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Illinois County To Use Algorithm To Automatically Expunge Old Marijuana Convictions (gizmodo.com) 65

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: With a statewide marijuana decriminalization ordinance set to take effect at the start of 2020, Cook County, Illinois is slated to automatically clear "tens of thousands of cannabis convictions" with the assistance of an algorithm, the Chicago Tribune reported on Wednesday. Cook County is the nation's second most populous county as well as home to the nation's third largest city, Chicago.

The Illinois Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act goes into effect on Jan. 1 and will decriminalize the possession of less than 30 grams (slightly over an ounce) of marijuana for those aged over 21, as well as create a process by which those convicted of possession of larger amounts up to 500 grams (about 17.6 ounces) can petition to have their records expunged of the charge. Expunged charges should no longer appear in background checks or law enforcement records. County prosecutors and California-based Code for America nonprofit have formed a partnership to use the nonprofit's "Clear My Record technology" to automate the process of clearing the records of those convicted of possessing 30 grams or less, the Tribune wrote, which Code for America says will save staff resources and expedite processing time.
"Code for America founder and executive director Jennifer Pahlka told the paper that the process will come at no cost to the state and will be carried out without action needed on the part of the convicted persons," reports Gizmodo. "The biggest hurdle will be getting the records in a form that can be quickly processed by a machine."

"Marijuana cases that were charged along with other offenses" aren't eligible to be run through the automated program and will have to go through a manual process, the Tribune wrote.
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Illinois County To Use Algorithm To Automatically Expunge Old Marijuana Convictions

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  • Won't help this guy. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 29, 2019 @08:16AM (#59136644)
    Marijuana reprobate [lewrockwell.com]
    • Of course it won't help him. This is for people with 1 ounce of pot. That guy was assisting in smuggling 1000s of kg of pot.

      Yes, that letter he wrote that you link to makes it sound like he did nothing but repair trucks. But even the change.org petition that his daughter started ( https://www.change.org/p/free-... [change.org] ) says "The trucks would be trashed after the marijuana was stripped from the secret compartments, and although it was obvious these trucks were being used to smuggle pot, my dad didn't think i
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • That guy was assisting in smuggling 1000s of kg of pot.

        I'm going to help you out with some advice because I'm charitable like that and because you're a fucking imbecile: Don't try to defend the indefensible. It quickly reveals what you're made of ... or not, as the case may be.

        • Wow, so eloquently worded. By contributing absolutely nothing except insults, you make such a compelling argument that you've changed my mind on the matter. By the way, you might want to also share your insightful commentary with the man's daughter, because even she admits that her dad knew he was assisting with the smuggling.
      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        Addressing one of the points, if knowing someone who knows someone who is a terrorist is was legally terrorism, and you found out that the guy you chatted with at the Starbucks once chatted with someone who was later convicted of an offense related to terrorism, you will (should) know that the government will have no problem proving that you knew (slightly) the guy who knew (slightly) the guy. That is, you believe the govcernment will be able to prove it's case. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be protesting

  • Not very effective (Score:4, Informative)

    by spaceman375 ( 780812 ) on Thursday August 29, 2019 @08:23AM (#59136674)

    Summary says: "Marijuana cases that were charged along with other offenses" aren't eligible. News flash - Police routinely write multiple charges to give attorneys room for negotiation & still allow for at least fines if not jail time. So a great majority of marijuana convictions won't be eligible.
    Nice intent tho.

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Its not "decriminalization" of crime :)
    • Summary says: "Marijuana cases that were charged along with other offenses" aren't eligible.

      you forgot to quote the rest of the sentence:
      "and will have to go through a manual process ".

      Cases that were charged with a non-marijuana crime are still eligible to be expunged, but just can't be done automatically

      • you forgot to quote the rest of the sentence:
        "and will have to go through a manual process ".

        Cases that were charged with a non-marijuana crime are still eligible to be expunged, but just can't be done automatically

        Translation:
        If the record / background check contains an entry
        - "charged with offence of muder and possession of 5g of marijuana"

        Then the automatic record clearing robot will not delete it,
        a human will need to go in and remove the marijuana reference while keeping the murder reference,
        so that the possession of marijuana doesn't show up anymore in the background check, but the murder still shows up.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Police routinely write multiple charges to give attorneys room for negotiation

      Sometimes there simply aren't any justifiable charges to tack on. And through the negotiation process some charges will be dropped and others will fail to get a conviction.

      Imagine a young loser getting both a possession charge and a loitering charge for trying to panhandle to buy papers in front of a liquor store. Let's say buying something means the loitering infraction gets dropped and all is left is a misdemeanor possession conviction. How many times does this happen in a big city, 100s of times a year m

      • I love reading the "police blotter" that gets thrown into newspapers from time to time.

        Nearly all the "drug busts" involving users involve related side charges, often for "drug paraphernalia", but sometimes for "intent to distribute" when somebody has their drugs in more than one container, even though it's more than likely not a drug distribution situation.

        At least in my state, I think this is done to somehow escalate the offense by making it multiple offenses, especially for marijuana which is a petty mis

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          To be fair, the question didn't specify typical or Cheech and Chong joints...

          • I mean, it's a good story but I find it plays into the idea that legislators are idiots and never write laws that involve weights and measures.

            I mean, maybe they are, but I would expect the first words out of their mouth would be "how many fucking ounces is that?"

    • One thing that matters are *arrest* records. Convictions are one thing, but there are a lot of HR departments that have a philosophy of, "convictions can be overturned, but if a cop took the time to whip out the cuffs and do the booking paperwork, the person is guilty of something and is a criminal."

      Just being arrested for a crime can ruin someone's future employment chances for life.

  • So even lawyers now are losing there jobs to automation. What is the world coming to.

    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      So even lawyers now are losing there jobs to automation. What is the world coming to.

      Lawyers have been losing their jobs to automation for some time. They are one of the hardest hit professional level jobs because of how much grunt work is needed to comb through documents and do research.

      Lawyers have a very bi-modal distributions of salaries because while there are a significant number of lawyers who are very successful, most struggle to find a place in the profession. Technology has taken away a large number of entry level positions but law schools keep selling the dream of high pay to too

      • nonsense, that work was (and still is) done by paralegals. they've been using computers for 20+ years

    • Probably paralegals rather than lawyers.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Just a reminder that the War on Drugs was a political hit job with racist motivations:

      “You want to know what this was really all about?” he [John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former domestic policy advisor] asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday August 29, 2019 @08:39AM (#59136714)

    I guess that's the 'algorithm'.

    • The algorithms is only for charges regarding Marijuana only.

      Human review are supposed to edit charges of multiple offenses where Marijuana is only one of them:

      “Marijuana cases that were charged along with other offenses” aren’t eligible to be run through the automated program and will have to go through a manual process, the Tribune wrote.

      So the basically, they don't trust the "CONTAINS" operator of SQL, they only trust the "=" operator.
      They still require human supervision of the "CONTAINS

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by DrYak ( 748999 )

          No, they don't want to automate removing convictions where the automation might screw up and vacate a murder conviction.

          Yes, I know. Common, how many ":-D" smiley do I have to add so it's obvious I'm jesting ?

          Also, in an even more "explaining the joke" step:

          notice the parent poster joked :

          select * from .. where conv contains "Marihuana"

          i.e.: an SQL script that *identifies* the conviction, not edit them.
          It's not specified what happens with them after ward.
          it might be a "DELETE" as in your specfic McKiller killing and raping (or is it the other order around) example, or it might be some s/[0-2]?[[:digit:]]g Marijuana possessio

      • by sjames ( 1099 )
        And apparently, the database has not been properly normalized.
  • SELECT * FROM jail WHERE grams 30;
    • In think in some cases it was just an fine and record with no jail time.

    • When I imagine government criminal records, I imagine a giant shared folder full of mixed word documents and excel documents listing all the convicts and crimes. Some of the records are TIFF-format scans of faxed pages.

    • SELECT * FROM jail WHERE grams 30;

      Excuse me, I think you dropped this: <

      (&lt;)

  • by pegdhcp ( 1158827 ) on Thursday August 29, 2019 @09:30AM (#59136970)
    This is the most pathetic clickbait piece of news I have ever seen in /.
  • by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Thursday August 29, 2019 @09:55AM (#59137052)

    their algorithm with Canada. It's 100% manual here.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/politi... [www.cbc.ca]

  • I'm not repulsed or offended by it; I am sincerely amused that any implementation of policy is now suddenly called "algorithm" in 2019. It's not wrong. It's a little weird, but it's not wrong.
  • OK, I get it, legalizing use/possession of pot is what all the cool jurisdictions are doing, and that past convictions almost certainly fell hardest on certain minority demographics.

    But... weren't these convictions for a violation of the law at the time of the offense? So the individuals willfully and knowingly (in most cases) breached the law, were tried with all the same rights of due process, representation, evidence standards, and appeal as for any other criminal offense, and were convicted.

    I don't und

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      Because those convictions for an offense for which other people were *systematically* not prosecuted are in themselves illegal under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

    • Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Cajun Hell ( 725246 ) on Thursday August 29, 2019 @11:51AM (#59137652) Homepage Journal

      I don't understand how we can justify removing a record of willfully criminal behavior

      Because it was a bad law. This is actually a very weird and interesting case of us valuing justice over compliance with the law. I'm not aware of this sort of thing happening in America before, though someone may correct me on that. That it's becoming government policy is fascinating. We look at our government and often see that things are getting worse all the time, but this is a rare counterexample.

      It happened, they were caught, and convicted; that it wouldn't be a crime if it happened today is irrelevant.

      No, that's just it: we're making it relevant. That's a decision being made, instead of blind adherence to dogma. We're putting thought and judgment back into a process that was perverted over several decades to eliminate thought and judgment. More brains instead of less.

      Imagine a society where people talk about the law as a force for good, instead of always as a corrupt thing that we only see with contempt and disrespect. Imagine a world where you actually expect people to obey the law, instead of everyone routinely violating it and everyone being ok with that, since the laws are stupid. In addition to fixing the laws, undoing the harms of bad laws is a good way to get there. The government must atone if it's ever to regain the people's trust. And if it ever gains the people's trust, it may some distant day even gain the people's respect. Isn't that what you want out of the social contract?

      • Isn't that what you want out of the social contract?

        Nah I just want to punish other people as hard as I can to feel better about my empty life.

      • by CODiNE ( 27417 )

        "I'm not aware of this sort of thing happening in America before"

        I was going to post a link to the Soghomon Tehlirian story as I thought it happened in SF California... but that's where he lived and it was a German court. :|

    • OK, I get it, legalizing use/possession of pot is what all the cool jurisdictions are doing, and that past convictions almost certainly fell hardest on certain minority demographics.

      But... weren't these convictions for a violation of the law at the time of the offense? So the individuals willfully and knowingly (in most cases) breached the law, were tried with all the same rights of due process, representation, evidence standards, and appeal as for any other criminal offense, and were convicted.

      I don't understand how we can justify removing a record of willfully criminal behavior. It happened, they were caught, and convicted; that it wouldn't be a crime if it happened today is irrelevant.

      I came to post the same thing. What counts is the law in effect at the time. As the law has changed, I can understand releasing anyone currently serving time for breaking the superseded law, but expunging records??? Also, isn't possession still against FEDERAL law (and federal law trumps state law)

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Case in point: The Constitution explicitly gives the Feds the power to regulate INTERstate commerce. It says absolutely NOTHING about INTRAstate commerce. Under the 10th, that means that the states get to decide what may be bought/sold inside their own goddamn borders. If the document is going to be routinely ignored, then why bother having it in the first place?

          Because a Potemkin villiage lends itself to the power of denial.

        • I came to post the same thing. What counts is the law in effect at the time. As the law has changed, I can understand releasing anyone currently serving time for breaking the superseded law, but expunging records??? Also, isn't possession still against FEDERAL law (and federal law trumps state law)

          Show me, in the Constitution, where the Federal government gets to ban marijuana. I'll offer up the 10th amendment as proof that they DO NOT.

          Do you believe that ALL federal laws are required to be in the Constitution? Show me where in the Constitution the federal government has the right to outlaw murder. The Commerce Clause [wikipedia.org] (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3) declares that Congress shall have power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes. Furthermore, the Supremacy Clause [wikipedia.org] (Article VI, Clause 2) says that in cases of conflict, federal law trumps state or local law. The Federal Food, Drug, [wikipedia.org]

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Anonymous Coward

      were tried with all the same rights of due process, representation, evidence standards, and appeal as for any other criminal offense, and were convicted.

      Actually I expect most of them were browbeaten into taking a plea, either through not being able to afford a lawyer who is not heinously overloaded like the public defenders often are, or by being overcharged with something they couldn't even risk taking to trial regardless of facts/evidence (most likely a combination of the two).

    • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Why? Because they came to realize that not only was the law stupid, it was unjust, and that it needed to not only go away but the injustices it caused needed to be reversed where possible.
  • A first conviction for possession of pot often has grave consequences in sentencing for crimes committed after that first conviction. Any defendant appearing before a judge with prior convictions is likely to receive harsh punishment as a judge may see them as a proven case of an individual willing to break the law. There are people in Texas serving life for doing next to nothing as one kid who was caught twice with pot and had another crime of breaking into a vending machine. Three felonies got him a l
  • "Illinois County To Use Algorithm to ..."

    How else will it be done in 2020? I would be surprised if the DIDN'T use and algorithm.

    The question is, how far back are they going and have all old convictions been computerized?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      How else will it be done in 2020?

      In Cook County, one would first expect it to be contracted to a company with connections to the mayor or an alderman. That company will be paid up front and will not do any work. Next, the work would be bid to a local company, but one of the unions will complain the winning company isn't a union shop. This will tie up the process until the company either withdraws their bid or pays off the union leaders. If re-bid, it will go to a union shop where appx. 1/3 of the work will be done before they ask for more

  • The many tens of thousands of dollars we've extracted from pot smokers via legal fines and fees? Yeah, we're keeping that. Don't push it.

    In fact, I wont be surprised to hear the final step in clearing your record is a nice reasonable fee of 5-10k

  • by Chromal ( 56550 ) on Thursday August 29, 2019 @12:42PM (#59137930)
    A first step, but what are they going to do to compensate their victims for the direct and indirect harms caused by wrongful prosecutions and vicious culture war injuries perpetuated against cannabis users? These people deserve to be made whole again and their lives restored to what they would and should have been without the interference of hateful authoritarians.
    • DELETE from conviction WHERE
    • SELECT prisioner from jail_population
    • WHERE conviction = 'marijuana' and amount
  • The Illinois Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act goes into effect on Jan. 1 and will decriminalize the possession of less than 30 grams (slightly over an ounce) of marijuana for those aged over 21,

    Illinois already decriminalized minor possession a while ago. This is legalization. The difference being under decriminalization, you can still be given a civil summons, found guilty, and fined. It's more like a traffic violation which may not a crime under the state codes, but are still illegal. It doesn't show up as a criminal conviction on your record, but it still shows up. With legalization, it's no longer a civil or criminal offense to possess under 30 grams (15 grams for non-residents), and it ca

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