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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 04 2018, @03:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the process-improvements dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @03:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @03:50AM (#633128)

    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]

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