Slashdot Mirror
LA County Is Using An Algorithm To Clear 50,000 Pot Convictions Faster (engadget.com)
Los Angeles and San Joaquin counties have teamed up with Code for America to help clear around 54,000 marijuana convictions. "The nonprofit's algorithm will aid prosecutors by automatically evaluating whether a case is eligible for dismissal or resentencing," reports Engadget. From the report: The two counties have been working with Code for America since July to examine marijuana conviction data, as automating the process should help them clear cases much more quickly than through entirely manual processes. There are an estimated 50,000 eligible cases in Los Angeles County and 4,000 in San Joaquin County. Code for America's Clear My Record system also helped San Francisco clear more than 8,000 marijuana convictions.
"As technology advances and the criminal justice system evolves, we as prosecutors must do our part to pursue innovative justice procedures on behalf of our constituents," Los Angeles County DA Jackie Lacey said. "This collaboration will improve people's lives by erasing the mistakes of their past and hopefully lead them on a path to a better future. Helping to clear that path by reducing or dismissing cannabis convictions can result in someone securing a job or benefitting from other programs that may have been unavailable to them in the past." Last year's passage of Assembly Bill 1793 gave district attorneys until July 1st, 2020 to review convictions eligible for downgrading or expungement and act accordingly.
"As technology advances and the criminal justice system evolves, we as prosecutors must do our part to pursue innovative justice procedures on behalf of our constituents," Los Angeles County DA Jackie Lacey said. "This collaboration will improve people's lives by erasing the mistakes of their past and hopefully lead them on a path to a better future. Helping to clear that path by reducing or dismissing cannabis convictions can result in someone securing a job or benefitting from other programs that may have been unavailable to them in the past." Last year's passage of Assembly Bill 1793 gave district attorneys until July 1st, 2020 to review convictions eligible for downgrading or expungement and act accordingly.
But the feds can still fuck you up. You better work on changing the law they are obligated to enforce.
50.000 bums shit on the street as fast as they can
Now let's stop prosecuting people for things that are not crimes. War on drugs, war in alcohol, war on terror*, and all other nonsense wars need to end.
* I'm all for beating down anyone who attacks us but declaring war on terror is like declaring war on preaching. Preachers gonna preach. Terrorists gonna terrorize. You kill one, another pops up somewhere because they think that way is effective for reaching their goals. You can fight specific terror groups but if your goal isn't to kill them all, then you are just feeding their machine and giving them fresh material to talk about when they recruit. Which is what we have been doing. Which is why we have to just stop. We smacked down on Afghanistan for 9/11, we smacked down on Iraq for WMDs (whether we believed that story or not...), we should have declared victory and GTFO immediately. Instead we stayed around and spent trillions on "them" (and a lot of it for the civilian side of our military-industrial complex and financiers). What did we get? Did we win the war on "terror"? Nope. We got almost as many dead American soldiers repairing Afghanistan as dead civilians on 9/11. And California had the three strikes law just to fill prisons so builders and subcontractors can get rich, even though it didn't make sense to have most of those people in prison. We are, as a nation, literally retarded in our governance capacity.
I'd love to see what really is behind the magic 'algorithm' here. Somehow I'm betting it's something like
UPDATE table_name
SET expunge to 'yes'
WHERE conviction_type = 'misdemeanor' and substance_type = 'marijuana'
Yeah man
"This collaboration will improve people's lives by erasing the mistakes of their past and hopefully lead them on a path to a better future."
What a condescending, arrogant statement from DA Jackie Lacey.
The process currently underway, in which old convictions are expunged, is not about the convicted individuals "turning over a new leaf" and deciding to straighten up and fly right. Nor is it about the state suddenly adopting an attitude of forgiveness. It's about the state acknowledging that it made a mistake, and punished people that it should not have.
And the "path to a better future" includes legal weed, for those who want it.
It's actually pretty standard for a judge to look at the whole situation when passing sentence, so them looking at the whole situation for rendering relief makes sense as well.
The sentence is limited to the actual charge and what congress set as the penalty, of course.
I don't read AC A human right
Here LA County, and any other counties that want to save some money on expensive contractors to develop your algorithms:
DELETE FROM convictions WHERE offence like %possesion for personal use%;
Are they accepting pull requests? I have some suggestions.
"This collaboration will improve people's lives by erasing the mistakes of their past and hopefully lead them on a path to a better future." Huh? Since it's now legal, doesn't that mean that the state made the mistake when the convictions were made, and not the pot user?
So.... All of them were bogus, right?
-In space, it is very hard to rig lights.
The only mistakes were made on the part of government and their enforcers, grossly mis-classifying a plant with significant medical potential and destroying people's lives as a consequence. Those who smoke it in large quantity may not be our best and brightest, but they're far less dangerous to everyone around them than those who overindulge in alcohol.
If they sincerely wanted to make things right, not only would they expunge records and compensate the wrongfully abused, they would punish and incarcerate those who insisted on following the status quo instead of standing up to the idiots who mis-classified the plant in the first place and those who continued to support them over the decades.
Boom.
Done.
Is exposing the racist and anti-competitive reasons for banning hemp in the first place.
if Prisoner race is Caucasian then continue consideration, else return false.
Plead guilty to illegal posession of Adderall. Get re-elected.
Perhaps as far as state legal issues are concerned. But on a federal level? Never. That pot bust is going to follow you forever through security and background checks. And as more private services utilize background checks for things like apartment rentals, bank loans, employment applications, you will quietly be turned down. And never know why.
Have gnu, will travel.
The temperance movement died nearly 100 years ago.
Temperance died for four and a half years, from the Volstead repeal (February 1933) to the Marihuana Tax Act (August 1937).
Helping to clear that path by reducing or dismissing cannabis convictions can result in someone securing a job or benefitting from other programs that may have been unavailable to them in the past.
No. Fuck no. It's a filtering system to prevent stupid fucking potheads from succeeding in life, as it should be. Drug use and users are a bigger problem than immigration.