SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25 (Xinhua) -- San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon announced Monday that 8,132 marijuana-related convictions have been automatically cleared as part of a pilot program of justice reform.
In partnership with San Francisco-based nonprofit group Code for America (CFA), prosecutors in San Francisco adopted a technology developed by the CFA that helped remove the obstacles in processing the decades-old backlog of cannabis-related convictions eligible for clearance or reduction.
In addition to the newly cleared pot-related convictions, 1,230 marijuana-related convictions had been expunged by the district attorney's office, bringing the total cases of sealed convictions to 9,362, the CFA said in a statement.
San Francisco became the first California county to complete the automated marijuana record clearance process.
Gascon made an unprecedented decision in 2018 to retroactively apply Proposition 64, which legalized the possession and recreational use of marijuana for adults ages 21 years or older, to misdemeanor and felony convictions dating back to 1975.
But it was a time-consuming tough task to identify eligible marijuana convictions from thousands of criminal cases, as the Proposition did not offer guidance on how to drop or reduce the offenses to misdemeanor.
The San Francisco district attorney's office worked with the CFA to streamline the clearance process by leveraging the technology of Clear My Record, a simple computer-based algorithm developed by the CFA to automatically process the pot-linked convictions.
"Using technology, we have been able to proactively bring greater racial equity and fairness to marijuana legalization in California," said Gascon, adding that other counties and states in the country are following suit by offering similar relief in their communities.
California passed Proposition 64 in 2016 to legalize the recreational use of weed in the state, which took effect on Jan. 1, 2018.
At present, a total of 29 U.S. states have adopted medical marijuana laws and seven states have adopted the most expansive laws legalizing marijuana for recreational use.
