In Md., Moore's weed pardons are a political pitch. What's the impact?

Washington Post

4 days ago

Last June, Gov. Wes Moore (D) issued a blanket pardon to 100,000 people in Maryland, forgiving decades of low-level marijuana possession charges in one of the nation's most far-reaching acts of clemency.
The historic act, which the governor's office said forgave 175,000 misdemeanor cannabis possession and misdemeanor drug paraphernalia convictions, was praised by criminal justice reform advocates as a symbolic but meaningful step in rectifying harm done by the failed war on drugs. The Juneteenth pardons have since become a cornerstone of Moore's political pitch as he seeks a second term as governor and raises his national profile amid speculation over a potential 2028 presidential bid.
A year after the pardons — which Moore has called record setting 'both in impact and scope' — their practical impact has been limited.
The Maryland Judiciary added a pardon notation to the bottom of the affected cases in the court system's publicly available online case search database, a signal of the state's forgiveness to landlords or potential employers inclined to research someone's criminal record. As a follow-up during this year's state legislative session, Moore championed the Expungement Reform Act of 2025, which, among other things, was meant to hide the 175,000 pardoned charges from the court's public database.
But that law, which the governor's office helped write, excludes two of the three charges he pardoned. The omission calls into question whether about 18,000 forgiven convictions — for misdemeanor use of drug paraphernalia or possession with intent to use drug paraphernalia — will actually be cleared from case search when that part of the law goes into effect in January.
The new law's impact on the other 150,000 or so charges that were included, all for misdemeanor cannabis possession, is unclear because many were already expunged last summer — just weeks after Moore's pardons — as part of the Maryland Cannabis Reform Act passed by state lawmakers in 2023, a Washington Post review of those laws and state data found.
The governor's office says the new law will apply to a subgroup of people who have other charges on their records besides cannabis possession but were not covered by the 2023 law. A Moore spokesperson, however, was unable to say how many such cases exist.
Moore's senior spokesman, Carter Elliott, did not answer questions from The Post about why the paraphernalia charges were omitted from the governor's 2025 law. But he said in a statement that the administration will work with the judiciary branch and state lawmakers to 'ensure that the legislative intent to include all pardoned convictions are hidden from view.'
'Gov. Moore's historic mass pardons were intended to right the wrong of a policy that criminalized the possession and use of marijuana and disproportionately impacted communities of color, because no one should continue to suffer the ill effects of a conviction for conduct that is no longer a crime in the State of Maryland,' Elliott said in a separate statement.
On Juneteenth of this year, Moore's office announced an additional 6,938 pardons that were mistakenly omitted from the original pardons. But a Maryland Judiciary spokesperson did not respond to questions about whether those simple cannabis possession charges should have been expunged under the 2023 law or if they'll be expunged now. The governor's office said they will be hidden from the court's public online database under this year's new law.
Sen. Jeff Waldstreicher (D-Montgomery), who is vice chair of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee and helped author the Expungement Reform Act, said the intent of that bill was to include all pardoned convictions.
'If for some reason there was an error in the drafting, the legislature will unquestionably come back and remedy that error with emergency legislation that would take effect immediately,' Waldstreicher said. 'But what we should not do is allow the complicated processes between three branches of government to obscure the moral act that the governor took.'
Adrian Rocha, policy director for the Last Prisoner Project advocacy group seeking to end the harmful impacts of those convicted for offenses that are now legal, said governors often use their pardon powers only in lame duck periods.
'Here we have a first-term governor who has front loaded pardons,' said Rocha, who worked with Moore's office on securing the pardons. 'It's a very strong message about where Governor Wes Moore believes his impact exists and what he wants to do with that.'
Cannabis reform has been a key issue for Moore since he took office in 2023. He has often spoken about the importance of rectifying the harms done to Black and Brown communities through mass incarceration due to drug arrests. Moore's administration created a Cannabis Workforce Development Program that provides job opportunities in that industry to people convicted of marijuana-related offenses. The administration also distributes grants and loans to small businesses entering the cannabis industry through a Cannabis Business Assistance Fund established in 2023.
Long before Moore was elected governor, state lawmakers also had been chipping away at the legacy of the war on drugs in Maryland, complex work requiring the cooperation of three distinctly different and constitutionally separate branches of government: the executive, the legislature and the courts.
Maryland legalized medical cannabis in 2014 and Maryland voters approved the legalization of recreational use in a 2022 ballot referendum, paving the way for lawmakers to pass the Maryland Cannabis Reform Act in 2023 — which Moore signed into law.
Along the way, lawmakers prioritized the purging of court records for cannabis-related criminal charges through expungement, meaning someone with such a conviction could submit a petition to the courts requesting the permanent obliteration of all related records.
An expungement is the most effective tool for clearing someone's criminal record, guaranteeing it will be purged from the three places documentation of it exists: the courthouse, the Maryland Judiciary case search database and the state's central repository, which is what gets tapped during criminal background checks. But the expungement process is also burdensome and expensive for those seeking relief, often requiring the help of a lawyer.
'These systems are complicated, they're cumbersome, there's paperwork,' said Heather Warnken, executive director of the Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the University of Baltimore School of Law. 'People who have been held back and marginalized by their convictions are facing even greater barriers to be able to engage with these systems.'
Advocates have championed laws that mandate automatic expungement of certain charges. It's the only way to truly give people a clean slate and second chance, said Del. David Moon (D-Montgomery), one such advocate. Auto-expungement was a key component of the Maryland Cannabis Reform Act of 2023, which, in part, ordered the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services to purge misdemeanor cannabis charges from the central repository.
But officials from the Maryland judiciary have told lawmakers that auto-expungement is a financial and resource burden, prompting the General Assembly to instead use a method called 'shielding' in reform laws. Shielding hides criminal records from the public-facing Maryland Judiciary Case Search database — a form of relief that is simpler to achieve. But it does not include the destruction of records at the courthouse or from the central repository.
Waldstreicher expressed frustration with the Maryland Judiciary for its reticence to commit to auto-expungement policies. 'The judiciary continues to plead poverty when it comes to their ability to expunge records,' Waldstreicher said.
The governor's office said in a statement that administration officials chose to shield the charges the governor pardoned rather than expunging them because shielding 'provides many of the same benefits of an expungement, and does so without requiring that the individual take any action.' The governor's office added that auto-shielding was done 'using existing state resources' and 'without flooding courthouses with expungement petitions.'
To completely purge their charges, those who were pardoned will still need to apply for expungement. Of the 100,000 people Moore pardoned, just 700 have taken that extra step, the judiciary said. It's not clear if those expungement applications were for the cannabis possession or paraphernalia charges. But the gap highlights the legal and administrative hurdles faced by people hoping for a clean slate in a state that disproportionately arrests and imprisons Black people
Officials in Moore's office and criminal justice reform advocates said they've known since the June 2024 pardons that clemency was just the first step in a multipart plan to bring relief to those charged with acts that are no longer crimes in Maryland. Since then, the administration has worked to bring additional relief.
The Maryland Expungement Reform Act expands expungement eligibility to three additional misdemeanor criminal charges: driving without a license, cashing a bad check and possession of a stolen credit card. Additional charges that were written into the original bill but later killed by lawmakers included resisting arrest, making a false statement to an officer and counterfeiting drug prescriptions, the latter of which would have given expungement eligibility to those who became addicted to opioids often originally prescribed by doctors.
Most important to advocates, the new law overturns a 2022 Appellate Court of Maryland ruling that barred expungement for anyone who had violated their probation, even if the underlying charge was eligible under state law.
The appeals decision originated with the case of a man, called Abhishek I. in court documents, who had pleaded guilty to low-level theft and was sentenced to probation. But he violated that probation when he was later arrested for marijuana possession, serving four days in jail.
When he applied to have his theft conviction expunged a decade later, a judge denied his request, ruling that Abhishek's probation violation meant he had not satisfied the terms of his sentence and, therefore, was not eligible for expungement.
Abhishek's attorneys unsuccessfully appealed the decision, with the Maryland appeals court ruling that the state's expungement laws at the time did not clearly address probation violations.
The Expungement Reform Act provides that clarity by defining the satisfaction of a sentence as 'the time when a sentence has expired, including any period of probation, parole, or mandatory supervision.' Under that part of the law, which goes into effect in October of this year, a probation violation cannot automatically undermine an expungement application.
Warnken called the governor's support for the Expungement Reform Act a 'game changer' that helped the Abhishek reform succeed.
Aside from the Expungement Reform Act, all other expungement proposals died in committee during the most recent legislative session. Among other changes, those bills sought to make all criminal charges eligible for expungement and auto-expunge certain charges.
When asked about his pardons and follow-up legislation earlier this year, Moore told reporters that he believes it is the 'responsibility' of the government to 'make sure that we're not just putting in laws that make sense in theory, but then we're also putting the supports in place to make people actually believe that redemption and efficient governance can be a reality for them as well.'
'Sometimes when you pass a really important piece of legislation or do things that I think are good, important, you still have to come back and make adjustments to make sure that it's being done correctly and being implemented properly,' the governor said.
Warnken said the next frontier of cannabis reform in Maryland should include expanding relief — through pardons and legislation — for those with low-level, nonviolent criminal charges related to marijuana.
'The power of the pardon and the forgiveness is so profound and absolute, but it's not going to wipe it away from the record searches,' she said. 'These are all just steps and we have to keep going. We can't just take victory laps.'
Katie Shepherd and Erin Cox contributed to this report.