Monterey County DA to review past marijuana convictions
Thousands of marijuana convictions around the state may now be expunged, including more than a thousand in Monterey County.
The Department of Justice had until July 1 to review past convictions that could be erased since the legalization of recreational marijuana use.
The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office says the DOJ has identified 1,450 of those cases in the county.
The DA now has one year to review each one to see if they’re eligible. They will have a year to finish going through them.
The DA’s office says people have already been able to ask the court to look into expunging their past marijuana conviction by filling out a form.
The DA’s office says have already gone through that process.
The DA’s Office says it’s possible that many of the people involved in the list of DOJ cases may not want the relief.
“Somebody in prison, probably doesn’t care about the marijuana conviction, somebody who’s no longer in the United States, maybe they’ve been deported?” Chief Assistant DA Berkeley Brannon said, “Somebody who has a bench warrant out in some other case, they might like it but they wouldn’t have been able to come in and ask for it, they really should handle the other case.”
The DA’s team will now have to check the eligibility of the county’s 1,450 cases themselves.
Those who had to register as sex offenders will not be eligible to get their record expunged as well as people who transported over 28.5 grams of marijuana or who committed environmental crimes while cultivating: just some of the criteria the DA’s Office says it will be looking at with each case, something they are now figuring out how to do with its current resources.
“If we were overstaffed it would be no problem but that’s not the case here at the Monterey County DA’s office,” Chief Assistant DA Berkeley Brannon said, “I suspect it’s similar at other offices, this is not. This is a medium-sized office, it’s not a huge office and no, I do not have somebody sitting around waiting to do this job.”
One of the solutions they are looking into is hiring a retired deputy DA to come in and help look at the cases, a position which could be paid for with money from their existing budget.
