San Francisco officials plan to expunge more than 9,000 marijuana convictions dating back to 1975, the city's highest law enforcement official said Monday.
It's the culmination of San Francisco's year-long review of past convictions after California voters legalized recreational marijuana throughout the state in 2016. Several California cities are taking on the task of expunging records, but San Francisco is the first one to finish the job, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
"It was the morally right thing to do," San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón told the Los Angeles Times. "If you have a felony conviction, you are automatically excluded in so many ways from participating in your community."
Gascón said his office would expunge 9,362 felony and misdemeanor cases. That includes 1,230 his office had already cleared. Before the city started to comb through records to find those eligible to be cleared, only 23 people had petitioned the city to do something about their convictions, NPR reported last year. That's because the process was tedious, Gascón told NPR's Ari Shapiro.