The blanket pardon by Moore is among the country’s most far reaching and will forgive decades of low-level possession charges for about 100,000 people.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore speaks on May 29, 2024, in Philadelphia. Moore is scheduled to sign an executive order to issue 175,000 pardons for marijuana convictions.
Moore called the scope of his pardons “the most far-reaching and aggressive” executive action among officials nationwide who have sought to unwind criminal justice inequities with the growing legalization of marijuana. “You can’t hold people accountable for possession of marijuana when you’ve got a dispensary on almost every corner,” he said.Nationwide, according to the ACLU, Black people were more than three times as likely than White people to be arrested for marijuana possession. President Biden in 2022 issued a mass pardon of federal marijuana convictions - a reprieve for roughly 6,500 people - and urged governors to follow suit in states, where the vast majority of marijuana prosecutions take place.
Maryland is the only state in the D.C. region that has fully legalized cannabis sales, though both the District and Virginia have decriminalized possession and have gray markets for the drug. Virginia and D.C. have not issued mass pardons of cannabis convictions, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, but Biden’s pardons had impact in D.C. because they applied to thousands of people arrested on federal land.
Maryland officials said the pardons, which would also apply to people who are dead, will not result in releasing anyone from incarceration because none are imprisoned. Misdemeanor cannabis charges yield short sentences and prosecutions for misdemeanor criminal possession have stopped, as possessing small amounts of the drug is legal statewide.
As Maryland prepared to legalize the drug for recreational use in 2022 - joining nearly two dozen other states - a report by state analysts found that White Maryland residents use cannabis at higher rates than Black residents, but Black people were more than twice as likely to be charged with possession. By law, 35 percent of the tax revenue generated by legal marijuana sales must go back into communities where cannabis enforcement was disproportionate to the rest of the state.
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