Pubdate: Sun, 2 Mar 2008
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: 21, Section A
Copyright: 2008 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Shaila Dewan
Cited: Sentencing Project http://www.sentencingproject.org/
Cited: American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project 
http://www.aclu.org/votingrights/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Voting+Rights
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/states/AL/ (Alabama)

IN ALABAMA, A FIGHT TO REGAIN VOTING RIGHTS SOME FELONS NEVER LOST

DOTHAN, Ala. -- The Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, onetime criminal and 
founder of a ministry called The Ordinary People Society, spent years 
helping people with criminal records regain the right to vote in 
Alabama, where an estimated 250,000 people are prohibited from voting 
because of past criminal activity.

Then he discovered that many of them had never actually lost the right.

Because of a quirk in its Constitution, Alabama disqualifies from 
voting only those who have committed a "felony involving moral 
turpitude." Those who have committed other felonies -- like marijuana 
possession or drunken driving -- can cast ballots even if they are 
still in prison, according to the state attorney general.

But it has been slow work cajoling public officials to enforce and 
publicize the law. Until Friday, the secretary of state's Web site 
advised, incorrectly, that those with any kind of felony conviction 
could not register unless they had served their time and their right 
to vote had been restored by the Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Because neither the Legislature nor the attorney general has offered 
a definitive list of crimes involving moral turpitude, there is no 
way of knowing how many inmates are eligible to vote. But state 
agencies generally agree that those convicted of drug possession -- 
at least 3,000 of Alabama's 29,000 prison inmates and thousands more 
on probation -- are eligible. Most felons and former felons, however, 
assume that they have lost the right to vote.

"This is an issue that's never come up before," said Richard F. 
Allen, the commissioner of corrections. "I would think that if there 
were any latent feeling out there that they wanted to vote, they 
would have expressed it by now."

Mr. Glasgow, who is the half-brother of a far less obscure crusader 
based in New York, the Rev. Al Sharpton, believes that not only do 
inmates and former convicts want to vote, but also that their ballots 
could alter the political landscape in this Republican-leaning state, 
adding that his group has registered more than 500 people by visiting 
a handful of county jails.

"There would be a lot of difference in our legislators, our elected 
officials and our presidents that we've had," he said. "It would 
definitely change the political spectrum of Alabama."

Republicans agree. They railed against a statute passed in 2003 that 
made it easier for some former felons to regain their voting rights 
by side-stepping a lengthy and backlogged pardon process.

"There's no more anti-Republican bill than this," said Marty Connors, 
the chairman of the state Republican Party, according to news reports 
at the time. "As frank as I can be, we're opposed to it because 
felons don't tend to vote Republican."

In the two years after the 2003 statute took effect, more than 5,500 
former felons had their rights restored, and interest in the November 
presidential election is running high, said Sarah Still, manager of 
the pardons department. In January, Ms. Still received more than 280 
applications for voting rights, up from an average of 140 a month last fall.

Nationally, 5.3 million people are barred from voting because of 
their criminal history, according to a 2004 estimate cited by the 
Sentencing Project, a criminal justice policy group. In the last 
decade, as criminals who were swept into prison during the drug war 
have been released and the difficulty of re-integrating them into 
society has become clear, at least 16 states have made it easier for 
former felons to vote.

But in the South, where restrictions on former convicts are among the 
most severe and in many cases date to Jim Crow laws, there have been 
fewer changes. Last Monday the American Civil Liberties Union filed 
suit in protest of a 2006 Tennessee law that requires former convicts 
to pay back child support before regaining the right to vote. In 
Alabama, the Republican attorney general, Troy King, has proposed a 
constitutional amendment that would delete the moral turpitude 
clause, prohibiting all felons from voting.

Though he is an active Democrat, Mr. Glasgow, 42, says his main goal 
is not to aid his party but to help former inmates become productive 
members of society.

But for most of his own life he was hardly an exemplar of civic 
engagement. Mr. Sharpton, in his memoir, "Go and Tell Pharaoh," says 
his parents' marriage was wrecked when his father, Al Sharpton Sr., 
had an affair with his mother's teenage daughter from a previous 
marriage, resulting in the birth of Kenneth.

By the time Kenneth was a teenager, his mother had taken him to her 
hometown, Dothan, Ala., where he began to get in trouble for selling 
drugs, became addicted to crack cocaine and did time in Alabama and 
Florida for armed robbery and other crimes.

It was during his longest stint in prison, nine years, that the genes 
of activism and oratory that run in Mr. Glasgow's family emerged and 
he began to preach. When he was released in 2001, the bondsman who 
had repeatedly bailed him out of jail became treasurer of The 
Ordinary People Society and paid for Mr. Glasgow to attend seminary.

Mr. Glasgow opened a soup kitchen, held church services under a white 
tent and began to help former convicts like Anna Reynolds, a 
recovering addict, regain the right to vote -- a process often made 
onerous by the moral-turpitude clause.

As a legal concept, moral turpitude refers to conduct that would be 
immoral even if it were not illegal, unlike, say, speeding. The 
delegates to the 1901 constitutional convention who used the term 
also took away voting rights for other infractions that they believed 
blacks were more likely to commit, like wife beating, adultery and 
vagrancy. In 1985 the United States Supreme Court struck down most of 
the law on the grounds that it was racially discriminatory, but the 
moral-turpitude clause remained.

Most officials in Alabama were unaware of the clause until 2005, when 
it came to light after a man on probation tried to vote in St. Clair 
County. The parole board requested clarification, and the attorney 
general responded with an incomplete categorization of felonies based 
largely on previous court decisions.

The opinion leaves a large gray area, said Ms. Still of the pardons 
department. It says, for example, that rape is a crime of moral 
turpitude and that assault is not, but offers no clarification on 
variations like statutory rape or assault with intent to kill.

The parole board settled on a policy of treating drug possession and 
drunk driving as crimes devoid of moral turpitude, but that has not 
put an end to the confusion, Mr. Glasgow said.

Initially Ms. Reynolds, 52, was told by the local registrar that she 
could not vote because of a conviction for drug possession. She 
applied to the parole board, which told her that it could not restore 
her right to vote because she had never lost it. Finally, The 
Ordinary People Society helped cut through the red tape.

On Feb. 5, Ms. Reynolds stood outside the public library handing out 
sample ballots before casting her own. "Voting, that's part of 
getting back to normal life," she said. "I've been out of the loop 
for a long time, and it was good to have help getting back into the loop." 
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