Namesake democracy where whites wrote all rules and regulations as land mines for blacks to walk into. If I were black, I would start with dropping white man’s forced religion.
In Florida, Fees, Fines From Felonies Means Disenfranchised
https://jjie.org/2019/08/28/in-florida- ... ranchised/
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Ten years ago, Rosemary McCoy never would have imagined that today she’d be in a Jacksonville library, tears streaming down her face, as she tells a stranger how it feels to be disenfranchised.
Then she was a real estate professional with two decades’ experience, a wife, mother of two, an average, everyday citizen living a good life.
Today she scrapes by on meager wages earned collecting petition signatures. Thanks to
felony convictions in 2015 on charges associated with renting homes without authorization, the 61-year-old’s former life is long gone. So are her voting rights.
Adding to her sense of injustice, McCoy was among those who gathered signatures to get Florida’s Amendment 4 on the ballot in 2018, which automatically restored voting rights to people with felony convictions (except murder and sex offenses) who have completed their sentences. When it passed, she was among the 1.4 million Floridians who believed they’d be able to vote.
Initially this was true. In April, she registered to vote. McCoy cast a ballot in Jacksonville’s municipal elections the following month.
Then the legislature enacted a law it claimed was necessary to interpret Amendment 4. That law, Senate Bill 7066, which passed strictly on party lines with Republicans for it and Democrats against, interprets “completion of sentence” to include payment of court fees, fines and restitution, or legal financial obligations (LFOs).
McCoy owes a little more than $7,000 in restitution. With an income of barely minimum wage, she may as well owe 10 times that amount.
Because of that debt, when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 7066 on the Friday before Independence Day, he took back her right to vote.
Rosemary McCoy is not alone. In fact, of the 1.4 million Floridians estimated to have been re-enfranchised when Amendment 4 passed overwhelmingly last November, as many as 80% were disenfranchised by that stroke of the governor’s pen.
McCoy’s debt is associated with restitution. Most would likely believe that restitution is straightforward, but tracking it is far more complicated than one might expect. As the Miami Herald reported, restitution differs by jurisdiction and even by judge. Sometimes court clerks collect; sometimes victims do. During imprisonment or probation, the Department of Corrections collects restitution. After probation, it’s often converted to a civil lien; then payments go to the clerk, the victim or a debt collector.
The state has no idea how much restitution is owed cumulatively, by whom and to whom. There is no state agency tasked with tracking the data. Many defendants themselves don’t know how much they owe.
Florida is among the states that charges often exorbitant fines to people convicted of crimes and civil infractions. Several estimates have found that roughly a million Floridians with felony convictions have court debt. Some owe hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They can appeal to convert it to community service hours, but McCoy points out that this typically requires hiring a lawyer with money that they just don’t have.
And now that debt also prohibits them from voting.
University of Florida political science professor Daniel Smith prepared a report analyzing the effect of SB 7066 on behalf of the ACLU. Based on court clerks’ data from 48 counties, he found that 82.4% of 375,256 people with felony records owe LFOs, rendering them ineligible to vote. If this ratio bears out across all 1.4 million Floridians with felony convictions who couldn’t vote before Amendment 4, then 1.15 million were disenfranchised by SB 7066.
“The public was unaware that this was happening to us. The public honestly thought that once you completed your sentence, it was over,” McCoy said. “They believed that all your rights would be restored.”
The ACLU is finding “enormous racial disparities” among those who still owe LFOs, Coodley said. “In some counties white people were twice as likely to have paid their fees,” he said. This means that black people are more likely to be disenfranchised due to LFOs.
There may also be debt on the books that’s decades old, following around people who have no idea that it’s owed. No one is sure.
What is clear is that fees and fines are big money. Last fiscal year, the court system collected $864 million, Florida Courts and Comptrollers reports. The Fines and Fees Justice Center reports that more than a billion dollars — $688 million in fines and $474 million in fees — was ordered. Of this, $298 million was unpaid.
So what happens to the unpaid LFOs? After 90 days, it can begin accruing interest in the form of a statutorily authorized surcharge of up to 40%. Some call this a “poverty penalty.” Clerks can collect or they can send the debt to private collections agencies. Advocates note that these agencies spend thousands in campaign donations and to lobby lawmakers.
The collection rate for all court debt (including that previously owed) was 74.25% last year, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center. For civil traffic cases ($388 million in 2018), the collection rate was 91.93%. For other categories of offenses, the rate was much lower. Felonies’ collection rate was 20.55%; juvenile offenses 26.6%. Some classes of felonies, such as drug trafficking, have such a low collection rate that the debt is largely seen as uncollectible, Thomas said, which for some calls into question the fine’s purpose.
Fees are more consistent, but still burdensome and complicated.
The fee schedule reads like a manual in nickel and diming. A first-degree misdemeanor traffic charge, which carries a fine of up to $1,000 regardless of whether the defendant has been found guilty, could also include: a 5% surcharge on the fine, $17 for the crime stoppers trust fund, $3 for the crime stoppers fee, $50 in additional court costs, $10 for the clerk of court trust fund, $1 crimes compensation fee, $49 for the crimes compensation trust fund, $3 additional court cost clearing, $2 for local law enforcement education (mandatory with ordinance), $20 crimes prevention fund, $3 state radio system surcharge, $30 for the court facilities fund (mandatory with ordinance) and $65 in additional costs (mandatory with ordinance); for a grand total of up to $1,303, more than 30% higher than the fine itself.
Every year, Florida courts collect hundreds of millions of dollars, in what’s called “cash register justice.” But it wasn’t always this way. In the past there were court costs, and, in some cases, fines associated with civil and criminal violations. The 1980s drug war caused governments to feel the budgetary pinch of the rapidly burgeoning criminal justice system, said Thomas of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. Concurrently, the nation became ever more tax-averse.
In 1998 Florida landed on a solution: People who use the court system should pay to operate it. That year, the state passed a constitutional amendment mandating that fines and fees from civil and criminal defendants fund the court system. It went into effect in 2004.
Since then, fees and fines have grown exponentially. In addition to adding scores of fees like the 15-cent charge in juvenile cases, the legislature has vastly expanded the categories of offenses that include fines. Today, more than 100 carry a fine. A few are discretionary; most are mandatory. Drug charges carry some of the highest fines, which arguably makes some sense in light of the drug war’s role in increasing courts’ costs. However, given new understanding of addiction, many wonder if it still makes sense to even incarcerate drug users. Three of the four former inmates interviewed for this article have had drug charges.
Today the fees and fines fund not just the court system, but a whole lot more.
Poor people and minorities are more likely to be charged and convicted of crime. Black people comprise 17% of Florida’s population and nearly half of its prison population.
Court debt takes on new significance in light of the approximately 3 million Floridians living in poverty, according to U.S. Census Bureau and Welfare Info data. Adding further depth to the issue is the fact that there are significantly higher poverty rates among minorities. With a statewide poverty rate of 15.1%; nearly 25% of black people and 20% of Hispanics live in poverty, Welfare Info reports.
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He stole $50 and got life without parole. 35 years later, he’s coming home.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... edirect=on
The unusually harsh punishment was the result of Alabama’s Habitual Felony Offender Act, also known as the “three strikes law,” which was originally intended to crack down on repeat offenders when it was enacted in the 1970s. But Kennard wasn’t exactly a hardened career criminal when he was sentenced to life behind bars: His prior history consisted of being charged in connection with a break-in at an unoccupied gas station when he was 18, which landed him on probation for three years, AL.com reported.
The Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, took up Kennard’s case. The group noted that he had been an exemplary inmate who lived in the “honor dorm” — a faith-based housing unit where prisoners are subject to stricter rules — and hadn’t been cited for a disciplinary or behavioral infraction in over a decade. Carla Crowder, the organization’s executive director and Kennard’s attorney, argued in court on Wednesday that he would likely have been eligible for parole 20 years ago if he had been sentenced under the new standards, WIAT reported.
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Blacks Left Behind by Three-Strikes Sentencing Reform
https://www.courthousenews.com/blacks-l ... ng-reform/
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — More than 60 inmates, disproportionately black, are set to stay in Washington state prisons for life — left out of the latest in a multiyear wave of reforms easing tough-on-crime three-strikes laws around the United States.
At least 24 states, including Washington, passed such laws during the 1990s, embracing tough-on-crime rhetoric. But nearly half have scaled them back amid concern that habitual but less-violent offenders were being stuck behind bars for life with hardcore felons.
Washington’s 1993 three-strikes law was among the first and stands out as among the nation’s strictest. But lawmakers targeted it for reform this year with legislation removing second-degree robbery — generally defined as a robbery without a deadly weapon or significant injury — from the list of crimes qualifying for cumulative life sentences.
While the state’s original reform included a retroactive clause, making inmates sentenced under the old law eligible for resentencing, an amendment pushed by a prosecutors’ group cut out retroactivity. Washington governor and Democratic presidential contender Jay Inslee signed the changes into law April 29.
That means about 62 inmates convicted of second-degree robbery will be left serving life sentences, according to state records, even after judges stop “striking out” new offenders convicted of the same crimes. About half are black, despite African Americans making up only 4% of Washington’s population.
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N.C. Supreme Court Hears Arguments On Racial Bias In Death Penalty Cases
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/26/75441057 ... alty-cases
In closing arguments in a death penalty trial, the prosecution told an all-white jury that a black defendant was "a big black bull."
In the case of a different black man, prosecutors justified excluding a black juror because he drank alcohol by calling him a "blk wino," whereas a potential white juror who drank was considered "ok" and a "country boy."
And in another courtroom exchange, a prosecutor grilled a black juror about whether he had trouble reading, but those same questions were never directed at other prospective jurors.
A decade ago, in 2009, the state's Democratic-controlled legislature passed a one-of-its-kind law called the Racial Justice Act that allowed death row inmates to challenge their punishment if they could show that race was a "significant factor" in being sentenced to death. Nearly every single person on the state's death row, including many white inmates, filed claims. But in 2013, North Carolina's newly elected Republican majority repealed the law, and all the pending cases later were voided.
Lawyers and researchers, though, had already begun to dig into how much race was an issue in death penalty trials in North Carolina. One study that examined death row cases in the state over two decades found that prospective black jurors were dismissed more than twice as often as jurors of other races.
That evidence, lawyers for the inmates say, should not be ignored.
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Rachel Azanleko-Akouete On A Mission to Eliminate Racial Health Disparities
https://diversity.wisc.edu/rachel-azanl ... sparities/
akouete-on-a-mission-to-eliminate-racial
Nearly all states have significant black/white infant mortality disparities, but Wisconsin has historically been one of the worst. In fact, the United Health Foundation indicated that Wisconsin’s black/white infant mortality rate disparity ratio of 2.9 is among the highest in the nation in its 2016 America’s Health Rankings.
Rachel Azanleko-Akouete, a public health nurse for Public Health Madison-Dane County, is on a mission to help change these disparity numbers. A passionate national and global policy advocate, she regularly educates elected officials so that they can make informed decisions. She firmly believes that good policies can undo what bad policies have created.
“As a black woman, college-educated, and middle-income, the birth outcomes are still comparable to a white woman who is not college-educated and who is low-income. That disparity is really sad,” Azanleko-Akouete tells Madison365 in an interview at Cargo Coffee on East Washington Ave. “Despite your educational background and despite your socioeconomic status, you still have poor outcomes as a black woman. What is leading to that?”