Every punishment should fit the crime; we can all agree on that! But what happens when the punishment goes far beyond serving justice and becomes nothing more than cruel and unusual punishment, as in my son’s case?

I will begin by telling you about my son William, who is currently serving a “natural life sentence.” A natural life sentence means just what it implies: “You will stay in prison until you are no longer alive.”

So, you might be wondering, did my son commit murder?  Thank God, NO! Did his crime involve physical harm to anyone? Again, thank God, NO. There was no physical harm whatsoever. My son’s crime was armed robbery, which in and of itself does not carry a natural life sentence. So, how is it that with this being a non-fatal, no-physical-harm crime did he receive a life sentence? The answer is Florida’s PRR law, which stands for Prisoner Releasee Reoffender. This law is a mandatory minimum sentencing guideline that takes all discretion away from judges.

Under the PRR guidelines, there is no choice but to give the maximum sentence allowed for the crime committed, which for armed robbery is a natural life sentence. Now, having said this, I want to make it perfectly clear that I have never said that my son should not pay his debt to society. It would be absurd for me to believe that or say such a thing. A crime was committed and there must be consequences.  I do support all fair and just punishments. However, whether my son or yours, a life sentence cannot be justified for a non-fatal, no-physical-harm crime. I believe this and every person that has ever heard my son’s story agrees as well.

Under mandatory minimum sentencing, a judge has no discretion and cannot take into consideration the circumstances of each crime. My son’s actions were driven by his drug addiction at the time, and, even then, he was not violent. Local law enforcement dubbed him the “gentleman robber” because he said “please” and “thank you” and gave his victim’s wallet back. However, this could not be taken into consideration, nor the fact that no physical harm was inflicted, because he was being sentenced as a reoffender under the PRR guidelines.

Why am I telling you this? Because it is past time to change these unjust sentencing laws. My son was only 21 when he received his life sentence. He has spent his entire adult life in prison and will be 43 this year. My son is not the same troubled, drug-addicted young man who was given a life sentence in 1997. He is a good man with a good heart and deserves the chance to become the man God intended for him to be before substance abuse overtook his life. My son will die in prison if these mandatory minimum life sentences are not changed.

Today, we hear a lot of discussions on criminal justice reform, and I am very thankful for this. In March, I joined 250 Floridians in Tallahassee to try to convince our state legislators that it is past time for common sense reform. However, the dialogue must go beyond only adjusting the punishments for crimes considered non-violent and low-level drug offenses. Please do not let my son and all the other sons, daughters, parents and loved ones who have received unjust life sentences under the Prisoner Releasee Reoffender law once again fall between the cracks of justice.  

Help me to change these laws that have incarcerated far too many for far too long. My son has supportive family members who love and miss him more than words could ever say. It is time to let all punishments fit the crime… It is overtime!

Audrey Hudgins is the Founder of Operation Overtime and an advocate and mother of a son who is directly impacted by the justice system. 

This post was also published in South Florida Sun Sentinel.

The 2019 Florida legislative session ended May 4 — and not a moment too soon. Floridians’ civil rights and civil liberties would be better off if the session had ended weeks earlier.

In just 61 days, the Florida Legislature managed the monumental feat of unraveling and undermining decades of progress. The Legislature is deeply divided and there were many who stood up for the freedoms guaranteed to all of us by the U.S. Constitution, but this year’s session was characterized by unrelenting and cynical attacks on the values we share.

The most egregious example came when the Legislature dramatically restricted Amendment 4, the landmark constitutional amendment approved by voters just last year.

In 1868, the Florida Constitution was changed for unambiguously racist reasons to permanently deny the right to vote to individuals with felony convictions. In 2018, 65 percent of Florida voters supported second chances and passed the amendment to restore voting rights to 1.4 million friends, family and neighbors. In May 2019, the Florida Legislature decided that it preferred living in 1868.

No legislative action was necessary at all. The amendment was self-executing and, for five months, it has been. Amendment 4 went into effect Jan. 8, and since then tens of thousands of Floridians have registered to vote under it without issues or legislative action. The Legislature went out of its way to insert itself into the issue, one which it had ignored for the preceding two decades. It injected itself solely to undo decades of hard work by everyday Floridians who pushed for change. And then it adopted a bill that could deny hundreds of thousands of returning citizens the right to vote, in defiance of Floridians’ will and in spite of Amendment 4’s text.

Worse yet, the bill says that otherwise eligible people will now be denied voting rights if they owe court fees or have civil liens. That resurrects an old, discredited and thoroughly harmful trope — that your ability to vote should be based on the size of your bank account. In America, no one should be denied access to the ballot box—and therefore excluded from broader community life — just because they lack financial resources. No other person in Florida is denied the right to vote because they have a civil lien. Denying returning citizens the ballot because they owe money creates a two-tiered democracy, and that is wrong.

The Legislature’s determination to attack civil rights went well beyond Amendment 4.

Sitting in Tallahassee, legislators decided to set the law enforcement priorities of every city and county in the state. Legislators are requiring local police to volunteer for routine, front-line immigration enforcement and insisting they divert their local resources to do so, regardless of other issues they may face in their communities.

This wholesale attack on the treasured idea of local control is effectively a mandate for unbridled racial profiling, unconstitutional behavior, and the separation of families from their children. Local police will be required to comply with requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), no matter how sloppy, overzealous, ill-informed, illegal, unconstitutional, or factually wrong those requests may be.

Hundreds of American citizens have already been wrongly detained in Miami-Dade County alone because ICE’s desire to harass immigrants outweighs its commitment to civil liberties, constitutional principles or sound investigative work; the Florida Legislature’s action means that a similar pattern is guaranteed in the state’s other 66 counties.

On voting rights and immigration, the Legislature chose to traffic in misinformation and extremism in order to go back to a time before the constitution protected the rights of all people, and that is shameful.

In cities and towns across New York state — and around the country — you can be evicted just for calling for police or emergency assistance. Fortunately, that’s about to change in New York. The State Legislature recently passed a bill — unanimously in the Assembly and 58 to 1 in the Senate — to protect tenants from eviction based on their calls for help.

Cities often enact local laws called nuisance ordinances that label certain properties as “nuisances” based on the amount of 911 calls or emergency responses at that property, regardless of the reason for the call, the tenant’s role in the dispute, or whether the person was requesting medical assistance.

When a property is the site of “too many” 911 responses, the city may punish the property owner with penalties such as fines, revocation of rental permits, or orders of closure. In order to avoid these consequences, landlords often evict or threaten to evict the tenants who called 911, refuse to renew their leases, or tell them to stop calling for help.

The NYCLU and ACLU surveyed New York’s 80 most populous cities, towns, and villages to find out whether they had nuisance ordinances and how they were being enforced. What we learned mirrors what we know about enforcement of these ordinances across the nation: the brunt falls disproportionately on survivors of domestic violence, forcing them to endure threats and violence without police intervention or to risk losing their homes. For example, in both Fulton and Binghamton, domestic violence was the single largest category of activity that led to nuisance ordinance enforcement. These ordinances also hurt those in need of frequent medical attention, including the disabled and the elderly. And they are more commonly enforced in poor communities and communities of color.*

For example, data from Rochester and Troy reveal that nuisance ordinance enforcement happens more often in neighborhoods with higher percentages of residents of color. We also found that enforcement is more frequent in neighborhoods with higher rates of poverty, which makes it even harder for people who are already struggling financially to keep their homes.

Nuisance ordinances harm landlords as well by forcing them into an impossible choice. They can either let tenants who have called for help stay in their homes and risk getting fined or having their property taken away. Or they can kick their tenants out, which violates laws that prohibit evicting people for seeking government assistance.

The lopsided vote count may make it look like this legislation is a no-brainer. But we, along with the Empire State Justice Center and the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, have been working to get this bill passed for a long time.

If Governor Cuomo signs the legislation into law as expected, New York will be the tenth state (plus the District of Columbia) to pass this type of bill. The ACLU wants to make these safeguards the law of the land nationwide. We are calling on the U.S. Senate to address this issue by supporting the housing protections in the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2019, which passed the House in April. These protections would ensure that cities across the country cannot threaten people’s housing because they called for help.

The graphics below represent actual nuisance ordinance enforcement data in the cities of Rochester (left) and Troy (right) from 2012-2018. Each map shows census tracts by proportion of residents of color, with lighter shading representing higher proportions of white residents and darker shading representing higher percentages of residents of color. Circles represent relative numbers of nuisance ordinance enforcement.

The figures below demonstrate the race and poverty profiles of the census tracts in Rochester where nuisance ordinances are least enforced to evict tenants and where they are most enforced to evict tenants for the period 2012-2018.

*A full disparate impact analysis is not possible due to the limited enforcement data we received.

Sandra Park, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Women's Rights Project
& Allie Bohm, Policy Counsel, NYCLU