KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When Missouri voters amended the state constitution to legalize adult marijuana use in late 2022, it came with a set of deadlines by which many marijuana offenses would have to be expunged.
The deadline for misdemeanors to be expunged is June 8 and felonies are required to be wiped clean by December 8. The responsibility to do the expungements falls to Circuit Clerks in each county across the state.
But, the work required to expunge those cases, especially older ones, is preventing county workers from meeting those deadlines.
“We’re not surprised that they’ve not been able to meet the deadline in Article 14, but those were designed primarily to motivate the courts, the court clerks, to get started and indeed they have,” said NORML Missouri Coordinator Dan Viets.Roller skating injury leads to cancer diagnosis for 12-year-old Lee’s Summit boy
The most recent data from the Supreme Court of Missouri showed 97,148 charged have been expunged so far but there is no way to know how many cases still have to be expunged.
Springfield’s Greene County is at the top of the list with 3,926 because Circuit Clerk Bryan Feemster tells FOX4 he brought back four retired staffers and dedicated a current employee to sifting through digital and paper files.
“Which means we’ll have to back to this record and go through, page by page, and take out every reference to anything marijuana-related and then it will go back into our archives,” said Feemster, holding up a paper file.
Since it takes so long, his employees are working on misdemeanor cases in 1988. Once they finish the misdemeanors, Feemster stays they’ll start on felony cases. His office has received about $120,000 from the state to cover overtime and the extra workers needed to complete that work, and still, Feemster says it can’t help but impact some of the day-to-day work for which his office is responsible.
Attorney Justin Ortiz says in a perfect work, the expungement deadlines would be met. Since the work is so labor-intensive, he says people who have past convictions can and should be checking in.Two charged in alleged theft that led to Overland Park chase, crash
“The reality is people are going to have to be conscious of what their history is and stay on top of whether or not it’s been expunged,” Ortiz said. “There’s a lot more on the line for some people than there are for others.”
Especially since Clerks are struggling to notify many people that their expungement has happened because there is outdated contact information in their files.
The challenge is that once the expungement has happened, Feemster says his workers can’t confirm it over the phone.
“When we say ‘expunge’ something, we mean, ‘make it as if it never was,” Feemster said. “So you can’t tell them about something that is not there.”
Still, Feemster, Ortiz, and Viets all recommend calling the Circuit Clerk’s office to check in on the process, because some offices might give clearing that case priority.
Source : Fox 4
