Felonies, Voting, and the Weight of History

American states are — literally and figuratively — all over the map on the issue of whether convicted felons should be permitted to vote.

Many states bar all convicted felons from voting, even after release from prison. Other states allow released felons to vote, as long as the sentence has been completed (sometimes called “discharged”).

What the law is on voting by ex-felons, and how it is enforced, raises a set of weighty issues about power, privilege, and political expediency.

For me, Exhibit A illustrating the power dynamics involved in disenfranchising felons is still the disputed Florida vote in the 2000 presidential election. State officials initiated an ill-fated effort to supposedly “cleanse” the Florida voter rolls of convicted felons. Unfortunately, the process was riddled with errors, resulting in hundreds and perhaps thousands of legitimate voters being removed from the rolls.

More recently, in Minnesota last summer, a political action group with ties to the Republican party tried to claim that voter fraud involving felons occurred in the 2008 Minnesota Senate race. The claims never got any traction from reputable observers, much less the secretary of state.

So where does this notion come from, that being convicted of a felony should have collateral consequences affecting the future exercise of the offender's civil rights?

The answer goes deep into the early common law. Back then, in feudal England, a felony was an offense for which conviction meant the death penalty, as well as forfeiture of personal property and escheat of land to the felon’s lord.

That’s right, the felon’s lord. The feudal language is jarring to modern American ears, but this is where our conceptions of “felony” have their origin.

The escheat of land did not occur immediately. According to Black’s Law Dictionary, the land first spent a year and a day in the possession of the king.

If the one-year-or-more duration sounds familiar, it should. Even today, most American jurisdictions mark the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor — or between jail and prison — as whether the sentence is over or under a year.

Kenneth Young and Transformative Suffering

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn charted the depths of degregation within the Soviet prison system in his landmark book The Gulag Archipelago. In the preface to the book's first volume, he wrote, "I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there not as something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed." With his unshakable commitment to write about it, to honor those who suffered and perished, he could even speak of a sense of love for the "monstrous world" from which he had emerged.

At age 24, Kenneth Young has already been imprisoned for nearly as long as Solzhenitsyn. When he was 14, on the mean streets of Tampa, Kenneth was forced into helping his mother's drug dealer commit a string of armed robberies. The 25-year-old drug dealer threatened to harm Kenneth's mom, 16-year-old sister, and even the sister's baby if Kenneth did not participate in the robberies. Kenneth and the dealer were caught, and a prosecutor charged Kenneth as an adult. Then a judge who now says he didn't understand the law sentenced Kenneth to life in prison without parole.



Last Friday, Nightline broadcast a segment on Kenneth's story. Terry Moran travelled to the maximum-security prison in Claremont, Florida, to interview Kenneth, who is one of more than 100 people around the country who are serving sentences of life without parole for crimes not involving homicide that were committed when they were under 18. Following a Supreme Court ruling earlier this month, people in this group may now have a chance to be considered for release.

Kenneth Young's quiet dignity during his interview with Moran was remarkable. What must it be like to wake up every morning in prison knowing you have been sentenced to die there for succumbing to threats issused by your mother's drug dealer at age 14? It could be soul-destroying. Yet like Solzhenitsyn before him, Kenneth has clearly gone inward and "absorbed into himself" the entire experience of being given such a monstrous sentence. He prays daily, has a learned a trade (barbering), and longs to become a positive mentor for his young nephew.

At the time Kenneth Young was charged as an adult, the prosecution claimed he was a "menace to society." But Kenneth did not have a single prior conviction before he was sentenced to life without parole. The judge who sentenced him, J. Rogers Padgett, has admitted he did not understand Florida's frequently-changed sentencing law at time he imposed the sentence. Judge Padgett has submitted an affidavit stating, "It was not my intent that Mr. Young never be considered for release."

When told by Terry Moran that Judge Padgett had (at least partially) recanted, Kenneth Young took the news with the perspective that only transformative suffering can bring. His sentence was a death sentence, he said - no matter what the judge calls it now, or what he thought the parole board would do.