Alaska Scrubbing Hundreds of Pot Convictions from Court Database
High Times

Hundreds of Alaska residents will have their prior marijuana convictions removed from the state’s online court database. That move follows an order late last month from the state Supreme Court last month, according to local media reports.  Local news station KTUU reports that, as of May 1, “marijuana possession convictions of about just under 800 Alaska residents will be removed from Courtview, a public, online database of court cases.” The order “follows years of similar, unsuccessful, legislative efforts to join a nationwide trend,” according to the Anchorage Daily News. “I’m glad that the Supreme Court has ordered this,” said Democratic state Sen. Scott Kawasaki, as quoted by the Anchorage Daily News. As stipulated by the state Supreme Court, the removal from the system will apply to individuals who were “convicted of possessing less than one ounce of marijuana … or a prior version of that statute that criminalized the same conduct, or a municipal ordinance that criminalized that same conduct if … the defendant was 21 years of age or older at the time of the offense, and … the defendant was not convicted of any other criminal charges in that same case.”  According to the Anchorage Daily News, those “records will still be available for inspection at courthouses and will be discoverable by a formal criminal background check, but they won’t be as easy to find for the general public.” Alaska legalized recreational cannabis for adults in 2014, when a majority of the state’s voters approved a ballot measure ending the prohibition on pot.  “Given that (marijuana) has been legal for eight years, it appeared to the Supreme Court that this was an appropriate time not to have people, as I say, suffer the negative consequences that can stem from having your name posted on Courtview. Because the conduct…

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