Long before Jessica Younts sat in a classroom working toward her law degree, she spent seven months in a federal prison camp. At the age of 20, the New Yorker boarded a plane with someone carrying cocaine. A flight turned into a federal charge of conspiracy to possess cocaine, and when offered a plea deal, Younts accepted. The 39-year-old thinks back to the situation with regret and a tone of sad irony. "I tell everybody, 'My sentence didn't begin until I finished my prison sentence,'" she says.
Younts moved to Florida and, in 2008, was admitted to law school. Upon starting the program, she joined thousands of formerly convicted felons petitioning the state's Office of Executive Clemency to have their civil rights restored. It's the only legal path in Florida for ex-felons to regain the legal right to vote again, serve on a jury, sit a bar exam, hold public office or carry a firearm, among other things
It's also a lengthy, tedious process that requires all of the following: completing one's sentence for one's felony conviction, paying in full any restitution owed to victims and having no pending criminal charges; waiting the mandatory period after those conditions are met (either five or seven years, depending on the offense); filling out and submitting the necessary paperwork, including a 13-page clemency application that asks questions ranging from the name of one's church and denomination to one's health and education; receiving notice of restoration by mail; and being solicited to travel to the Office of Executive Clemency in Tallahassee to go before a clemency board comprised of the governor, the attorney general, the chief financial officer and the Commissioner of Agriculture.
The process can take more than a decade.
Younts applied for clemency during Gov. Charlie Crist's administration, which had issued an order automatically restoring rights. But her case became part of a large backlog. She graduated from law school, but it wasn't until 2013 that her case was given attention – this time, under a new administration. Younts traveled to the State Capitol and stood before Gov. Rick Scott himself, and his clemency board.
The clemency board restored her rights that day, opening the door for her to finally take the state bar exam and vote. But Younts was one of just a few to receive a favorable decision.
"Where I should've been happy, I left crying," she remembers. "It was just horrible to watch them basically belittle people in front of a whole audience and judge them – like, re-judge them."
An estimated 1.68 million Floridians are formerly convicted felons without civil rights, including the ability to vote.
Since Scott took office in 2011, his clemency board has reviewed more than 29,611 cases and restored voting rights to less than 3,000.
A federal judge ruled on Feb. 1 that Florida's system of civil rights restoration is unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, in a 43-page order, sharply criticized the unfettered discretion the governor has in the decision-making process. "To vote again, disenfranchised citizens must kowtow before a panel of high-level government officials over which Florida's governor has absolute veto authority," he wrote. "No standards guide the panel. Its members alone must be satisfied that these citizens deserve restoration."
Walker also found the lack of timeliness in administering clemency unconstitutional. He noted the board "may defer restoration of rights for years or forever."
"Indefinite can-kicking is not some Floridian fairy tale like a line-less Space Mountain," he wrote.
The Governor's Office responded in a statement: "The discretion of the clemency board over the restoration of felons' rights in Florida has been in place for decades and overseen by multiple governors. The process is outlined in Florida's Constitution, and [this] ruling departs from precedent set by the United States Supreme Court."
The office pledged to defend the clemency tradition in court, an appeals process that could take months.
To understand Florida's decades-old clemency process is to understand U.S. history, particularly the post-Civil War and Reconstruction era. That's when the law and measures like it began appearing across the South. Many legal historians and criminal justice reform advocates maintain that it was intentionally put in place in Florida and other parts of the South, to find ways to keep African-Americans under white establishment control even though slavery had been outlawed.
In an article for the Brennan Center for Justice titled "Racism and Felony Disenfranchisement: An Intertwined History," researcher Erin Kelley writes, "The Thirteenth Amendment carved out an exception allowing states to impose involuntary servitude on those who were convicted of crimes. Seeing an opportunity to sustain their crumbling economy, numerous Southern politicians quickly implemented new criminal laws that were [in writer Douglas Blackmon's words] 'essentially intended to criminalize black life.'"
The so-called Black Codes characterized many nonviolent, low-level offenses as felonies. "While white people accused of crimes often escaped punishment," Kelley adds, "black people were arrested and convicted," becoming cheap labor for Southern employers. The measures have since disproportionately kept African-Americans – many of whom have committed low-level offenses – disenfranchised for decades.
Similar laws remain on the books today in Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia. But according to The Sentencing Project, a D.C.-based voting rights advocacy group, Florida has the highest concentration of disenfranchised citizens in the country.
The federal ruling is a big shot in the arm for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition's ballot initiative to automatically restore voting rights to formerly convicted felons in Florida. The volunteer-led group reached an unprecedented milestone last month by submitting the 766,200 verified petition signatures required for a constitutional amendment to appear on the November 2018 ballot.
"This constitutional provision offers the option that solves the issue," says attorney Jon Mills, who helped draft the proposal for the ballot initiative and represented it before the state Supreme Court. "It elevates the visibility and importance of this issue, and it shows now that the voters – the public – have a clear option."
Mills expects the process of addressing the federal ruling in court, with appeals, could go beyond the November 2018 midterms. But that legal battle would become moot if the constitutional amendment passes.
Last March, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition reached its first goal by gathering the 68,000 petition signatures needed to trigger a review by the state Supreme Court of the constitutional amendment and its ballot language. It received unanimous approval.
After its state Supreme Court win, the coalition went into overdrive, soliciting thousands of volunteers and paid petition gatherers across the state to collect the signatures to meet the Florida Division of Elections' Feb. 1 deadline for constitutional amendments to appear on the 2018 ballot.
Howard Simon, executive director of Florida's American Civil Liberties Union, was part of a group that spent a year and a half researching and writing the ballot language.
"One of the reasons that this has become such an important movement and effort is because it's so important now to finally put the remnants of the Civil War behind us," he says. "We've got to drag Florida, kicking and screaming, into the modern era."
Volunteers circulated petitions at house parties, in parking lots, at festivals and campaign rallies, from Jacksonville to Miami. In the last few months leading up to the Florida Division of Elections' deadline, the American Civil Liberties Union pledged $5 million to the campaign, the organization's largest investment in a cause in its nearly 100-year history. In November, at a Jay-Z concert at the Amway Center in Orlando, Chicago rapper and opener Vic Mensa dedicated his performance to the campaign and urged fans to sign petitions circulating during intermission. Lady Gaga offered the same show of support at her November concert in Tampa. And Grammy award-winning artist and activist John Legend has raised the profile of the coalition's efforts on social media, tweeting regularly about voting rights and releasing videos as part of a national criminal justice-focused campaign, called Free America.
The coalition estimates a quarter of the petitions gathered came from volunteers, many of whom were ineligible to sign the forms themselves because of their status as convicted felons.
"The way that we did it really reflects what's great about this country," says FRRC executive director Desmond Meade, who notes that petitions are still coming into the office. "When you talk about regular everyday citizens from all walks of life; all races; all political perspectives that came together and recognize that Florida has a broken system and that we need to get in line with the rest of the country."
Come November, 60 percent of Florida voters will need to vote in favor of the constitutional amendment in November in order for it to pass. Up until then, the coalition is focusing on educating voters about what life looks like for formerly convicted felons in Florida. It is a life of stigma. It is a life of difficulties finding employment, obtaining a loan, and finding housing. For Meade, it is having a law degree but being prohibited from applying to the Florida Bar because of drug charges from the 1990s.
Meade, newly hired staff and volunteers will center the campaign on forgiveness and redemption, humanizing the 10 percent of the state's voting-age population who cannot vote. The coalition will also draw from the success of past constitutional amendment campaigns, including the most recent push to bring medical marijuana dispensaries to the state. If successful, automatic rights restoration could spur grass-roots campaigns in Virginia, Iowa and Kentucky, prompting reconsideration of the clemency process there.
But first things first, says Meade: Celebrate that history's already been made.
Meanwhile, the state will continue to fight in court to justify and preserve what Judge Walker called its "alarming, unconstitutional" clemency process.
“My life has been transformed through my faith, and what I see is that God constantly uses underdogs and people who are hurting and broken to do amazing things. I think this movement reflects that.” – Neil Volz
tweet this
Neil Volz
Neil Volz gained success quickly after graduating from Ohio State University. A chance opportunity with a congressional candidate catapulted him from Ohio to Washington, D.C., where he went from press secretary to chief of staff and, eventually, staff director for a legislative committee. But the quick success drove him to greed, he thinks now: “Ultimately I ended up crossing these ethical lines that I shouldn’t have.” In 2006, he was charged with felony fraud. He was ordered to pay a fine and work court-sanctioned community service hours. Though he did not serve time in prison, he says the stigma of the label – ex-felon – weighed him down."I became radioactive; I could not find a job anywhere. I went from being somebody people looked up to and admired to somebody nobody wanted to associate with," Volz says.
He began volunteering at a local homeless shelter in D.C. and, before long, got hired as staff. He is currently chairman of the Lee County Homeless Coalition in Fort Myers and continues his work with alcohol and drug recovery programs.
As a petition signature gatherer for the voting rights restoration ballot initiative, Volz met hundreds of people from all walks of life. Some of his most memorable moments were circulating petitions at campaign rallies for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
"It isn't very often that you don't find somebody who – if it's not them, it's their family member. It's somebody that they know." Volz is quick to say that voting rights restoration isn't a political issue but, rather, a "people issue" that crosses party lines. If he could vote, he says he would vote Republican.
“I had to make the decision to speak out because I wanted to help with the change, you know?” – Jessica Younts
tweet this
Jessica Younts
Jessica Younts, a mother of four, never wanted her children to feel the stigma of having a parent who had been convicted of a crime. She had already endured enough.Despite completing her law degree and passing the New York bar, the bar denied her admission, after a five-year wait.
"It's a scarlet letter," she says. "And it's really hard to have the courage to put that aside and be a voice for others."
Younts was involved in the rigorous process of putting the amendment ballot language together. There were plenty of naysayers, she remembers, but the coalition pushed ahead.
"It's so surreal," she says. "I mean, it's almost like I can't believe it's here. I know we still have November to look forward to because I know we'll win, but the fact that we made it this far when so many people were against us from the beginning – it's really surreal."
“They can walk in there and get their ballot … I can just stand in the window outside and just look and watch and hope.” – Cicily Martin
tweet this
Cicily Martin
Cicily Martin lost her right to vote before she even reached voting age. By 18 years old, the Sanford native had accumulated a slew of charges – including car theft and battery – aggravated by her addiction to crack cocaine. Martin, now 45, remembers taking her first hit of the drug at the age of 11."In 2008, I decided enough is enough," Martin says. She stopped using drugs and has been working to establish herself as a productive citizen. In 2011, she completed a nine-month course at Southern Technical College on business fundamentals. "That, in itself, made me feel so good that I finished something other than a jail sentence," she says. "I want to be one of the people to go in the jail house and say 'Look at me. Here's what I did.'"
Martin, now a grandmother, wants to open a skating rink and youth community center in Seminole County, where there are far fewer youth-centered programs than distractions, she finds. But the road has not been easy. She's met a lot of "no"s so far, presenting her proposal to community leaders.
"Just because I went to school and got that sheet of paper didn't mean that society was going to let me start doing things," she says.
Martin helped gather petition signatures in Sanford for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition's initiative. She remembers one woman asking her if she deserved her rights back. Now, the prospect of actually having them feels surreal.
"It's such a big thing. It's so big almost that I don't know what to do with it."
