Ken Wolski runs the Coalition for Medical Marijuana of NJ.
“Our organization supports Sweeney’s effort to reintroduce marijuana legalization in the legislature in November of 2019 during the lame duck,” Mr Wolski told InsiderNJ. “We realize this legislation won’t have home cultivation in in but we support it nevertheless because of all the good legalization would do like a decrease in mass incarceration.”
Home cultivation would endow the citizens with too much liberty so we can’t have that now can we?
Anyone with a New Jersey cannabis conviction could be in for good news if state lawmakers decide to enact criminal justice reforms suggested by Gov. Phil Murphy.
Murphy, a Democrat, late last week vetoed parts of Senate Bill 3205, which would have cleared a path to expungement of certain non-violent criminal cannabis charges. He argued the measure didn’t go far enough.
In response, Cunningham said in a statement that she was “disappointed” in the decision, and that the “proposed changes would significantly lessen the number of individuals who would be eligible for expungement.”
“If expungement is a good step toward responsible citizenship, then we should be broadening the opportunity for people to expunge their records and to rejoin the work force. There has to come a time when we understand the importance of permitting people to have a second chance.”
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has vetoed legislation that would have expedited expungements for people with certain cannabis-related offenses on their record. On Friday, Murphy announced that he had shot down the plan because it did not go far enough, and offered suggestions to lawmakers on how they could craft expungement legislation that was more likely to get past his desk.
Over the past six months, cannabis legislation in New Jersey has been a hotly debated topic. Since the promise of Murphy’s campaign to legalize, the debates and negotiations have not stopped among legislators. Since our March update, a lot has changed.
Murphy vetoed the bill because he wants the process to be even easier, Burns reported,
Instead of jumping through several hoops: lots of paperwork, hiring a lawyer, petitioning a court, Murphy wants it to be automatic for anyone who has stayed out of trouble for at least a decade.
"Nobody that I know - certainly not me - is opposed to automatic expungement. That's something we would all like to be able to flip a switch and you're expunged," Murphy said earlier this year.
People looking to wipe certain criminal records clean in New Jersey will have to wait after Gov. Phil Murphy vetoed a measure Friday, saying he wants to create a computer system that would automatically expunge conviction information.
Offenders who have clean records for 10 years would see their convictions removed, instead of having to actively apply to wipe them clean. The governor also wants to seal the records of people that committed low-level marijuana and hashish crimes.
On August 9, Governor Phil Murphy signed into law Assembly Bill 5322, establishing the state’s program for cultivation, handling, processing, transport, and sale of hemp. The bill also repeals the New Jersey Industrial Hemp Pilot Program, which was passed in late 2018. Here are some key takeaways from the new law:
In rejecting the legislation, the Democratic governor also offered recommendations on how to fix it. He called for assembling a task force that would outline how New Jersey would adopt a more technologically advanced automatic record removal process for those who have kept a clean record for 10 years.
“I applaud the sponsors’ commitment to social justice, and their efforts to correct historic wrongs inflicted on our communities by a criminal justice system that has at times unfairly, and harshly punished individuals,” Murphy said in his veto statement.
How does this work in New Jersey?
The last iteration of the recreational marijuana legalization bill included a flat tax rate on cultivators growing the plant of $42 tax per ounce of marijuana.
The Legislature completed a fiscal impact analysis for an early version of the bill, but it doesn't calculate the costs for the latest proposal.