Around six months after the cannabis legalization law came into force, the judiciary has processed almost all of the “old cases”. The aim was to identify those procedures in which prison sentences or fines for cannabis offenses that are no longer punishable under the new law can be partially waived. Since April 1st of this year, adults over the age of 18 have been allowed to carry up to 25 grams of dried cannabis with them, among other things.
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“Of the 21,000 cases that we checked, there were 494 in which a sentence had already been remitted by law,” said Justice State Secretary Jens Diener (SPD) to the German Press Agency. These were “far, far predominantly” fines. According to Diener, this is “not surprising” because impunity concerns an area “in which under normal circumstances one would not have received a prison sentence directly”.
Penalties were redetermined
However, there are also 334 proceedings in which a new sentence is required. This is due to the fact that total penalties are imposed for multiple offenses. In other words, individual penalties are set for each crime, which in the end would not be added to a total penalty, but would mean a “moderate increase” in the highest penalty. However, if a penalty is no longer applicable because a conviction for cannabis is no longer legal, the penalty must now be correspondingly lower. However, as is the case vice versa, it is not automatically deducted, but must be re-determined by the court.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, two adults were released from prison because the sentence was shortened. A “single-digit number of adults” were not punished, but they would have had to remain in custody to enforce other punishments.
However, a few months after the cannabis law came into force, the State Secretary drew a positive conclusion: “Although it was so short-term, the bottom line is that we have gotten the problem under control quite well.” The reason for this was that people thought about implementation very early – at the end of last year. “We had to do some preparatory work in anticipation of a law that we didn’t know exactly what it would look like in detail.” The Saarbrücken public prosecutor’s office developed a concept early on and thus laid the foundation for the consistent processing of the cases.
A public prosecutor was released for several months to check the files “manually”. However, despite the additional burden on her colleagues who had to take over other procedures from her, this was worth it. Diener: “If we had waited until the law was passed and only started thinking about it when the law was passed, then we wouldn’t have finished reviewing it yet.”
Around six months after the cannabis legalization law came into force, the judiciary has processed almost all of the “old cases”. The aim was to identify those procedures in which prison sentences or fines for cannabis offenses that are no longer punishable under the new law can be partially waived. Since April 1st of this year, adults over the age of 18 have been allowed to carry up to 25 grams of dried cannabis with them, among other things.
“Of the 21,000 cases that we checked, there were 494 in which a sentence had already been remitted by law,” said Justice State Secretary Jens Diener (SPD) to the German Press Agency. These were “far, far predominantly” fines. According to Diener, this is “not surprising” because impunity concerns an area “in which under normal circumstances one would not have received a prison sentence directly”.
