Inside Minnesota's Push to Clear Nearly 98,000 Cannabis Felony Records
Contributing writer Clint Combs reports on the Minnesota Cannabis Expungement Board's outreach push, including a recent intake clinic at the Urban League Wellness Center in North Minneapolis. CEB officials explain how the board, created under the 2023 Adult-Use Cannabis Act, reviews felony-level cannabis cases without requiring residents to hire an attorney, and can vacate convictions outright rather than just sealing records. Advocates including Jon Geffen and Malcolm Wells discuss the scale of eligible cases statewide and the stark racial disparities in Minnesota's cannabis arrest history that make the board's work especially urgent for Black residents.
Three years after Minnesota Democrats used their newly won trifecta to legalize recreational marijuana, the state agency tasked with clearing old felony cannabis convictions says it’s ready to bring its work directly to the communities most affected by it.
The Cannabis Expungement Board (CEB) was created by the 2023 Adult-Use Cannabis Act, part of a broader package of criminal justice reforms that Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party lawmakers pushed through after flipping the legislature that year. Alongside legalization, the DFL trifecta delivered automatic “Clean Slate” expungement for lower-level cannabis misdemeanors, changes to the state’s pardon law, and the CEB itself. The CEB was built specifically to review felony-level cannabis cases that don’t qualify for automatic clearing.
The CEB hosted an expungement relief clinic at the Urban League Wellness Center in North Minneapolis on July 15. CEB Executive Director Jim Rowander said the agency spent its first year and a half largely out of public view, building the systems needed to handle a massive volume of records.
“We’ve done a lot of work over the last year and a half to get it built up and to build a lot of behind-the-scenes functionality,” Rowander said. “There’s a lot of technology issues that had to be resolved. Data management is a big deal in terms of 10s of 1000s of records that we’re trying to review, and we didn’t want to get out into the community and talk about the work when we weren’t prepared to really have some immediate impact by having the foundation built already.”
That foundation is now in place, he said, and the agency wants to make sure Minnesotans understand what it offers and that it isn’t something they need a lawyer to access.
“It is not something that people have to go out and get their own attorneys for, find their own resources, go to court and pursue something,” said Rowander. “We’re tasked with identifying the cases, working them up and getting them in front of the actual board so that relief can be granted.”
The Roots Wellness Center intake event was part of that outreach push: attendees were able to fill out intake applications on site, letting CEB staff and partner attorneys pull up individual criminal records on the spot and flag cases for expungement review.
Heather Faulkner, the CEB’s Chief Communications and External Engagement Officer, said Minnesota’s approach to felony cannabis convictions is unique.
“As far as we’re aware, we are the only state in the country approaching cannabis expungement in this way, so really, particularly on a felony level,” Faulkner said. “The idea was to remove the burden from those who have been impacted by cannabis convictions. Rather than someone having to hire an attorney, go to court, go through a process, our attorneys and paralegals will literally look at every cannabis case and see if it’s eligible”
The board pulls its cases from a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension database of “98,000 cases,” reviewing each one for eligibility before it goes to a five-member board for a final decision.
“Recipients don’t have to do anything,” Faulkner said. “That will just happen on their behalf.”
The five-member expungement board consists of:
- Susan Segal — Chair, Supreme Court designee (also Chief Judge of the Minnesota Court of Appeals)
- David Genrich — Attorney General’s designee
- Safia Khan — Department of Corrections designee
- Amanda Brodhag — Public defender, currently an assistant public defender in Hennepin County
- Rebecca St. George — Public member, Legal and Policy Counsel to the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe
The board’s authority extends beyond sealing records. It can also vacate and dismiss a past marijuana felony conviction outright, a distinction Faulkner called more powerful than expungement alone.
“Once this is delivered by the court and it is off their record, they now can say when they’re applying for housing, no, I don’t have a felony,” said Faulkner. “No, I don’t have this conviction anymore because it’s gone.”
Jon Geffen, Executive Director at The Legal Revolution, provides free legal help on old criminal records. Geffen said 2023 marked a turning point for record-clearing generally in Minnesota, not just for cannabis.
“So 2023 was a watershed moment for a lot of record clearing. It created a clean slate, automatic expungement and automatic cannabis expungement. Then the cannabis expungement board for more serious cannabis-related offenses changed our pardon law,” said Geffen.
He estimated roughly 2 million Minnesota records are eligible for some form of relief statewide, far more than existing advocates and attorneys can handle. He said groups like his hold intake sessions at community events like this one. Geffen also cautioned that legalization alone hasn’t erased the risk of lingering consequences.
“Even with the changes in the law, even with the legalization of cannabis, people with cannabis-related offenses should still be tracking what’s going on to ensure they’re not continually punished for something that is not legal”, said Geffen. “Truthfully, it is making people a lot of money now, because nothing’s happening faster automatically for most people.”
Minnesotans can search their own criminal history through Minnesota Court Records Online (MCRO) to see whether a case has already been expunged, or reach out to the CEB directly if they’re unsure whether they qualify.
That’s precisely the awareness gap the CEB is trying to close with events like the one at Roots Wellness Center. “What we’re hoping to do with events like this, and as we get on into the community, is people are aware that we exist, and they come to us, and we get their case moved up in the queue, so that rather than waiting until we get to their case, they’ll say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a case. Is it eligible?’And if it is eligible, we get it in front of their board, and hopefully get them that relief sooner,” Faulkner said.
Malcolm Wells of the New Justice Project said the stakes are especially high for Black Minnesotans, who bore the brunt of cannabis criminalization long before legalization. He said events like the CEB’s outreach clinics represent “an opportunity for people to get back either into the workplace, find housing without having to deal with any kind of prejudice, but also getting people on a pathway to, you know, working towards the type of life that they want to live.”
The disparity Wells pointed to is well documented. A 2021 ACLU report examining marijuana possession arrest data from 2010 to 2018 found that, nationally, Black people were arrested for marijuana possession at three times the rate of white people, despite comparable usage rates between the two groups. Minnesota’s disparity was substantially worse than the national average: Black Minnesotans were arrested for marijuana possession at five times the rate of white Minnesotans in 2018, with an arrest rate of roughly 537 per 100,000 Black residents compared with about 100 per 100,000 white residents. That marks one of the widest racial gaps of any state in the country that year.
Next Steps
The Cannabis Expungement Board holds public meetings monthly at the Department of Corrections, 1450 Energy Park Drive in St. Paul, which are open to the public and livestreamed. The board’s next scheduled public meeting is August 12, 2026, at 10:00 a.m.