Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Meanwhile - Innocence Is Irrelevant

"Comparing presidential administrations by arrests and convictions: A warning for Trump appointees"

This is the age of the plea bargain—and millions of Americans are suffering the consequences.

Emily Yoffe
September 2017 Issue


Shanta Sweatt (left) and her attorney, the public defender Ember Eyster, in Eyster's Nashville office
Nina Robinson

It had been a long night for Shanta Sweatt. After working a 16-hour shift cleaning the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, in Nashville, and then catching the 11:15 bus to her apartment, she just wanted to take a shower and go to sleep. Instead, she wound up having a fight with the man she refers to as her “so-called boyfriend.” He was a high-school classmate who had recently ended up on the street, so Sweatt had let him move in, under the proviso that he not do drugs in the apartment. Sweatt has a soft spot for people in trouble. Over the years, she had taken in many of her two sons’ friends, one of whom who had been living with them since his early teens.

[...]

This is the age of the plea bargain. Most people adjudicated in the criminal-justice system today waive the right to a trial and the host of protections that go along with one, including the right to appeal. Instead, they plead guilty. The vast majority of felony convictions are now the result of plea bargains—some 94 percent at the state level, and some 97 percent at the federal level. Estimates for misdemeanor convictions run even higher. These are astonishing statistics, and they reveal a stark new truth about the American criminal-justice system: Very few cases go to trial. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledged this reality in 2012, writing for the majority in Missouri v. Frye, a case that helped establish the right to competent counsel for defendants who are offered a plea bargain. Quoting a law-review article, Kennedy wrote, “?‘Horse trading [between prosecutor and defense counsel] determines who goes to jail and for how long. That is what plea bargaining is. It is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system.’”

[...]

Writing in 2016 in the William & Mary Law Review, Donald Dripps, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, illustrated the capricious and coercive nature of plea bargains. Dripps cited the case of Terrance Graham, a black 16-year-old who, in 2003, attempted to rob a restaurant with some friends. The prosecutor charged Graham as an adult, and he faced a life sentence without the possibility of parole at trial. The prosecutor offered Graham a great deal in exchange for a guilty plea: one year in jail and two more years of probation. Graham took the deal. But he was later accused of participating in another robbery and violated his probation—at which point the judge imposed the life sentence.

What’s startling about this case, Dripps noted, is that Graham faced two radically different punishments for the same crime: either be put away for life or spend minimal time behind bars in exchange for a guilty plea. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled, in Graham v. Florida, that the punishment Graham faced at trial was so cruel and unusual as to be unconstitutional. The Court found that a juvenile who did not commit homicide cannot face life without parole.

Thanks in part to plea bargains, millions of Americans have a criminal record; in 2011, the National Employment Law Project estimated that figure at 65 million....

[...]

Millions of people each year are now processed for misdemeanors. In a 2009 report titled “Minor Crimes, Massive Waste,” the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers described a system characterized by “the ardent enforcement of crimes that were once simply deemed undesirable behavior and punished by societal means or a civil infraction punishable by a fine.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocence-is-irrelevant/534171/

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Voting Rights for Ex-Offenders by State

(updated 6/10/19) In all but two states, voting-age citizens convicted of a felony are barred from voting for some period of time. Laws vary in each state .. http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=286 . While many states restore voting rights to individuals automatically after they exit jail or prison, others continue the bar on voting even while on probation or parole. Some even permanently disenfranchise people with a past conviction or require they petition the government to have their right restored.

This is a short, up-to-date state guide to voting for people with past felonies. For more, visit the resources on the right.

Overview

Voting rights retained while in prison for a felony conviction in:

Maine and Vermont.

Voting rights restored automatically upon release from prison in:

Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Utah.

Voting rights restored automatically once released from prison and discharged from parole (probationers can vote) in:

California, Connecticut, and Oklahoma

Voting rights restored automatically upon completion of sentence, including prison, parole, and probation in:

Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Virginia now does this by the policy of the current governor.

Voting rights restoration is dependent on the date or type of conviction or, in some cases, the outcome of an individual petition to the government in:

Alaska, Alabama, Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wyoming.

Voting rights can ONLY be restored through an individual petition or application to the government in:

Kentucky

State by State

With links for each state - https://www.nonprofitvote.org/voting-in-your-state/special-circumstances/voting-as-an-ex-offender/