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U.S. District Judge Mark Walker has ruled that Florida's system for restoration of voting and other civil rights to convicted felons is unconstitutional. Florida is likely to appeal the ruling:
A federal judge has declared unconstitutional Florida's procedure for restoring voting rights to felons who have served their time. In a strongly worded ruling seen as a rebuke of Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who is the lead defendant in the case, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker said the disenfranchisement of felons who have served their time is "nonsensical" and a violation of the First and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Although nearly every state bars incarcerated criminals from voting, only Florida and three others — Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia — do not automatically restore voting rights at the completion of a criminal sentence.
Walker, an Obama administration appointee, decried the state's requirement that someone with a felony conviction must "kowtow" to a partisan panel, the Office of Executive Clemency, "over which Florida's governor has absolute veto authority" to regain their right to vote. "[Elected], partisan officials have extraordinary authority to grant or withhold the right to vote from hundreds of thousands of people without any constraints, guidelines, or standards," the judge said. [...] The judge cited one clemency hearing where Scott announced the panel "can do whatever we want" as evidence of its arbitrary nature.
Last month, Floridians for a Fair Democracy reached the signature threshold needed to get a constitutional amendment onto the 2018 ballot that would end the disenfranchisement of 1.5 million Floridians with past felony convictions.
Also at the Miami Herald and Orlando Sentinel:
Walker blasted Florida's process at length, writing that it makes felons "kowtow" to a board that can accept or deny their application for any reason. "A person convicted of a crime may have long ago exited the prison cell and completed probation. Her voting rights, however, remain locked in a dark crypt," Walker wrote. "Only the state has the key — but the state has swallowed it. Only when the state has digested and passed that key in the unforeseeable future, maybe in five years, maybe in 50, ... does the state, in an 'act of mercy' unlock the former felon's voting rights from its hiding place."
(Score: -1, Troll) by Gaaark on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:39AM (10 children)
Anyone who commits a crime and gets caught because THEY DON'T WEAR A BELT and their pants are falling down around their ankles deserves to have to ask to get back the right to vote, I think.
Them and anyone who says "He mah babby-daddy"....fuckingStupidPeople!!!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @09:15AM (9 children)
THEY DON'T WEAR A BELT and their pants are falling down
Do you have any idea how that fashion trend got started?
Hint 1: They don't let you have a belt in prison.
Hint 2: USA has 2.3 million people in its correctional systems.
That's more than any other country including China and India which have over 4 times USA's population.
With 5 percent of the global population, USA has 25 percent of the world's prison inmates.
(Do you believe that USAians are simply more criminal by nature?)
Hint 3: 1 in 3 Black men in the USA will do time in prison.[1]
N.B. In Maryland, the prison population is 72 percent Black.
This is grossly disproportionate to racial demographics AKA "selective enforcement".
[1] ...after which e.g. voting rights will be blocked and employment opportunities will be even more limited than before being imprisoned.
So, if you start out with a 66 percent chance that you won't be railroaded into prison, why even try to make something of yourself?
...and why not make a political statement with the way you wear your clothing?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Sunday February 04 2018, @01:01PM (4 children)
...I can think of several reasons, not the least important of which is that doing these things is much more likely to move you into that 33%.
If you adhere to culture that is abrasive, or perceived as abrasive, to those in power, you will be the nail that sticks up. And as the saying goes, the nail that sticks up is the one most likely to be hammed down.
How you are treated absolutely should not be about skin color. But I can't say the same about abrasive cultural modes you choose to embrace. Some of those seem entirely appropriate as triggers for treating you this way or that way. It goes both ways: you walk into my office seeking a job and you're dressed well, I'm not concerned with it, and otherwise will at least hope that you will continue the practice. OTOH, you walk into my office dressed like you don't care if I give you a job or not, you had better believe I will carefully take that into consideration, and not in a way that will accrue to your benefit.
It's not just how you dress or if you speak the language reasonably well. Other things, such as being well supplied with tattoos, piercings, etc. matter too. All of these things are visible manifestations of your (lack of) good judgement. That has to figure in when trying to evaluate how you're going to fit in, or not. Jobs, personal relationships, etc.
To put it another way, if you plug yourself into a highly obvious, easily identified subculture, you can reasonably expect that specific subculture to accept you, and others, not so much. So if your chosen subculture doesn't offer desirable employment and/or whatever other good things in life you want, perhaps you should rethink your choice(s.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:34PM (1 child)
This is why I own my own business: To avoid dealing with shallow corporate rules. Why not just evaluate the candidate's skills rather than relying on shallow dress codes? Maybe they don't have the same sense of style that typical business environments ask of them. Maybe they don't like being mindless slaves who dress the way others want them to. Maybe they don't care about such aesthetics at all. In any case, none of it means they don't have the comprehension to do the job properly. None of it even so much as indicates such a thing. Plenty of con men and liars in general are able and willing to meet or exceed these dress codes, so good luck.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Sunday February 04 2018, @08:44PM
Because how the person dresses is a highly visible flag of the person's mindset. You walk in wearing a Hell's Angel vest, we're going to take a signal from that. Likewise if you dress like a ghetto thug, or you smell really bad, or your hair is a mass of grease and knots.
And there's no "rather", it's "and": of course we evaluate the candidate's skills.
There's an entire raft of things that are unfairly applied in most operation's candidate testing that should not be: many of them have to do with history, which is past and most likely should be ignored in favor of an in-the-present skills evaluation; others are age, sex, family headcount, that sort of thing.
Yet when you walk into an interview, how your dress, your manners, your level of cooperation all present – all of this is you as you are now and that's where we start. Do we want this person representing the face of the business? Will other people be able to stand being next to this person all day? Will business partners be put off by this person?
These things all have real-life consequences, potentially financial ones, and so mistakes made here can impact everyone who works for the business. If an account or a relationship may be lost or damaged because we've got someone toxic on staff, that's going to matter. Not taking it into account is simply irresponsible to everyone else affected by the business.
If your personal "thing" is so important to you – or everyone else's is so unimportant to you – then you need to be prepared to go it on your own, because your "thing" has made you less important to them as well. Society is very much synonymous with interaction, the smoother the better. And business exists grounded in the smooth operation of society. If you intentionally throw sand in the gears, people will take cues from that, and to expect otherwise is either blind or stupid.
Then they're going to negatively affect relations with other businesses on that same level if they're publicly exposed so it matters. Can you seriously not understand that?
As an employee, your whole thing is to do what others expect you to do. If you can't even manage that in an interview, why would it make any sense at all to expect that you would in the office, the lab, the field?
Then they are going to be a problem unless they can be hidden off in a closet somewhere. Pretending there is no social aspect to a business in the lab, the office, the field is just disingenuous nonsense. If you look/smell/sound/act like a problem, the business takes a hit or hits, and so do your interactions within it.
That's a strawman. There is no distinction to be made by dress for "con men and liars", nor did I say there was one. But that doesn't mean there aren't other consequential distinctions to be made – and in fact, there are.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Sunday February 04 2018, @06:00PM (1 child)
There's truth in that. Such subcultures include "asshole corporate shill" and "bankster thief". As Woodie Guthrie sang, "some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen." It may just be me, but I find the former more honorable (though scarier) than the latter. Of course if you want to be a monkey, you have to ape the higher-status ones.
It's interesting that among my younger (that is to say, born in the 1960s or later) relatives and acquaintances, piercings and tattoos have become the norm. These are mostly white, middle-class college grads. Me, I'm an old fart, I think that unless you can get proper coherent yazuka style tats, they just make you look like a bulletin board with random cartoons thumbtacked. But at least they don't make you look like a bankster defrauding people.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday February 04 2018, @08:52PM
Yes. And racists, jingoists, violent radicals, and so on.
The smart ones hide well. The others don't, and that makes them somewhat easier to avoid. And they should be avoided whenever possible. So paying attention to easily visible and currently present flags carried in by the individual to the interview process is one way to clear the decks of the obvious ones.
When someone interviews with me, they start fresh. But that doesn't mean they can't start badly.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday February 04 2018, @01:14PM
Yes I know the origins, but stupid does stupid.... A smart criminal (black, yellow, Neapolitan coloured, doesn't matter) plans an op and MINIMALLY WEARS A BELT!
If your going to rob a place, you don't show them your ID first or yell your name and address, so why would you not temporarily put on a belt? Because 'political statement'?!?
Stupid does stupid, smart doesn't get caught.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by wisnoskij on Sunday February 04 2018, @09:22PM (2 children)
America is simply the only developed nation with such a high number of blacks. The crime rate of blacks in america falls right in the middle of other nations like Nigeria and Ethiopia. The crime rate of whites in america falls right in the middle of Norway and Sweden pre-refugees. We find that internationally, you can predict a group's crime rate very accurately with nothing but a racial makeup. Their is no evidence that this can be changed significantly taken as a whole statistically. Social economic status can have an effect, as well as a hundred other things, but these other variable show little to no correlation taken singularly.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday February 05 2018, @02:39AM
Hard stats:
http://www.amren.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/2005-Color-of-Crime-Report.pdf [amren.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @03:50AM
Clearly, you don't comprehend the concept of selective enforcement.
When USA.gov "outlawed" slavery via the 13th Amendment, they left in a giant loophole:
Slavery in prisons was specifically excluded.
So, now the White Ownership Class, which had previously owned these humans, had to figure out a way to get their labor again at a cost below the market value of White workers and even below the labor rate of free Black men.
That's when "vagrancy" became a thing.
You're Black and you can't prove that you have an employer and you don't have $20 on you?
You are a vagrant. That's a crime.
You will now be tried (by a White judge), convicted (for sure), and imprisoned.
The state, via the warden of the prison, will now contract out your labor to the White Ownership Class and you get none of the money.
Pretty neat system, huh?
Some called it "Jim Crow".
Author Douglas A. Blackmon calls it Slavery by Another Name. [google.com]
You're Black and you're in the wrong part of town after dark?
That's a crime.
Rinse and repeat for every racist thing you can think of and you see why the Black "crime rate" is high.
.
Move on to modern day Ferguson, Missouri.
A Black teen is walking somewhere other than on the side of the road.
If that was a White kid, the cop would write him a ticket and move on, or scold him and move on--or, most likely, just ignore the "crime".
Instead, the cop uses his police-issue SUV as a weapon and assaults the Black teen with it.
The cop shoots at the Black teen--mostly at the teen's back--emptying his 10-round magazine and finally killing his victim for jaywalking.
Seeing yet why the Black "crime rate" is so high in USA?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]