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Perhaps the people who stand to benefit the most from marijuana legalization in New Jersey — with the exception of potential business owners — are the hundreds of thousands of people in the state with marijuana convictions. If marijuana is legalized here, those people would be able to have their pot convictions cleared much more quickly than they could previously.

On Monday, they got an even bigger boost. Two state legislative committees advanced a bill that, in addition to legalizing marijuana, would allow people to clear convictions for distributing up to one ounce of marijuana and possessing up to five pounds of weed. (Yes, pounds.)

The New Jersey Legislature is expected to vote on the legalization bill Monday, and Gov. Phil Murphy and top lawmakers are pushing hard behind the scenes to secure the votes to pass legal weed. Murphy said on Tuesday that, should the bill pass, he would continue working to make sure expungements have a positive impact on people.

“Monday, if we are successful, is not the end of history,” Murphy said, adding that he was dedicated to making expungements easier for people. “So if we’re successful, let’s get by Monday and (consider) from me on down in the administration all-in on getting this as smooth as possible and as ironed out as possible.”

Expungements and other social justice provisions have been key to Murphy’s proposal on legalization. If New Jersey was ever going to successfully legalize marijuana through its Legislature, lawmakers were going to have to consider what to do about the hundreds of thousands of people in the state with marijuana convictions.

Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and others made sure that question was always near the top of the debate in Trenton.

A lot of the work in the past few weeks on the legalization bill has been on expungements. Lawmakers like state Sen. Nia Gill, D-Essex, have said they wouldn’t support a bill without progressive provisions on expungement.

The current bill would allow people with marijuana convictions to apply for an expedited expungement, which would move their application along faster than in the past. It also puts the onus on the state to help move along expungement applications. The burden has been on the person applying and it has prevented a lot of people from clearing their records.

Whether New Jersey is able to handle such an influx of expungement requests is still open to debate. If marijuana became legal, tens of thousands of people would be eligible for expungement almost immediately, potentially overwhelming the state Judiciary, which handles expungement petitions. The provisions in the bill call for the Judiciary to hire more employees to help with the expected increase in expungement requests.

Over the past three decades, New Jersey police have arrested a staggering number of people on marijuana charges. Since 1990 nearly 1 million people have been arrested for marijuana in the state. Between 2015 and 2016, New Jersey had the biggest spike in marijuana arrests of any state in the country.

Data also shows that marijuana enforcement hasn’t been applied equally in New Jersey. A 2017 report from the ACLU of New Jersey found that black people are three times more likely to be arrested for marijuana in the state than white people, despite similar usage rates.

For those reasons and others, Murphy and several state lawmakers have pushed for better expungement language to help ensure that the people most affected by marijuana prohibition would be helped by legalization.

In previous versions of the legalization bill they called for marijuana conviction to be automatically expunged, but that’s not a possibility in New Jersey’s current expungement system. An NJ Advance Media report earlier this year found this and other problems with expungements in New Jersey.

But by adding marijuana distribution as a conviction that can get cleared and raising the limit on possession convictions up to five pounds in the new bill, lawmakers may have overcorrected. Three Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday voiced concern about letting someone caught with that much pot be able to more easily clear their record.

“If you were convicted of possessing several pounds of marijuana, it’s almost certain you were a drug dealer and not a recreational user,” said state Sen. Mike Doherty, R-Warren, said in a statement on Thursday.. "And you were probably pushing harder stuff, too, within our communities. It’s outrageous that Democrats are willing to put drug dealers back on our streets to get the votes they need for legalization.”

It’s unclear if those changes will get the support needed to pass the bill. As of Monday night, both chambers of the legislature were still short the votes needed to legalize marijuana.

Payton Guion may be reached at PGuion@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @PaytonGuion.

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