ANNAPOLIS, Md. (NPR) – Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is pardoning 175,000 people who have low-level convictions related to marijuana, the governor announced Monday. To date, it is one of the most expansive absolutions by a state for this type of crime.
“The barriers to everything from employment to education to the ability to buy a home and to be able to start gaining wealth for your family, all of these things are being blocked,” Moore told NPR. “By doing what is the largest state misdemeanor cannabis pardon in the history of this country, essentially what it’s doing is, we want to make second chances actually mean something.”
But in many states, a pardon doesn’t erase a conviction from a person’s record. In Maryland, a pardon will mean that a landlord or employer doing a background check will see that a person was convicted of a crime and what the crime was, but that it’s been forgiven.
There isn’t a lot of research on the effects of having a pardon listed on a person’s record, says Colleen Chien, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. But research does show having just an arrest on paper — not even a conviction — can make employers less likely to call a candidate for a job interview.
“A record, whether or not it’s been pardoned, whether or not it’s been convicted, is often enough,” Chien says. “And so if the governor wants to sort of ensure that this is policy, that there is as much force behind it as possible, he would probably work with the legislature to also try to turn it from a pardon to some sort of shielding, a sealing, or an expungement.”
