President Biden made headlines late last year when he expunged thousands of federal marijuana charges. However, the problem at the time was that most marijuana charges happen on a state level, so a mass federal pardon wasn’t actually able to get very far.
Case in point: look how far Missouri was able to get in one year of marijuana legalization. So far, more than 100,000 cases have been expunged in the state. The deadline for felony expungements was last Friday, and even with that huge number, there were many that weren’t put through the process in time.
“The courts are going to need more time to finish the job, and in fact, it might be years before all the cases from the past century are expunged. We’ve had more than 100 years of marijuana prohibition in Missouri. Many of the older cases have never been put on a database. So, it’s going to take a lot of physical work to locate those paper records in boxes and attics and go through them,” says Dan Viets to local news station KVTI, a NORML coordinator and lawyer in Missouri.
Older cases in the state were not computerized, so filing through these is an arduous and time consuming process. In some of the more rural areas in the state, very little cases have yet to be expunged, so that’s where most of the work still lies. Because the deadline has already passed, they’ll be in violation if any cases are still expunged, meaning a legal case will probably have to be drawn in favor of the continuing expungement process.
If this were to occur throughout the country, it’d mean millions of felonies would be erased, something the Biden administration was not able to get anywhere near with their sweeping pardons.
Read the original story at Marijuana Moment.
