Excuse my title, I tried my best to write it.
Onto the specifics…
Let’s say someone was charged with cultivating marijuana a few months ago and just recently, that county that they were charged in has now passed an ordinance to allow cultivation. Will their charges be dropped?
Facts: that person has already filled out an application and paid all their fees. They followed all the codes and guidelines within that county for cultivation.
It was a crime at the time so it’s up to the prosecuting authority. Unless the ordinance addresses that situation.
Reported for forum change.
Is this even something that can be decided at the county level? I’d expect the relevant laws to be at the state level, and that a county ordnance couldn’t override that. Unless the state law specifically said that it was up to each county, that is.
But to the more general question, I don’t think there’s any principle of law that the government must drop the charges, but it’s a case where they’re certainly likely to.
By way of historical background, it seems that few people convicted of bootlegging were released from prison sentences even after Prohibition ended:
Moderator Action
Moving thread from GQ to IMHO.
It’s sort of the other side of the coin for ex post facto laws. Just like you can’t be convicted of something that isn’t a law at the time the offense occurred, you don’t have a requirement to be released if the law was in effect when you committed it.
This doesn’t mean you could be paroled sooner, but the issue is that you broke the law (even though it’s no longer the law) so the law applies.
The state of Washington has been taking a second look at those convicted of marijuana possession since pot was legalized a few years ago. My brother is one of those that would like to see his record cleared, he was busted for 2 ounces of pot and spent 67 days in jail for it. This was just 5 years ago.
The default is that the criminality of your action done before the law changed is unaffected by the law change.
This is what underpins the ban on retrospective criminalisation, of course, but it works both ways. If charges are pending, they are still pending after the law has been changed, and if you have already been convicted and are doing time, you are still a convict and are still doing time after the law has changed.
As other have said, policy considerations might lead to the charges being dropped or parole granted, as appropriate, but there is nothing inevitable about that. In rare cases there will be a statutory reversal of prior convictions - e.g. expungement of convictions of those convicted of homosexual offences - but this is a separate matter and usually happens years after the law has been changed.
Are you saying the person had done all the paperwork and was then arrested for cultivation? Or that the person was arrested for cultivation and then filled out all the paperwork?