and when laws were written differently, and how to deal with job-screening services that rely on old data.

The questions clouded what seemed like a rare area of consensus in New Jersey's marijuana debate: that the state should purge past marijuana convictions if it either legislates legal sales of the drug or removes criminal penalties for possession in the future.



"We have to ask ourselves if it's morally just to allow those individuals to continue to carry the scarlet letter, and is it in our best interests as a state," said Assemblywoman Annette Quijano, D-Union, who sponsored the bill to expunge old marijuana crimes if the drug becomes legal. "We also need to address the reality that minorities face marijuana charges at significantly disproportionate rates than those of their white peers even though usage rates across racial lines are generally the same."

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Jon-Henry Barr, a past president of the New Jersey State Municipal Prosecutors Association and a Republican, agreed.



"It simply serves no salutary purpose in my opinion as an experienced municipal prosecutor to maintain someone with a criminal record for having possession of a joint or even several of them," Barr said. "It simply doesn't do anything to advance our interests as New Jerseyans."



During more than two hours of testimony to the Assembly's Judiciary Committee, no one spoke against the idea of expunging past marijuana crimes, which has been a key demand of civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union, both of which advocate a legal marijuana marketplace in New Jersey.



Forming a political consensus around expungement could be the easy part. The harder part could be figuring how to dispose of thousands of drug convictions — 400,000 just since 2008, according to state judiciary officials — and which qualify for forgiveness.



Amol Sinha, the state ACLU's executive director, suggested that the state expunge all marijuana possession convictions, most convictions for distributing the drug and even other crimes that stem from marijuana arrests as the "fruit of a poisonous tree." He said the state should reach back at least to the 1970s.



Alyson Jones, the state judiciary's legislative liaison, said the court system's digital database didn't go live until the mid-1980s, so finding and expunging older crimes would be a painstaking process. In addition, the state's current possession laws don't distinguish between marijuana and hashish, so if the state elects to make marijuana legal but not hashish, it may have to review old cases individually to determine which involve marijuana and which involve hashish.



Leo Bridgewater, who heads the state chapter of Minorities for Medical Marijuana, said it's a distinction without a difference, as hashish is simply a marijuana derivative.

Marijuana convictions

Lawmakers also questioned whether striking marijuana convictions from criminal records would restore a path to employment for thousands of people who have been barred from work. That's because firms that screen prospective employees may have databases that still would show old marijuana convictions, as an expungement order would apply to government agencies like courts and police departments but not to private companies. Court officials said there was little they could do about private companies.



Even if uprooting marijuana convictions from hundreds of thousands of criminal histories proves to be time-consuming and expensive, the state should do it in the interest of social and economic justice, said Kate Bell, legislative liaison for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project. She noted that state officials have projected $300 million a year in revenue from taxes on marijuana sales, which she said should more than cover any expungement-related costs.



After hearing from court officials about the complexity of the endeavor, Bell did concede one point. Rather than taking one year to review and change criminal records to reflect marijuana's new status, she said, it would likely take closer to two years.