Palm Beach Post letters to the Editor | Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Despite the April 2007 changes to Florida's Rules of Executive Clemency, which helped ease re-enfranchisement for some Floridians, the state still lags far behind the majority of states in eradicating the shameful Reconstruction-era voting ban. Hundreds of thousands of Florida citizens continue to be denied the fundamental right to vote; relegated to second-class citizenship long after they have completed all terms of their sentence.
This is no time to backtrack or roll back the reforms of 2007. The solution to Florida's disfranchisement crisis is for the Clemency Board to adopt restoration of civil rights (RCR) rules creating a truly automatic civil rights restoration process.
It was shocking when House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, R-Boca Raton, recently called for the rollback of the 2007 clemency rule changes, resorting to scare tactics to fuel the false claim that RCR endangers public safety. In fact, restoration of civil rights enhances public safety.
As The Post's Oct. 6 editorial pointed out, the recent independent audit of the Parole Commission's RCR operations found that 13 people were improperly granted RCR. Politicos used this to launch a smear campaign targeted at rolling back the 2007 reforms - which need to be expanded - and failed to notice the more alarming finding: More than 86 percent of ex-offender-initiated applications submitted since January 2006 (more than 28,000 applications) are piled up on bureaucrats' desks and have not even been submitted to the Clemency Board for review.
This proves what the ACLU found in a March 2009 report: The current RCR rules do not result in "automatic" approval for any ex-felon. They are difficult to understand, costly to implement and unfairly administered.
Fairness, justice and an opportunity for a second chance are core values that Floridians embrace and that our state's racial justice and RCR policies should reflect.
MUSLIMA LEWIS
Miami
Editor's note: Muslima Lewis is the director of the ACLU of Florida's Voting Rights Project.
