Great Texas Hemp Hiatus combines with COVID to reveal a dirty little secret about pot prosecutions:
Politics is unpredictable and a big part of success stems from one's ability to capitalize on unexpected advantages when they arise. This requires recognizing them in real time as they occur.
Grits submits that, when it comes to marijuana policy, the passage of Texas' law legalizing "hemp" in 2019 was a game changing alteration to the Texas criminal-justice landscape; like inserting a knuckleballer 8th-inning relief pitcher who then strikes out the side. It's still a tight, close game, but suddenly, there's hope.
Readers will recall that Texas 2019 hemp law included a weird, happy accident: Legislators were told in committee that the testing to distinguish hemp wasn't available at most crime labs, but they either (more likely) didn't understand or simply didn't care (which is sort of the same thing in that job: they didn't care enough to inquire). Regardless, when the law took effect, it required prosecutors prove the THC content in marijuana seized was above a certain level. No public labs and few private ones were set up to do it.
Elected prosecutors responded in more or less bipartisan agreement (with a few outliers on both sides): By dismissing charges for low-level pot possession cases, by the thousands. Early on, the Texas Tribune estimated arrest volume for pot possession statewide had dropped by nearly 2/3. In the wake of COVID, it's surely dipped much lower than that.
COVID gave judges across the state an incentive to scrub their dockets with an eye toward releasing everyone who could be released, and pot smokers definitely fall into the low-public-safety-risk category. So judges didn't want to see these cases, prosecutors had means to dismiss them, and if police wanted to keep arresting on these charges, the cases would go nowhere.
https://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2020/07/great-texas-hemp-hiatus-combines-with.html
