Rights Group Demands Corrections' Help On Ex-Felons, Voter Rolls
Group Wants State Officials To Help Inmates File Forms
NBC 6 News Team
POSTED: 2:09 pm EDT June 15, 2004
UPDATED: 2:21 pm EDT June 15, 2004
MIAMI A civil rights group is asking a court to step in and help former felons in Florida get their voting rights back before the November election.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed an appeal Tuesday with the First District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee. They argue that the Florida Department of Corrections "evaded its legal responsibilities" by failing to help inmates navigate the complicated process of restoring their civil rights before they left prison.
Under a Florida law dating back to the post-Reconstruction period, felons can only regain the right to vote by obtaining a pardon, or by having their rights officially restored by a state board that includes the governor and his cabinet. Civil rights groups claim the process is overly complicated and riddled with errors, and they point to the 2000 election, in which more than 8,000 Floridians were mistakenly stricken from the voter rolls when a private Texas company hired by a previous Secretary of State (whose contract was renewed by former Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who was also state co-chair of the George W. Bush campaign,) incorrectly included them on the felon purge list.
This year's list includes some 48,000 names that Secretary of State Glenda Hood has ordered stricken from the rolls.
The secretary of state has said it is the responsibility of the supervisors of elections in each of Florida's 67 counties to go through the list provided by the Corrections Department, and to remove the appropriate names from their rolls.
In Miami-Dade, elections officials have been given more than 3,600 names to check, while Broward has about 6,600 names to go through.
The counties have said they will be very cautious about removing names (Miami-Dade officials have removed fewer than 150 people from their rolls to date, NBC 6 learned), and supervisors of elections from across the state met last week in Key West to discuss their concerns about the accuracy of the list, but groups like the ACLU say that's not enough.
The ACLU of Florida is appealing a lower court decision rejecting its lawsuit challenging the state's failure to comply with a state statute the group says requires corrections officials to help inmates who are about to be released from custody with the application process to restore their rights.
Florida is one of only seven states all in the south that strip convicted felons of their voting rights for life and the state has more disenfranchised ex-felons than any other state as many as 500,000 according to some estimates.
In the lower court hearing, Leon County Circuit Court Judge P. Kevin Davey found that prison officials failed to fulfill their legal obligation to assist 124,769 felons released from state custody between 1992 and 2001. The judge ordered state officials to restore the civil and voting rights of some 30,000 former felons immediately. The state agreed to restore the rights of the remaining former inmates last July.
But the judge stopped short of blaming the Corrections Department for the failures. Now, the ACLU is asking an appeals court to go a step further, and order state officials to help felons complete the necessary applications and forward the paperwork to the Office of Executive Clemency in Tallahassee.
The ACLU filed its original lawsuit on behalf of several local civil rights groups, black lawmaker, and four former felons: Reginald Greenlee, Joseph Brown, Milton McCloud and Hollis Horton.
The controversy over the state's voter rolls has sparked another lawsuit, this one initiated by the cable network CNN, which is suing the state's Division of Elections, seeking to gain access to the purge list. Sen. Bill Nelson last week filed a "friend of the court" brief supporting that lawsuit.
Officials from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement have expressed a willingness to help elections supervisors vet their lists.
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