Credit: (NJ Spotlight News)On an icy Saturday morning, some 50 people gathered in an upstairs event room at East Orange Public Library. Some kept to themselves and picked up free coffee and iced donuts, while others wondered aloud how the next few months would unfold for them.
Today, they weren’t checking out books. They were receiving free legal assistance to expunge marijuana possession and other charges from their records.
Some may question why New Jerseyans still need help with expungements, since more than 362,000 low-level marijuana and hashish cases were automatically expunged, or cleared from records, after the state’s decriminalization laws took effect July 1. However, the process left out residents with other charges on their records, like child endangerment. Those residents could need lawyers to help file petitions and provide the legal pushback if courts were hesitant to clear their client’s names. But hiring a lawyer isn’t something that everyone can afford.
East Orange resident and Roll Up Life CEO Tiyahnn Bryant decided to take matters into his own hands by creating Saturday’s “Community Expungement Series” at the library. Bryant approached East Orange Mayor Ted Green in October to help host the program, since Green has been helping residents through the expungement process for 15 years. Eventually, two New Jersey-based cannabis companies, Apothecarium Dispensary and Green Thumb Dispensaries, would sign on to Bryant’s event to sponsor legal aid for New Jerseyans with trickier records.
“For far too long, our cities have been affected with the War on Drugs,” Bryant said in front of the crowd of participants.
“There’s a friend of my mom’s in here – (we have to) think of it like that. We have to take care of our own,” he said. Slow nods rippled through the crowd inside a library event room, making it evident that the troubles extended far beyond the building’s walls.
Helping his neighbors
Bryant later said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News that he felt Black and brown people were left out of the state’s automatic expungements, so he wanted to help his neighbors clear their records. In New Jersey, Black residents are 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than their white counterparts, according to a 2020 ACLU-NJ report. And because Black New Jerseyans are incarcerated at a rate of 12 times higher than white New Jerseyans, they’re disproportionately more involved with the criminal justice system and could have more charges on their records.
And having charges on a person’s record can have life-altering implication, which is another reason why Bryant created the expungement event, he said. It can bar someone from housing, federal student aid and jobs — which ironically includes working for cannabis distribution companies.
Bryant said that about 138 people signed up for the event, and 50 were selected to participate. Some of those who signed up may have had certain charges, like perjury, robbery or sexual assault, which made them ineligible for expungement.
Saturday’s event was Phase One, where participants meet the lawyers and event sponsors and learned about how expungement works, details that include the amount of time that needs to pass without reoffending before someone can request their records to be cleared. After the event, in Phase Two, participants should be able to set up consultations with lawyers and file their petitions. It might take some time for a petition to be reviewed so the participants can receive their judicial order, which is a paper that states their record has been cleared. Phase Three could be needed, if someone has more complicated charges and lawyers need to argue with resistant courts.
Crime not always a choice
It was clear throughout the event that all of the companies and lawyers involved wanted to show empathy. Roll Up Life Co-Founder Precious Osagie-Erese made it clear that no one’s faces would be shown in their event recording, leading to more thankful nods in the crowd. First assistant corporation counsel for East Orange Malee Wing also told participants that “crime is not always an option for some people. Sometimes people do things because they need to survive.”
“Mhmm, that’s right,” one participant affirmed.
Wing, who worked with Green to file expungements for other New Jerseyans in the past, said later in an interview that“you have people who were 18, 19 years old who were selling $10 bags of marijuana to get food money or rent money because they may have had a parent who was drug addicted and they had siblings to take care of … and that was the only job or the only thing that they could do to survive.”
And what further exacerbated the drug war’s toll on Black New Jerseyans was the disparity in sentencing and convictions, Wing said. Someone could have the same offense in Ocean County, which is almost 93% white, and someone else in Essex County, which is nearly 42% Black, “and the treatment of that offense is completely different,” she said.
Prison not parents
“I’m sure that everybody has seen college kids get caught with marijuana and get just a slap on the wrist or just get taken home to their parents,” she said. “Those things don’t happen in urban cities. Kids don’t get taken home when they do things wrong. They get put in prison.”
Wing said legal help is “always needed” when expunging marijuana charges because courts will push back on requests to clear records. She said she helped a man with his expungement, who was arrested for marijuana possession at 19 years old. It was his first offense and he served two years. Twenty-five years later, he never reoffended – but Superior Court in Passaic County objected to expunging his record.
“So we had to follow a full-on motion to go back to court to try to get it done. And it was ultimately expunged, but can you imagine if that person had to pay for lawyers and things like that … He never would have got that done,” she said.
One of the attorneys offering pro-bono services in the community expungement program, Mike Hoffman, said that the process is “much, much simpler” and less expensive now. People once had to pay a $75 fee to file an expungement petition. And then all courts and law enforcement bodies involved in the charge needed to be notified via certified mail, which Wing said could easily be $13 per piece of mail, sent to upwards of 11 recipients. And then someone would need to pay another $52 if they wanted their fingerprints scanned to check for any other charges not filed under their legal name.
It’s now free to petition, and everything is electronic, but Hoffman said he’s already experiencing pushback from the courts for some of the program’s participants.
Roll Up Life co-founder Osagie-Erese said that she and Bryant are grateful for the assistance they’ve received for the program to navigate the court system’s complexities and hopes that more expungements mean they can get more Black and brown New Jerseyans into the “lucrative” cannabis industry. They’re also offering five scholarships to NJ Cannabis Certified, a program to certify participants to work in the cannabis industry.
Byrant’s and Osagie-Erese’s guiding principles are restoring their community and creating racial equity in the cannabis industry — and leaving the door wide open for other Black and brown New Jerseyans to join them.
“Completely open, wide open! Grab my hand,” Osagie-Erese said.
