Pubdate: Thu, 16 Jun 2005
Source: New York City Newsday (NY)
Copyright: 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Contact: http://cf.newsday.com/newsdayemail/email.cfm
Website: http://www.nynewsday.com/news/printedition/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3362
Author:  Sheryly McCarthy

IT'S A CRIME TO STOP FELONS FROM VOTING

Joseph Hayden and Jalil Abdul Muntaqim aren't the most sympathetic
guys in the world. Hayden served 13 years in New York prisons for
killing a man during an argument in Harlem in 1986. Released three
years ago, he'll be on parole until 2007.

Muntaqim was convicted of shooting two police officers in the 1970s,
when he belonged to the Black Liberation Army. He's doing life in an
upstate prison and probably will never get out.

Both are plaintiffs in a case to be argued before a federal appeals
court this month challenging New York's felon disenfranchisement law.
And while until now I've been skeptical about the call to repeal such
laws, I've changed my mind.

New York's election law bars Hayden from voting until he gets off
parole, and essentially says that Muntaqim will never cast a vote in
this state. There's been growing criticism of such laws since the 2000
presidential election, when one of the many flukes of the Florida
election was that hundreds of thousands of felons who had completed
their sentences were barred from voting.

Laws like those in Florida and Alabama, which bar felons from voting
for life, are clearly excessive. New York's is less so, but there are
still arguments against it. First, that voting is not a privilege, but
a right guaranteed by the Constitution, and states don't have the
right to take it away, even from someone like Muntaqim. Second, that
such laws are doubly unfair to communities of color, which are treated
more harshly and often unfairly by the criminal justice system, and
then have their voting power diluted because they have a larger
proportion of felons.

Third, the history of felony disenfranchisement laws stinks. In the
South they were enacted to keep blacks from voting. Other laws made
harmless acts like quitting a job, being unemployed or simply
congregating, into felonies, which allowed blacks to be arrested,
convicted and stripped of their right to vote. According to the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund, whose lawyers are representing Hayden and
Muntaqim, disenfranchising blacks was one of the motivations behind
passing New York's law in 1821.

But the most convincing argument against these laws is this one: What
purpose do they serve?

"What does it accomplish?" asks Frances Fox Piven, a professor at the
City University of New York's graduate school and an expert on
American voting habits. "It's certainly not an effective form of
punishment, since a lot of people don't have that kind of faith and
love for the right to vote. So there's nothing to be lost, and maybe
something to be gained, by making the right to vote universal."

She also doesn't "see the point of depriving these people of the right
to express their opinion."

And isn't that what voting is? So what are we afraid will happen if
inmates and former inmates get the vote? That they'll try to elect
other criminals to office? That they'll vote for legislators who want
to water down the criminal laws and create statutes of limitations for
murder? Clearly none of this is going to happen. In Maine and Vermont,
where prison inmates vote by absentee ballot, nothing horrible has
happened as a result.

I know there are people who say if you do the crime, then you deserve
to lose all your rights. But these are the same folks who think prison
inmates should be denied college courses - even though education helps
them stay straight once they get out. Following elections and voting
in them is probably good practice for inmates in being good citizens,
which benefits all of us in the long run.

About 131,000 New Yorkers can't vote because of the felon
disenfranchisement law. Nationwide, it's close to 5 million. It's time
to get rid of these laws, for the primary reason that they serve no
good purpose.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin