Maryland governor pardons 175,000 marijuana convictions in sweeping order

“You can’t hold people accountable for possession of marijuana when you’ve got a dispensary on almost every corner,” he said.

Nationwide, according to the ACLU, Black people were more than three times more likely than White people to be arrested for marijuana possession. President Biden in 2022 issued a mass pardon of federal marijuana convictions — a reprieve for roughly 6,500 people — and urged governors to follow suit in states, where the vast majority of marijuana prosecutions take place.

Maryland’s pardon action rivals only Massachusetts, where the governor and an executive council together issued a blanket pardon in March expected to affect hundreds of thousands of people.

But Moore’s pardons appear to stand alone in the impact to communities of color in a state known for having one of the nation’s worst records for disproportionately incarcerating Black people for any crimes. More than 70 percent of the state’s male incarcerated population is Black, according to state data, more than double their proportion in society.

In announcing the pardons, he directly addressed how policies in Maryland and nationwide have systematically held back people of color — through incarceration and restricted access to jobs and housing.

“We’re talking about tools that have led to an eight-to-one racial wealth gap in our state — because we know that we do not get to an eight-to-one racial wealth gap because one group is working eight times harder,” he said.

Moore introduced Shiloh Jordan, 32, who was once fired on his second day of a job because a background check revealed a lone cannabis possession charge. Jordan went on to earn a college degree and build a career.

“Shiloh was not handed a second chance, he built one for himself, despite the odds, despite a system that was not built to support those actions,” Moore said.

Jordan handed Moore the pen used to sign the mass pardons, an orange retractable one from the Last Prisoner Project, an advocacy group for drug policy reform. Jordan told reporters that despite overcoming the conviction, “it really bothered me” to have it hang over him.

Maryland, the most diverse state on the East Coast, has a dramatically higher concentration of Black people compared with other states that have issued broad pardons for marijuana: 33 percent of Maryland’s population is Black, while the next highest is Illinois, with 15 percent.

Maryland is the only state in the D.C. region that has fully legalized cannabis sales, though both the District and Virginia have decriminalized possession and have gray markets for the drug. Virginia and D.C. have not issued mass pardons of cannabis convictions, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, but Biden’s pardons had impact in D.C. because they applied to thousands of people arrested on federal land.

Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D), called the pardons “certainly long overdue as a nation” and “a racial equity issue.”

“While the pardons will extend to anyone and everyone with a misdemeanor conviction for the possession of marijuana or paraphernalia, this unequivocally, without any doubt or reservation, disproportionately impacts — in a good way — Black and Brown Marylanders,” he said in an interview. “We are arrested and convicted at higher rates for possession and use of marijuana when the rate at which we used it was no different than any other category of people.”

Reducing the state’s mass incarceration disparity has been a chief goal of Moore, Brown and Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue, who are all the first Black people to hold their offices in the state. Brown and Dartigue have launched a prosecutor-defender partnership to study the “the entire continuum of the criminal system,” from stops with law enforcement to reentry, trying to detect all junctures where discretion or bias could influence how justice is applied, and ultimately reform it.