Most, though not all, with cannabis convictions in the county get rap sheets amended.

Forty-eight years worth of cannabis convictions in Monterey County have been permanently amended, fulfilling the task set out in 2018 when former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill to revise criminal records across the state to reflect the new reality of legalized cannabis.

The 1,519 cases in Monterey County, ranging from misdemeanors to felonies, date back to 1973. The revisions – which reduced 1,121 felonies down to misdemeanors and dismissed and sealed another 398 cases that were originally misdemeanors – were finalized by Monterey County Superior Court on Oct. 28, says court administrator Chris Ruhl. For those with past cannabis convictions, how their records show up on employer or government background checks are permanently altered – past cannabis felonies are asterisked and clarified, while sealed misdemeanors are hidden completely.

Oct. 28 marked an important date for those with cannabis convictions in Monterey County. However, the superior court, responsible for filing the changes with the state’s Department of Justice, had the list of cases for roughly 19 months, a long lag since the District Attorney’s Office greenlit the changes in April 2020.

Ruhl says the delay was due to a storm of obstacles mixed with the notoriously slow speed of bureaucracy. After receiving the list from the DA, court administrators had to examine each individual case. The mandate from the state to do this work came with no additional staffing and the court received the DA’s list just as the pandemic was taking hold, exacerbating staffing issues. Ruhl says the court’s case management system, Odyssey from Tyler Technologies, provided further obstacles. For some cases, a cannabis violation was only one part of a larger conviction, but Odyssey did not allow the court to seal only one charge of multiples until September 2021.

Deputy Public Defender Zach Newhouse has been watching the process unfold since the DA sent its list to the superior court last spring. Since Brown signed the bill, Newhouse has been fielding calls from formerly convicted people who wanted help getting their records revised. Now that the court has filed all of the changes with the Department of Justice, Newhouse just has to alert people his office represented that their records have been amended.

However, there is a small universe of people who he thinks are getting overlooked and will run into obstacles getting their records changed. When a former client with a cannabis-related charge called Newhouse to ask about her record, he could not locate her name on the DA’s list. She was arrested for bringing cannabis into jail but was charged with, and convicted of, transportation of a controlled substance.

“The list of people are only those who were charged with a violation of five specific marijuana state statutes,” Newhouse says. “It’s not everyone who has gotten in trouble with the law because of marijuana. The work is not completely done. I don’t think it can be and it might not ever be.”