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This seems plausible, but can you provide any evidence for this claim?
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/culpeper%20and%20johnson%20foundations'%20report%20on%20substance%20abuse%20in%20prison%2C%201998.pdf
"it appears that few inmates could be in prison or jail solely for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Indeed the number is likely so small that it would have little or no impact on overcrowding "
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/behind-bars-ii-substance-abuse-and-americas-prison-population
Of all drug defendants only 2.3 percent—186 people—received sentences for simple possession, and of the 174 for whom sentencing information is known, just 63 actually served time behind bars.
https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2021-guidelines-manual-annotated
Those are the sentencing guidelines.
Here are some illustrative examples you can use the guidelines to doublecheck:
Simple possession of marijuana (say you are caught with a big ole bag of weed) is, at most, a level 4 offense, carrying a sentence of 0-6 months for first time offenders and up to a year for those with a criminal history. Acceptance of responsibility (aka plea deal) would reduce the offense to a level 2. At level 2 anyone without a Class VI criminal history has a recommendation of 0-6 months, and a VI would be 1-7 months.
The next level of possession would be if you had 2-4 kilograms of marijuana. That is a Lvl 10 offense. So 6-12 months for a first time offender, 24-30 for a Class VI criminal. LVL 10s are allowed to be pled down to lvl 8, which would make it 0-6 months for a first time offender. With 8 pounds of weed! That's enough for Havard's whole student body to get high for the weekend!
The fact that only 2.3 percent of all drug defendants received sentences for simple possession in no way supports your claim that those pardoned are "hardened criminals," because that data says nothing about what other crimes those people might or might not have committed.
Of course, there are certainly people who are convicted of both marijuana possession and, say, robbery. But:
those are not the people you are talking about; you explicitly claim that "They are hardened criminals, who also happened to have weed on them and that was the easiest thing to prove, so that is what the AG who wanted to preserve his 100% conviction rate went with." That means you are saying that they were not convicted of additional crimes.
If someone was indeed convicted of both possession and robbery or other serious crime, pardoning their possession offense does not get them out of jail; they still have to serve the sentence for robbery.
Nor do your references to the sentencing guidelines say anything about what other crimes these people did or did not commit.
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in advance, probably not. check the outcomes for the people who've been pardoned, over the next decade or so. If the above is correct, you'll see very bad outcomes relative to the general population.
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