Just more than a year after voters passed a constitutional amendment legalizing recreational marijuana in Missouri, workers in circuit clerk offices are still working to expunge certain weed-related convictions from people’s records.
To date, the Greene County Circuit Clerk’s Office has completed more expungements than any other county in Missouri, with more than 4,300 charges cleared as of January 2024.
Bryan Feemster, Greene County’s circuit clerk, said it’s a labor-intensive and time-consuming project that requires experienced deputy clerks who know the ins and outs of the records-keeping systems.
Feemster’s staff is mostly done with the case files stored electronically, from 1989 to present. Workers are now digging into the old paper records, which date back to 1970 and are stored in boxes and ledgers at the Greene County Archives.
Feemster expects it will take at least another year to be done expunging Greene County marijuana cases.
“The deadline for misdemeanors was last June 8, and felonies was Dec. 8 last year. So we’re past both,” Feemster said. “(Meeting the deadline) was never doable.”
Expungement isn’t automatic
The promise that certain marijuana-related convictions would be cleared from people’s records was a big selling point for those who voted to pass the constitutional amendment legalizing recreational weed in November 2022.
Greene County Records Section Supervisor Kayla Daum recalled how proponents of the amendment’s passage would often use words like “automatic” when speaking of the expungement process.
“There’s nothing automatic about this,” Daum said. “There’s a misconception. I think people are saying, you know, ‘This should already be done. Why are you still doing this?’
“It’s way more detailed than just hitting a button and poof, it goes away,” Daum said. “I don’t think they understand the depth, the detail of what this takes.”
Polk County Circuit Clerk Tiffany Phillips, too, recalled hearing promises of “automatic expungements” from amendment advocates.
“I thought, ‘You’re kidding me.’ My mind just blew. I didn’t know how we were ever going to find them all. We’ve got paper files. We’ve got books. We’ve got cards,” Phillips said. “I just thought there’s no way possible that we can do all this.”
Across Missouri, more than 100,000 marijuana charges have been cleared from people’s criminal records as of Jan. 2.
1971 marijuana conviction took 10 hours to clear
Not long after recreational marijuana first became legal in December 2022, the team at the Greene County Circuit Clerk’s Office got a call regarding a man who had a pot possession conviction from 1971.
The man hoped to get that 53-year-old criminal conviction wiped clean from his record.
His was Greene County’s first decades-old expungement request stemming from the legalization amendment’s passage, so Daum volunteered to take the man’s case.
Using the arrest date, Daum was able to search court ledgers in the Greene County Archives and figure out which magistrate court the man’s case had been assigned to and what day he was supposed to appear for his first court date.
From there, Daum spent hours searching through paper records at the Greene County Archives building just north of the courthouse. She searched ledgers and microfiche, reading through charging documents and court records. She made copies, filled out paperwork, got the expungement request approved by a judge and then notified agencies of the expungement.
Daum spent about 10 hours working to get the man’s record cleared of that conviction.
“It was overwhelming,” Daum said. “Back then, those types of records were not anywhere in a computer database.”
Because that man knew the exact date of his arrest, Daum was able to quickly locate the “start” of his journey through the legal system. But for the most part, the marijuana expungements are especially challenging because court staff has to sort through and read all the court cases and pull out the ones they think might qualify for expungement.
“I think we pretty well got it figured out now,” Feemster said. “But boy, in the beginning, it was just constant back and forth of, ‘Okay, I’m seeing this. How are you doing that? How do you organize? What are the steps we need to do?’”
Feemster figures his staff spends about 2.5 hours of work per case.
Retired clerks hired to help part time
Any revenue the state collects from taxes on recreational marijuana sales, along with fees the businesses pay, must first go towards the state’s cost of regulating legalized marijuana. Then it goes to expenses incurred by the court system for expunging certain marijuana offenses from people’s records.
According to the Missouri Independent, lawmakers approved $4.5 million last year to pay for court employees overtime or to hire temporary workers to complete the huge number of expungements required by law. Lawmakers approved another $2.5 million in a supplemental budget on May 5, 2023. And another $3.7 million was requested for 2024.
So far, Greene County has received $940,000, the highest amount of funding requested by any county in the state.
Normally, the Greene County Circuit Clerk’s office employs about 75 deputy clerks. Using those funds appropriated by the legislature to expunge marijuana charges, Feemster hired four retired clerks to work part-time on expungement cases in 2023, and recently added two more part-time retired clerks to help.
Since his office still has to do its regular duties, Feemster is able to offer overtime for any employee interested in putting in extra hours to work on marijuana expungement.
With six part-time employees, plus a handful of regular employees putting in overtime, Feemster estimates he has the equivalent of 5.5 full time employees dedicated to expunging eligible marijuana charges from peoples’ record.
Jonathan Zachary is among the few regular circuit clerk employees who are taking advantage of the overtime.
In addition to helping expunge records, Zachary does a lot of the physical “heavy lifting” of boxes filled with old paper records, which are stored at the Greene County Archives building. Zachary uses a wagon to transport boxes of files to and from the Archives building.
“I’ve been grateful for the opportunity to work some overtime,” he said. “I have been doing eight to 10 hours a week, coming in a little early and leaving a little late.”
Polk County records stored in dusty attic
Polk County’s circuit clerk staff might be jealous if they saw Zachary collecting old court records from the Archives building and pulling the wagon back and forth across the Greene County courthouse parking lot.
“We’re having to go into the attic — a nasty attic — and dig through boxes,” laughed Phillips, the circuit clerk in Polk County. “The courthouse attic, it’s above us. It’s got some steps that are less than a foot wide to walk up and boxes up there with mice.”
Still, Phillips’ office is “making headway” on the marijuana expungement project.
Phillips hired three part-time retired clerks to work on expungements. Her regular staff makes time to work on expungements on “no court” days. Polk County has so far requested $26,000 from the allocated state government funds to pay the part-time staff and the overtime needed to complete the project.
Phillips said her staff is pretty much done with expungements on cases stored electronically (from 1989 to present). They are now tackling those dusty paper-filled boxes stored in the Polk County Courthouse attic.
When Phillips spoke to the Daily Citizen by phone in early February, she wasn’t sure exactly how many expungements her deputy clerks have completed. But like Feemster in Greene County, Phillips said she expects it will take at least another year to 15 months to finish.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for Phillips has been that so few people have inquired about whether or not their record has been expunged.
“I’ve had less than six people call or come up here and ask about their marijuana expungement,” she said. “They don’t even care, so that’s been pretty frustrating.”
Per the terms of the constitutional amendment, Phillips said her staff mails notifications to people once a conviction is expunged. The Polk County circuit clerk staff relies on the address on file, which means the post office is returning many of those notifications.
“Nobody lives where they did in 1983. Nobody,” Phillips said. “So we’re spending all this money on mail, and it’s coming back. People just don’t realize how costly it was.”
Surrounding counties also need more time
Barbara Stillings, Christian County’s circuit clerk, said the process has felt overwhelming at times, but she feels her staff has been amazing throughout the process.
In her view, one major challenge is that each case coded as “drug charges” has to be read through to check to see if there were any marijuana charges included.
“It would have been very helpful if the authors of Amendment 3 had worked with the judiciary to ask how they could make it work for the clerks that are responsible for doing this job,” Stillings wrote in an email.
Because there are so many steps to the process of expunging a conviction, Stillings estimates her staff spends about three hours on each case.
“It is also very complicated because a person could have several charges against them and only part of the charges are eligible for expungement,” Stillings wrote, “so that requires even more work from my staff, to make sure the charge that needs to be expunged and not the rest of the charges and all the coding that goes into that process.”
So far, Christian County clerk staffers have expunged nearly 600 convictions. Stillings figures her staff and temporary staff will need at least until the end of 2024 to complete the project.
Amy Strahan, Taney County’s circuit clerk, said her staff is moving through each case in about 45 minutes — considerably faster than work times reported by the other circuit clerks interviewed for this story.
In an email, Strahan said her staff has completed about 750 expungements so far. She expects to have the project completed in about six months.
MORE CANNABIS COVERAGE FROM SGFCITIZEN.ORG
