Ruling Provides New Hope for Felon Voting Rights
Printer-friendly version
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Click the flash player below to listen to or the mic to download an MP3 copy.
Click the flash player below to listen to or the mic to download an MP3 copy.
In what is being hailed as a landmark ruling, a federal court found that the criminal justice system is “infected” with racial discrimination. As a result, said the judges, disenfranchisement of felons is a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Ruling Provides New Hope for Felon Voting Rights
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“The criminal justice system is 'infected' with racial discrimination.”
Mass Black incarceration touches every aspect of African American life – economic, cultural and political. The pervasive impact of the Black American Gulag is made even more devastating and intractable because its effects weaken Black people’s ability to change the system through electoral politics. 5.3 million U.S. citizens are barred from voting because of felony convictions – two million, or 38 percent, are Black.
Court rulings in cases challenging felon disenfranchisement have been all over the map. But last month, in a case from the state of Washington, a federal court decided that the hugely disproportionate effect of felony convictions on Black people’s voting rights amounts to a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The case is being appealed, and is very likely to wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the state of Washington, 24 percent of Black men and 15 percent of African Americans overall are ineligible to vote because of felony convictions. Since Black mass incarceration has been a fact of life everywhere in the U.S. for two generations, the facts and principles of the Washington case apply to every state in the nation.
The federal court, in a two-to-one ruling, declared that there was “compelling evidence” that minorities are “more likely to be searched, arrested, detained, and ultimately prosecuted” than whites. In the courts words: “If those decision points are infected with racial bias, resulting in some people becoming felons not just because they have committed a crime, but because of their race, then that felon status cannot, under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, disqualify felons from voting.”
In other words, since the criminal justice system's behavior, at every stage of its interaction with Black people – from the stop on the street to the trail in the courtroom – is more likely to result in a felony conviction for Blacks, that racially biased system violates Black voting rights.
“The Voting Rights Act recognized that many discriminatory factors can combine to prevent effective exercise of one's rights.”
The court's conclusion flows from the reasoning of the Voting Rights Act, itself. In attempting to outlaw racist Jim Crow voting restrictions, the Congress took into account the wide range of racial practices that had prevented Blacks from exercising their voting rights, including poll taxes, literacy laws, and intimidation. The Voting Rights Act recognized that many discriminatory factors can combine to prevent effective exercise of one's rights. The federal court agreed that race was the reason that “minorities are disproportionately prosecuted and sentenced, resulting in their disproportionate representation among the persons disenfranchised....”
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hailed the ruling, for acknowledging that the criminal justice system is “infected” with racial discrimination. That is an understatement. Mass Black incarceration has replaced Jim Crow as the principal American mechanism to subordinate and control Black people. Finally, a federal court has recognized that the racist infection has also vitiated the right to vote.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialise correctly.
Email this page
Comments
WHEN WILL COPS START SNITCHING?
If profiling actually worked, the most profiled group would be white males between the ages of 15 and 25.
Brilliant!
On a related note, have to give credit to a friend of mine, for a provocative, indeed probing question he raised in his book, in it, he asks the question:
If Cocaine was a WMD would it get into the country?
It made me ponder the imponderable of Al Quaeda or some other terrorists spiking powder cocaine with a biological agent.
That question and your analysis of a certain cohort...things that make you go, "Mmmmmm."
As Rep. Maxine Waters pointed out, crack cocaine has been a WMD
in the African-American communities, of poor, probably by a former administration of the US gov't.* And, What was the line Richard Nixon said about incarcerating the poor African-Americans for crack? I don't recall the line, but it was a turning point in gov't policy toward incarceration for certain drug possession.
*What was the name of the reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who did the research and series on the gov't and crack cocaine?
Freeway Ricky Ross on Alex Jones Tv
How The CIA Supplies, Controls, Operates The Drug Business
Interview of Ricky Donnell Ross (aka Freeway Ricky Ross), the convicted drug dealer who was featured in a Gary Webb expose on CIA involvement in the drug business (http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/drugs/start.htm).
Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBU7P5y4PsQ
Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDt0zGxK2Ss
Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXojInrc6yU
Part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqnEhE4ZcMY
Part 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD1igMNDR0A
Remember who the REAL criminals are...
On 02/03/2010 at 15:39, "LL" writes:
"If profiling actually worked, the most profiled group would be white males between the ages of 15 and 25."
Actually, no. It would be white males between the ages of 45 and 65 - the ages when they become the corporate executives whose crimes MASSIVELY outweigh street crime. To wit: an estimated 50,000 people in the US die every year from workplace carcinogens/toxins/unsafe conditions; an estimated 30,000 people in the US die every year from industrial pollution;
an estimated 100,000 people in the Us die every year from legal over-the-counter/prescription drugs; an estimated 45,000 people in the US die every year from the lack of health insurance that lobbyists for that industry are largely responsible for. If
some portion of the 450,000 people in the US who die every year from the effects of smoking are included (and the 1990s Tobacco industry lawsuit revealed the industry's own documents on how they deliberately tried to make cigarettes addictive and deliberately avoided making cigarettes "safer", at least as far as second-hand smoke - which kills an estimated 30,000 people in the US every year - goes), something approaching HALF A MILLION people in the US die every year from corporate crime. Heck, an estimated 3,000 people in the US die every year from the carcinogens in beauty products (that are banned in Europe).
And notice I didn't even mention the white males who order illegal wars - the old adage about "kill one person, that's murder; kill thousands, that's foreign policy". White males between the ages of 15 and 25 can't even come CLOSE to doing the kind of damage.
On what is crime: some years ago, I heard a critic of state
legislatures point out that it is they who write what is criminal and against the law in their respective state. He then used the example of drunk driving as an example of lower penalties for that because so many of the legislators relate to driving while intoxicated.
Then there's the limited liability or none, for all the corporate crime as you point out-- and someone recently noticed that corporations get to pay fines, such as in medicare fraud or financial fraud, and not have criminal cases. So, in one case it's who writes the laws and in the other case I mention, it's enforcement. And enforcement, that is , selective enforcement, goes back to the article. There are more white people using drugs than people of color, but the enforcement and prosecution is selective: poor people of color are more often arrested and prosecuted. The disparity of sentencing for crack cocaine vs powdered has been noted many times, as has the "draconian" Rockefeller Drug Law in NYS, which have only minimally been "reformed". "Grandpa" Al Lewis did a lot of work on getting the Rockefeller Drug Law repealled via his years of vigils, weekly, at Rockefeller Center in NYC. (I took photos at two of them.) Some high profile folks jumped in, got spotlight, in came some pols and it got the usual watered down to near nothing in the legislature with lots of fanfare. Keeping bodies in prison = money for localities, in terms of jobs and census. Many fronts to fight on.