Court: Florida should do more to help felons get rights restored

By DAVID ROYSE
Associated Press Writer
TALLAHASSEE, Fla.
State corrections officials don't do enough to help thousands of prisoners get their voting and other civil rights restored when they're released, an appellate court ruled Wednesday.

The unanimous ruling by the First District Court of Appeal said the Department of Corrections isn't following a state law requiring that prisoners get a form to apply for a hearing to get their civil rights back.

The appeals court said prison officials must provide the forms and help prisoners fill them out before they leave prison.

Critics of Gov. Jeb Bush's administration say the opinion adds fuel to their argument that it is too expensive and burdensome to continue requiring felons to go through a sometimes tricky restoration process.

Renewed criticism of the system, which keeps hundreds of thousands of ex-felons from voting, follows the acknowledgment by state officials this past weekend that its process for purging prisoners from voter rolls is flawed.

The state told local officials to stop using a state-provided database identifying potential felons because of the possibility that people might be wrongly purged.

Critics charge that underlying that specific problem is the broader policy preventing felons from automatically having their rights restored, as they are in a number of other states.

"Why don't we just get rid of this Civil War-era Jim Crow law?" suggested Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho, who had been a critic of the requirement that he purge his county's voter rolls based on a state database he has publicly questioned. Counties are still expected to purge their rolls, but without a state database.

Gov. Jeb Bush says the state will do what the judges order and help prisoners apply to have their rights restored.

"If the requirement is there be assistance to fill out the form, that's what we'll do," Bush said.

But he said he has no intention of changing the underlying requirement that released felons apply to get their rights back, arguing it's part of the state constitution.

"I'm not going to, by edict, change the rules that are a part of our constitution," Bush said.

Currently, when a prisoner is released, the Department of Corrections sends the prisoner's information to parole officials. About 15 percent of those felons are now automatically granted a hearing to have their rights restored, something Bush says his critics don't acknowledge.

"We have streamlined the system, and gotten very little credit for it ... making it easier for people to get their rights restored," Bush said.

But roughly 85 percent aren't automatically granted a hearing, and if they want one, they later must figure out how to get an application and fill it out, said Randy Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute in Miami and the lawyer who argued the case for the plaintiffs, the Caucus of Black State Legislators.

The court ruled that those 85 percent shouldn't have to figure out possibly months after leaving prison how to apply for a hearing.

"At what point is the governor going to say this is a cost that's just not worth it?" asked Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The cost to the state of Florida of maintaining this archaic and unjust system has just increased."

Democrats and some government watchdogs complained this week about the cost of the now-discredited felon purge database, although state elections officials say it is impossible to figure out how much it cost.

The state two years ago paid a private vendor, Accenture, $1.8 million to create and upgrade a database of all state voters that county officials could use to check to make sure voters aren't registered in more than one place. It's also matched against lists of dead people to make sure they're purged from the rolls.

The felon list is created using that database. But Secretary of State Glenda Hood said Wednesday that it was impossible to determine how much it cost to run queries of the database to create the list of possible felon matches.

Hood also said that her office didn't have any choice but to create the felon match list anyway - it was required by the Legislature and a court case.