EPILOGUE

LOVE WILL WIN THE DAY

AMENDMENT 4 ACCOMPLISHED what it was intended to do. Some may disagree with this statement in light of the legislative and litigative battles that ensued immediately after our ballot initiative passed, and the dominance of the narrative that created the need to “fight to save” the amendment from the malicious intent of conservative legislators. The reality was that in spite of the legislation that emerged and was eventually challenged in court, the accomplishment of Amendment 4 remained intact. Prior to the passage of Amendment 4, anyone convicted of any felony offense lost their civil rights, including the right to vote, for life. The seriousness or the triviality of the offense did not matter. Upon conviction, the only chance a person had to regain the right to vote was through clemency, which meant that one had to avail oneself of the mercy of the governor, a politician. It didn’t matter how deserving one might be. It didn’t matter if there was a victim or not, or if there was a victim; it didn’t matter if that victim was in favor of clemency. The decision to grant clemency was arbitrary and seemed to boil down to how the governor felt at the time and his partisan leanings. As arduous and arbitrary the process was, though, it was the only option returning citizens had if they ever wanted to vote in Florida. That is, until Amendment 4 passed.

Amendment 4 enshrined the right to vote in the Florida constitution, unless that right was removed or amended by the same process that FRRC had led, with the help of so many Florida voters. Through the efforts of everyone connected with Amendment 4, we had more than a flag-waving patriotic moment on January 8, 2019. We had a watershed moment in history, when people became full citizens again. Unfortunately, partisan rancor raised its head again, and the very next day we got a call from the leadership in Tallahassee saying that they wanted to talk to us about where all this was going. I didn’t think there was anything to talk about; the highest authority in the land, the state constitution, clearly stated how we were moving forward. No state officeholder, no supervisor of elections, could supersede that.

And, yet, the politicians still wanted to engage in conversations about the restitution aspect of “completion of sentence.” Recall that the ballot initiative amendment restored the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they completed all terms of their sentence, including parole or probation. Whatever these terms involved from a financial perspective was now at issue.

We often hear politicians bemoan judges who “legislate from the bench,” yet somehow we now saw some of those same leaders suggesting that it was the proper role of the legislature, and not the judiciary, to “interpret the constitution.” The reason Floridians from all walks of life worked together to collect more than one million signatures to get Amendment 4 on the ballot was because partisanship prevented our state lawmakers from doing what was right. Rather than allowing the process to work itself out, members of the state legislature now took it upon themselves to decide what that process should be.

Central to the legislative process was the question of what constituted “completion of sentence.” The decision to address this question opened up a Pandora’s box from which emerged claims of racism, allegations of “poll taxes,” debates that revealed again the sharp partisan divide that Amendment 4 seemed to have started to mend, as well as an impending lawsuit that would capture the attention of the country.

In a sense, I suspected that something like this was going to happen. I know that we don’t live in a perfect world and that the “ideal” situation doesn’t always play out the way it should, but I had hope. Didn’t we just pass Amendment 4 the ideal way? So you can’t really blame me for thinking that maybe, just maybe, politicians would keep their hands off of this beautiful victory and allow Amendment 4 to run its course unencumbered. I guess they couldn’t help themselves.

The way I looked at what the legislature was doing was like this: For years, Florida politicians walked by a homeless family and never lifted a finger to help them. One day, citizens decided that enough was enough, so they took matters into their own hands because they believed that people should be treated better. These citizens came together and built the homeless family a house, but as soon as the house was completed, those same politicians barged into the new home and demanded that they, the politicians, should be able to decide how the home would be decorated.

When there is alignment between the State Senate, House, and governor, and they are all dominated by one party; whatever they want to happen will happen. We were thus left with no choice but to roll up our sleeves and try to mitigate any potential damage. Central to our efforts were the roughly 1.4 million Floridians who were just given the opportunity to be a part of our democracy again. These were real people with real lives, not just statistics, or votes for any particular party. We were more influenced by the desire to expand democracy to everyone and by the desire to restore a voice to countless Americans with felony convictions. In a perfect world, people, not politics, would be central to the debate, but like I’ve said, we don’t live in a perfect world.

So the debates began, and as predicted, they fell along partisan lines with conservative lawmakers leaning on comments made during oral arguments in the Florida Supreme Court review of our ballot language. In an argument to the State Supreme Court, our attorney had made comments, in a different context, about fines, fees, and financial obligations being included in a sentence. The purpose of that hearing was to assess whether Amendment 4’s language comported with the constitutional requirements for a citizens’ ballot initiative. The question came out of nowhere, our attorney answered it on the fly, and we were forced to live with that answer; an answer that became the foundation of what the leadership in Tallahassee decided to work from.

After weeks of debate and over our strenuous objection, the Florida legislature passed a measure requiring people with felony records to pay all financial obligations (“court fees, fines, and restitution”) from their sentencing except in two cases. The first is that a judge, with the consent of the victim of a crime in such cases where that applies, can dismiss the repayment requirement. The second allows a judge to convert all fines, fees, and restitution into community-service hours. In the second case, a person could have their voting rights restored after completing community service.

We argued that since tracking fines, fees, and restitution is so complicated in Florida, with no single entity holding all the information, people wouldn’t even know the amount they owed. We also argued that the courts were going to be bent to the point of breaking with an influx of people seeking to have their financial obligations dismissed or converted to community service.

Central to the fines and fees argument was the question of how many of the 1.4 million returning citizens would be impacted by this new spin. How many will be able to immediately register to vote, and how many would have to pay off their legal financial obligations before being eligible to vote? That was a simple question that did not have a simple answer. One estimate indicated that approximately 840,000 out of the 1.4 million returning citizens would be eligible to vote immediately. Another estimate indicated the inverse: that over 800,000 returning citizens still had some type of financial obligation that would prevent them from registering to vote. This variation between the two estimates hinged on what was being included in the assessment of what constituted legal financial obligations. In the first case, only fines, fees, and restitution were considered in the assessment. That was in line with what were thought to be the only financial obligations that could be attached to the actual crime a person was convicted of committing. The other assessment included court costs. While both assessments fell short of the 1.4 million returning citizens we would have ideally wanted to be able to vote immediately, I was still optimistic, because the 2018 elections showed me that Florida’s governor’s race was decided by thirty thousand votes, a congressional race was decided by sixteen thousand votes, and generally presidential elections in Florida are decided by approximately one hundred thousand votes. Out of either estimate of how many returning citizens would have to satisfy their legal financial obligations, there still remained an estimated six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand returning citizens in Florida who would be able to register immediately. That number “covers the gap” for any election in Florida and means that even though the debate and the litigation may rage on, the voices of people impacted by the criminal justice system can still be heard at the ballot box, and their voices can be loud enough to determine who our next governor, member of Congress, or even president of the United States will be. In spite of the barriers raised by meeting legal financial obligations, there are still enough returning citizens who can play a critical role in local elections to determine the next state attorney or district attorney, sheriff, judge, public defender, clerk of court, or even supervisor of elections in their counties. I’m optimistic because people who’ve long been impacted by our broken criminal justice system, and who have long been silenced, now have an opportunity to play a significant role in fixing it.

As anticipated, a lawsuit quickly followed, challenging the Amendment 4 legislation. Filed in a federal court in the Northern District of Florida, sixteen plaintiffs asked the court to determine whether or not it is constitutional to deny a person the right to vote solely because the person is financially incapable of paying legal financial obligations in a felony case that is essentially closed. The court initially issued a ruling on a motion for a preliminary injunction and held that the plaintiffs could not be denied the right to vote if they could not afford to pay their financial obligations. The state lost its appeal of that decision, and the actual trial is slated to begin in 2020. Of note is the fact that the lawsuit is now a class-action suit. While the previous court ruling technically only applied to the sixteen named plaintiffs, this “class-action” designation means that subsequent rulings from the court would now apply more broadly to the 1.4 million returning citizens.

As of this writing there is still uncertainty about the final outcome of the lawsuit. The case could potentially go all the way to the US Supreme Court, but in spite of the uncertainty, the Amendment 4 victory has created a moment for returning citizens like me, a moment that has reignited a dormant hope, stimulated the imagination of a more inclusive and vibrant democracy, and repositioned the balance of electoral power. This moment has given me and many others in Florida and throughout the country the chance to firmly declare “Our Vote, Our Voice, Our Time!”

And no matter the challenges that may lay ahead, I still believe that love will win the day.