In 2019, Cincinnati city officials voted to expunge minor, nonviolent cannabis offenses. The measure established a full time position to identify and contact people of their expungement eligibility. Approximately 14,000 cases are eligible for record expungement. This means any previous records can become sealed and removed from any background checks made. 

“This is a real silver bullet that allows somebody who had a small amount of marijuana be brought right back into society,” said Vice Mayor and City Councilmember Chris Smitherman. “This is one of the most effective ways that we’re going to be able to impact citizens so that they can get a job by the expungement, they can apply for student loans by way of getting the expungement.

“We’re asking the city solicitor to go throughout dockets and be proactive about looking at cases and then proactively making phone calls. And at the same time we’re going to have to solicit help from our partners,” Smitherman concluded.

Eligible individuals include those convicted of possessing less than 100 grams, or 3 ounces, of cannabis in nonviolent offenses. Anyone with a charge involving a child, a sex charge, or a first or second degree felony will never be eligible for a record expungement under city law.

Delay

Chris Jones is the director of the Appellate Division for the Hamilton County Public Defenders. According to her, “as far as I know, they (city officials) still haven’t done anything. I haven’t seen any movement.”

The 14,000 eligible records haven’t had any progress made towards becoming sealed. And unfortunately, not many citizens know their records are eligible. “I just want them to get this program started, I would love it, and if they can’t do it, just identify the people and send them to us,” Jones said.

Jones now leads Fresh Start Expungement Clinic. This clinic operates twice a month and helps those eligible for expungement to file the correct paperwork requests. Because of the high demand, each clinic session can only accept the first 50 people who arrive.

However, what was expected to be a great success hasn’t necessarily been open long enough to be considered one. Shortly after the clinic started offering expungement help, the pandemic broke out. Since then, each clinic has unfortunately closed for public safety. However, Jones remains optimistic that the clinic can begin again in September 2021. Then it can continue to offer the necessary help to the Cincinnati public. 

City Partnership

According to a statement from city officials, the “city administration and the Solicitor’s Office have worked with various partners to support expungements of qualifying offenses … While this work was delayed during the pandemic and closure of courts, we have since resumed work with our partners to identify eligible cases and individuals, and process improvements.”

Sean Vicente is the director of the Municipal Division at the Hamilton County Public Defender’s Office. They operate the Fresh Start Expungement Clinic. He spoke about police counter efforts to the city’s expungement measure:

“The city did reach out to us twice in 2020. And as I said before, at the time, the city police department is still arresting folks for marijuana possession,” he said. “And so we told the city that we would not — definitively not — partner with them, because they were not acting in good faith. They were, one, still arresting folks for marijuana; and two, sometimes opposing those marijuana expungements — those very expungements — in court on a daily basis.”

Some prosecutors use low level issues, like overdue traffic tickets, as a reason not to grant cannabis expungement requests. The CPD and city officials say people should only receive warnings for possessing less than three ounces of cannabis. However, Vicente says even cannabis warnings have issues:

“My guess is that the police department wanted to keep using the fact that marijuana is still an arrestable offense in the state of Ohio to harass certain people — I’ll say brown and Black people — in certain neighborhoods and to continue to, basically, justify pretextual stops,” Vicente continued. “They use that to then search someone’s car, they use that to pump somebody for information. Those sort of tactics eventually led us to what happened last summer across the entire nation.”

Future

It seems Cincinnati city officials are delaying expungement efforts. Plus, the Fresh Start Expungement Clinic is still not fully operational in the pandemic. So expungement may still be a ways away for the city. Nevertheless, there are individuals and organizations working to change the lives of thousands of Cincinnati residents.

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