Michigan Court: Blanket Marijuana Probation Bans Are Illegal

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Michigan's Supreme Court just told trial judges they can't treat federal marijuana prohibition as a rubber stamp for probation conditions. On July 6, 2026, all seven justices signed onto a unanimous ruling in People v. Hess, closing out a case that started with a shoplifting charge at a Meijer store and ended up rewriting how probation works for the roughly two million Michigan adults who can legally buy, possess, and consume marijuana under state law.

The defendant, Danielle Hess, was barred from using marijuana as a condition of her probation for retail fraud -- a standard, boilerplate term that courts across the state have attached to sentences for years, regardless of what the Michigan Regulation and Taxation of Marihuana Act actually legalized back in 2018. The Court's answer was blunt: judges can no longer impose that ban automatically, just because marijuana remains illegal under federal law. That doesn't mean probation officers have lost all authority to restrict marijuana use -- it means they need an actual reason tied to the individual case, not a form paragraph.

How a Meijer Shoplifting Case Became a Cannabis Rights Test

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The facts here are almost mundane, which is part of what makes the ruling notable -- this wasn't a cannabis business dispute or a licensing fight, it was a routine retail theft case that happened to collide with drug policy. Danielle Hess pleaded guilty to retail fraud after stealing clothing from a Meijer store, and in August 2021 a Montcalm County district court sentenced her to one year of probation. Like thousands of Michigan probationers before her, she was handed a standard set of conditions: no marijuana use, no marijuana possession, and mandatory drug testing to enforce it.

Hess tested positive for marijuana twice during 2022, and each positive test triggered a separate probation violation. Rather than simply accept the second violation, she pushed back -- asking the district court to amend her probation terms and to dismiss both violations on the grounds that MRTMA had already made her marijuana use legal under state law. It was a reasonable argument on paper, given that Michigan voters approved recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older four years before Hess was ever sentenced.

The district court wasn't persuaded, and neither was the Michigan Court of Appeals when Hess took the fight there. Both sided with prosecutors, treating the probation condition as valid because marijuana remains a Schedule I substance under the federal Controlled Substances Act -- meaning courts could restrict it regardless of what state law said. That set up the exact question the Michigan Supreme Court agreed to take on: does federal illegality automatically override a state-legal activity when it comes to probation conditions, or does Michigan's own constitutional and statutory framework for marijuana carry more weight than that?

What the Supreme Court Actually Decided

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Justice Elizabeth Welch wrote the opinion, and every one of her colleagues joined it -- a 7-0 result that leaves no dissent to parse and no split reasoning to argue over later. The Court didn't need to invent a new legal framework to get there; it leaned heavily on its own 2014 decision in Ter Beek v. City of Wyoming, which held that the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act preempted a local ordinance banning medical marijuana use, even though marijuana remained illegal under federal law. That case established a principle that has quietly underpinned a lot of Michigan cannabis litigation since: state legalization doesn't need federal law's blessing to have legal force within Michigan's own courts.

Welch's opinion extends that same logic from the MMMA to MRTMA. If federal illegality wasn't enough to let a city ban medical marijuana use in 2014, it isn't enough to let a court impose a blanket probation ban on recreational marijuana use in 2026. As Welch put it in the opinion, courts may not prohibit MRTMA-compliant marijuana use as a condition of probation solely because that use violates federal law. That single sentence is doing most of the work in this ruling -- it doesn't ban marijuana-related probation conditions outright, it just knocks out the one justification prosecutors had been relying on as an automatic trump card.

Practically, the Court remanded the case with specific instructions: Hess's probation terms need to be changed to reflect that her marijuana use, on its own, isn't a violation; her first probation violation gets vacated; and her second violation gets dismissed entirely. For Hess personally, that closes out a legal fight that spanned two positive drug tests and roughly four years of litigation over what should have been a straightforward compliance question.

What This Ruling Does Not Change

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It's worth being precise about what the Court didn't do here, because this ruling has already generated some overreading. The justices struck down blanket, automatic bans on MRTMA-compliant marijuana use as a standard probation condition -- they did not say judges are powerless to restrict marijuana use during probation under any circumstances. The opinion specifically leaves open whether a judge can impose an individually tailored restriction tied to a defendant's rehabilitation needs, treatment plan, or specific offense history, since the Court of Appeals never actually reached that narrower question in Hess's case. Expect that gap to be the subject of the next round of litigation.

The ruling also has zero bearing on federal probation or supervised release. If someone is on federal probation, marijuana remains banned as a condition regardless of what Michigan voters approved or what the state Supreme Court says -- federal courts answer to federal law, and this decision doesn't touch that jurisdiction at all.

There was also a practical wrinkle raised during oral arguments on March 11, 2026, when Chief Justice Cavanagh pressed attorneys on how a ruling like this might disrupt Michigan's drug courts, which often rely on strict sobriety requirements, including for marijuana, as part of their treatment model. The state has since addressed that concern through a statutory exception preserving drug courts' ability to impose those restrictions, which took some of the pressure off the justices to carve out that exception themselves in the opinion. Montcalm County Prosecutor Thomas Ginster argued the case on behalf of the state, defending the blanket-ban approach that ultimately didn't survive review.

Reaction From Advocates and What It Means for Michiganders on Probation

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Advocacy groups read this as a straightforward vindication of the 2018 vote. Ewurama Appiagyei-Dankah, a legal fellow with the ACLU of Michigan, called the ruling a recognition that MRTMA applies to everyone it was written to cover -- including people caught up in the criminal justice system. Her point, in essence, was that probation status doesn't create a second class of Michigan resident excluded from a law voters approved statewide; people on probation are beneficiaries of MRTMA just like anyone else in the state.

Zoom out and Hess fits a pattern that's been building in Michigan case law since Ter Beek: state courts have consistently declined to let federal marijuana prohibition function as an automatic override of state-legal marijuana activity, even when federal supremacy arguments get raised. That's not true in every state, and it's not guaranteed to stay true in Michigan forever, but it's now been tested twice at the state Supreme Court level with the same outcome both times.

For anyone currently on probation in Michigan with a marijuana-related condition sitting in their file, this ruling gives real grounds to petition for amended terms -- particularly if that condition was imposed as boilerplate rather than tied to any specific treatment need. That's a conversation to have with a defense attorney, not something to act on unilaterally, since courts still retain discretion to justify individualized restrictions.

Readers outside Michigan should treat this as a Michigan-specific development rather than a national trend. Probation law, drug testing requirements, and how courts treat state-legal marijuana use vary enormously by state, and even within states that have legalized recreational use, courts haven't uniformly reached the same conclusion the Michigan Supreme Court did here. Check local law and talk to an attorney before assuming a similar protection applies where you live.

What Hess actually closes off is narrower than the headlines suggest, but it's still meaningful: prosecutors in Michigan can no longer point to federal illegality as an automatic, standalone justification for banning marijuana use during probation. That single move eliminates a lot of boilerplate language that's been sitting in probation orders across the state for years, largely unquestioned because nobody had forced a court to actually defend it.

It's not a blank check, though. Judges still have room to impose marijuana restrictions where they can tie them to something specific -- a treatment plan, a documented substance abuse history, the goals of a drug court program. The likely near-term effect is that Michigan trial courts start writing more individualized probation conditions instead of reaching for the same template language for every defendant, and that shift will probably generate its own wave of litigation as defense attorneys test exactly how much justification a judge needs to make a marijuana restriction stick.

Step back further and the case is really a reminder that probation law, drug courts, and sentencing guidelines have been slow to catch up to a legalization landscape that Michigan voters settled back in 2018. Eight years is a long time for state courts to still be litigating whether a legal adult activity can be banned by default in a probation order, and Hess suggests the answer -- at least in Michigan -- has finally landed on no.