Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is scheduled to sign an executive order to issue more than 175,000 pardons for marijuana convictions Monday, the governor’s office said.

The administration is describing the pardons as the largest state pardon to date. The governor’s action regarding cases relating to use of paraphernalia make Maryland the first state to take such action, his office said.

The pardons will forgive low-level marijuana possession charges for an estimated 100,000 people, according to The Washington Post, which first reported on the order Sunday night.

Moore plans to sign the executive order Monday morning in the state Capitol in Annapolis with Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown in attendance.

Recreational cannabis was legalized in Maryland in 2023 after voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2022 with 67% of the vote. Maryland decriminalized possession of personal use amounts of cannabis on Jan. 1, 2023. Now, 24 states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational cannabis.

“The Moore-Miller Administration is committed to promoting social equity and ensuring the fair and equitable administration of justice,” the governor’s office said. “Because the use and possession of cannabis is no longer illegal in the state, Marylanders should not continue to face barriers to housing, employment, or educational opportunities based on convictions for conduct that is no longer illegal.”

Brown, a Democrat, described the pardons as “certainly long overdue as a nation” and “a racial equity issue.”

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Seventeen-year-old Marian Pannalossy cuts a striking figure wherever she goes in Archer’s Post, a small town 200 miles north of Nairobi. She lives alone and is light-skinned in a place where mixed-race people are a rarity and therefore ostracized.

“They call me ‘mzungu maskini,’ or a poor white girl,” she told CNN at her single-room house, a tremor in her voice. “They always say ‘Why are you here? Just look for connections so that you can go to your own people. You don’t belong here. You’re not supposed to be here suffering.’”

Marian believes that her father was a British soldier, but she has never met him. She does not even know his name.

_{Marian Pannalossy pictured at her home. Festo Lang/CNN}

Marian is among a group of mixed-race children whose mothers say they were conceived after rape by British soldiers training in Kenya. Her mother, Lydia Juma, was among hundreds of Kenyan women who filed complaints with the UK military over the years, as documented by Kenya’s human rights body.

“I don’t know why God is punishing me. I don’t understand,” Juma said through tears in a powerful  2011 documentary, ‘The Rape of the Samburu Women.’

Marian, aged four at the time, sat on her lap, sometimes hugging her mother as she wept and recounted how she was violated and the suffering she had endured since.  

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Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin says his committee has uncovered at least three additional trips given to Justice Clarence Thomas by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow as part of the panel’s ethics investigation into the Supreme Court.

Durbin, D-Ill., said Thursday the committee obtained information from Crow that Thomas took three trips, and at least six flights, on Crow’s private jet in 2017, 2019 and 2021. The panel also found evidence of private jet travel during trips to Indonesia and California that Thomas recently disclosed in an amendment to a 2019 financial disclosure report.

The Democratic-led Judiciary panel launched the investigation last year after several reports that Thomas had for years received undisclosed expensive gifts, including international travel, from Crow. The committee has since pushed the Supreme Court to adopt a stronger ethics code as trips by Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito came to light, along with six-figure book deals received by other justices.

The new information “makes it crystal clear that the highest court needs an enforceable code of conduct, because its members continue to choose not to meet the moment,” Durbin said in a statement.

There was no immediate comment from the court on the Senate report. In the past, Thomas has maintained that he is not required to disclose the many trips he and his wife took that were paid for the Texas megadonor because Crow and his wife Kathy are “among our dearest friends,” Thomas said in an April 2023 statement that he was advised by colleagues on the nation’s highest court and others in the federal judiciary that “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”

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