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September 30, 2005
Denied A Voice--FL disenfranchisement of 600,000 people
The U.S. Supreme Court should review two lower court decisions upholding Florida's lifetime disenfranchisement of ex-felons.
A Times Editorial: St. Petersburg Times
Published September 29, 2005
Under questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the next chief justice of the United States described the right to vote as "preservative ... of all the other rights" Americans cherish. "Without access to the ballot box," he said, "people are not in the position to protect any other rights that are important to them."
That was well said. How sincerely Judge John G. Roberts Jr. meant what he said will be tested in one of the first decisions awaiting him at the Supreme Court.
The issue: the shameful fact that Florida denies some 600,000 citizens their right to vote.
The question: whether to review two lower court decisions that upheld Florida's severe, lifetime disenfranchisement of anyone ever convicted of a felony, no matter how old or nonviolent the crime.
Most states suspend felons' voting rights, but Florida is one of only 13 that refuse to restore them automatically on the completion of a prison term, parole or probation. In Florida, it takes approval by the governor and consent of at least two Cabinet members to restore someone's lost civil rights. Without them, ex-felons also are barred from most jobs and professions that the state licenses.
Despite some recent simplification, the clemency process remains needlessly bureaucratic and expensive. Too many offenses, including drug sales, require personal appearance before the clemency board.
The unsurprising results: Most never apply and thousands more wait years for their cases to be called. With a backlog of some 9,000 applications, the board has been clearing barely 400 a year. Parole Commission processing is the holdup; it could be expedited for a fraction of the money that the Legislature spends trying to purge the voter rolls of improperly registered felons who, it is feared, would vote Democratic.
There is debate over whether Florida tightened its constitutional ban on voting by ex-felons as part of a post-Civil War scheme to suppress blacks politically and economically. But there is no denying the present-day discriminatory effect, which is due in large part to racial biases in the law - crack cocaine, for example, is punished more severely than powder - and to the process of selecting who was convicted and who was not. But the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals glossed this over in a decision of stunning sophistry that turned altogether too much on the ban having been re-enacted in the Constitution of 1968.
The flaw in that analysis is that Florida in 1968 had not yet come to terms with its racist past. School desegregation was spotty. Only one black served in the Legislature. The governor was indifferent, at best, to civil rights. There was no political incentive to confront the racial implications of lifetime disenfranchisement.
The Voting Rights Act applies, in any case, to racially discriminatory effect as well as to intent. That was the issue under discussion when Roberts pledged his faith in voting rights. To keep that faith will require him to vote to review the Florida case.
© Copyright 2003 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved
Posted by lois at September 30, 2005 11:57 PM