“Municipal prosecutors cannot decriminalize conduct that the Legislature has criminalized,” Grewal said, in releasing new guidelines on how local authorities handle pot cases. “They cannot adopt blanket policies of non-prosecution.”
However, he said, “municipal prosecutors can and should strive to ensure that individual justice is done in individual cases.”
Grewal also announced that, beginning next Tuesday, municipal prosecutors should resume pursuing those cases.
The attorney general had suspended all local pot cases until then while he received advice on creating a uniform statewide policy from a working group that he said represented a “spectrum of criminal justice stakeholders.”
Although Grewal said that prosecutors may not dismiss marijuana cases out of hand, they can “appropriately exercise prosecutorial discretion on a case-by-case basis, as they would when prosecuting any other type of criminal offense… based on the particular facts and applicable law, and consistent with their ethical obligations.”