Not only did Missouri miss its deadline to expunge past marijuana convictions within a year of cannabis becoming legal for adult recreational use, but it could be another half decade before those expungements are complete.
That was the message Missouri State Highway Patrol (MSHP) officials had for lawmakers at a hearing last month of the House Subcommittee on Appropriations for Public Safety, Corrections, Transportation and Revenue.
“Right now, we’re projecting four to five years at the current rate is how long it’s going to take us to do what we need to do,” Capt. Matthew Broniec, director of the MSHP’s budget and procurement division, said at the Dec. 14 hearing.
Broniec spoke at the hearing with MSHP Superintendent Eric Olson to present budget requests for, among other things, funding for eight full-time employees for an MSHP records expungement unit.
Among changes to the Missouri Constitution under Amendment 3, which was approved by voters in 2022 and legalized adult recreational marijuana use in the state, were new requirements that all past nonviolent, marijuana-related misdemeanor convictions be expunged by June 8 of last year, and nonviolent, marijuana-related felonies by Dec. 8. Neither deadline was met.
Rep. Kyle Marquart (R-Washington), a member of the House subcommittee who is retired from a career with the MSHP, said he remembers when the division within the highway patrol that handles expungements was staffed with more than 20 people.
“How did we get that reduced?” he asked. “Did that come from our other responsibilities there being more efficiently run?”
Olson said the MSHP is “learning a lot” as it works on marijuana expungements. He said he was “certainly encouraged that we had a pretty good idea of where we were headed” when the MSHP predicted prior to Amendment 3’s passage that nine full-time employees would be needed for the additional work.
“But I think a lot of it’s just still yet to be determined,” Olson said. “There are a lot of records out there.”
Marquart said he was “impressed” that the MSHP was “going to be able to get this stuff done in a timely manner” with only eight full-time employees dedicated to the task.
Rep. Bill Owen (R-Springfield), chair of the subcommittee, however, echoed past comments of court officials across the state who have suggested that staffing is just one factor of many in completing the expungements. Owen’s neighbor is his local circuit clerk, “so I get an earful,” he said.
The Missouri General Assembly set aside $7 million to pay for overtime or to hire temporary employees for county clerks’ offices, specifically to assist with marijuana expungements.
In Franklin County, Circuit Clerk Connie Ward told The Missourian in November that the additional money had not made much of a difference in getting expungements done, as it remained a challenge to even get her office fully staffed with regular clerks, without hiring additional people to focus solely on expungements.
Ward said Tuesday, however, that while her office is still short of being fully staffed, several more employees have recently been hired.
“So I’m hoping that we will be able to have those employees help out with the expungements,” she said. “One of those employees has already helped out tremendously with working on expungements and I have another couple of clerks that have decided to work overtime again, so they are working overtime hours in the evenings trying to help get these done as well.”
In Franklin County, 3,263 marijuana cases had been expunged as of Tuesday morning, Ward said, out of a total of 103,558 statewide. She said her office was recently notified by the Missouri Supreme Court that Franklin is one of the leading counties in the state for completing expungements.
“And again, it’s hard to compare because there are different sized counties, so in some counties they have more records to expunge than others based on population and so forth, but I will tell you that as far as number of expungements that have been done, we were in the top five for the state of Missouri,” she said, “so I was pretty proud of that.”
It remains unclear, however, what percentage of the total records to be expunged have been completed so far. Ward noted that her office has to review records dating back to 1971.
“Whether they’re deceased or not, we still have to do the work,” she said.
“Last week a clerk and I went over and spent two days in the basement of the historic courthouse going through old records. I think we were working in like ‘79 and ‘80 through about ‘95, starting to pull those records and review them to find cases that are eligible, so we have started that process as we also continue to work on newer cases where the files are housed here in the judicial building.”
Like Ward, Owen said the greatest challenges of marijuana expungements for the local circuit clerk in his county rarely come up in the more recent cases where all records are available digitally. The much more time-consuming expungements for his local circuit clerk, he said, are those involving printed records.
“He’ll tell you it’s not too bad when you’re still in electronic documents, but when you start finding the paper and you have to start getting out the boxes, it really slows the system down,” Owen said.
“And I assume you probably are facing that, as the circuit clerks are,” he told the MSHP officials, “so you might be back, down the road, wanting something additional before we’re all said and done.”