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 was created by the 2023 Adult-Use Cannabis Act, part of a broader package of criminal justice reforms that Democratic-Farmer-Labor 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 board itself, which reviews felony-level cases that don’t qualify for automatic clearing.
The board hosted an expungement relief clinic at the Urban League in North Minneapolis on July 15, in partnership with Roots Wellness Center. Executive Director Jim Rowader 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,” Rowader said. “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.”
That foundation is now in place, he said, and the agency wants Minnesotans to understand what it offers, and that it isn’t something they need a lawyer to access. “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,” Rowader said.
The event let attendees fill out intake applications on site, with CEB staff and partner attorneys pulling up individual criminal records on the spot to flag cases for review.
Heather Faulkner, the board’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, particularly on a felony level,” Faulkner said. “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 board consists of Susan Segal, chair and Supreme Court designee, who also serves as chief judge of the Minnesota Court of Appeals; David Genrich, the attorney general’s designee; Safia Khan, the Department of Corrections’ designee; Amanda Brodhag, an assistant public defender in Hennepin County; and Rebecca St. George, assistant commissioner for the Child Safety and Permanency Administration at the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families.
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,” she said. “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. He said 2023 marked a turning point for record-clearing generally in Minnesota, not just for cannabis. “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,” Geffen said.
He estimated roughly 2 million Minnesota records are eligible for some form of relief statewide, far more than existing advocates and attorneys can handle. Geffen also cautioned that legalization alone hasn’t erased the risk of lingering consequences. “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,” he said. “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 to see whether a case has already been expunged, or reach out to the board directly if unsure whether they qualify. Closing that awareness gap is the point of events like the one at the Urban League, Faulkner said: “People are aware that we exist, and they come to us, and we get their case moved up in the queue.”
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 the board’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 … the type of life that they want to live.”
The disparity Wells pointed to is well documented. A 2020 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 at five times the rate of white Minnesotans in 2018, one of the widest racial gaps of any state that year.
The board holds public meetings monthly at the Department of Corrections, 1450 Energy Park Drive in St. Paul, open to the public and livestreamed. Its next scheduled meeting is Aug. 12 at 10 a.m.
Clint Combs is a contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. He welcomes reader responses at combs0284@gmail.com.