http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/us/suit-alabama-bias-felons-voting.html 2016-09-27 01:52:51 Suit Accuses Alabama of Bias in Law That Bars Some Felons From Voting Language citing ‘moral turpitude’ is seen as vague and as being applied arbitrarily to disenfranchise black and poor people. === BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Constance Todd, 70 years old and a diligent voter in elections local and national, did not know what to make of the letter she got from the local registrar this month. “You have been convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude,” it read, apparently referring to a conviction for a series of bad checks from 20 years ago, “which disqualifies you from voting under Amendment 579 of the Constitution of Alabama.” A puzzled Ms. Todd gathered the official documents she keeps on hand, including the photo ID she had been required to obtain for voting in Alabama, and called her son, Timothy Lanier. He knew exactly what this was about. He knew, from a similar letter he had received himself. He also knew from his long days at the prison library learning about state laws by poring over the State Constitution. And, as it just so happened, Mr. Lanier is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed on Monday in federal court in Alabama, claiming that the state law stripping the vote from any person “convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude” — a law that has left more than 250,000 adults in the state ineligible to vote — is racially discriminatory, indefensibly vague and flagrantly unconstitutional. Such a law, the suit alleges, is racist in its origins and is biased in its effect, disenfranchising roughly 15 percent of Alabama’s black voting age population, compared with fewer than 5 percent of whites. The suit argues that bias lies in the crimes generally chosen as involving moral turpitude — there are multiple interpretations of the crimes in that category — and in the requirement that fines and restitution be paid before the right to vote can be granted again, a condition that falls harder on the poor. As the country’s incarceration rate grew over the past three decades, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based nonprofit group, laws like the one in Alabama “The vast majority of the reforms that have taken place have been toward expanding the electorate, cutting back on longstanding categories of disenfranchisement and/or making the process more transparent,” Mr. Mauer said, speaking of recent activity along these lines in California, Maryland and Virginia. Still, there are While the lawsuit filed in Alabama on Monday challenges felony disenfranchisement generally, its focus is on the state’s “moral turpitude” clause, a phrase that is not formally defined in law. Instead, it leaves the decision of who gets to vote, essentially, up to the local registrar. “Not only does it leave the fundamental right to vote up to an arbitrary process,” said Danielle Lang, a lawyer with the Indeed, A decade after that court decision, however, the Alabama Legislature voted to put the “moral turpitude” language back into the Constitution, though this time applying only to felonies. It has been there ever since. John Merrill, the Alabama secretary of state and a named defendant in the lawsuit, said on Monday that he had not seen the litigation but pointed out that he has pushed for laws that would define and limit those felonies considered to involve moral turpitude. “We don’t want anybody to be disenfranchised, even people who have been convicted of crimes, as long as they’ve paid any restitution,” he said. For the second year in a row, a bill made its way through the Alabama Legislature in the past session, and with the backing of high-level Republicans as well as voting rights advocates, it looked as if it might pass. In one of the late versions of the bill, said the Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, a veteran of battles over felony disenfranchisement in Alabama, all drug-related convictions except for trafficking would have been removed from the moral turpitude category, which would have immediately opened voter eligibility to thousands. But in a sign of the national trajectory on this issue, some of the main criticism of the bill came from members of the Democratic black caucus who believed it did not go far enough; indeed, some were mulling the best way forward having heard the news that a lawsuit was in the works. Eventually the caucus backed the bill, but the session ended before a vote. “That would have given us at least 50 to 100,000 more voters this election cycle,” Mr. Glasgow said, though he did see some limited success in Many who have been convicted of felonies simply assume that they have permanently lost the right to vote. But given all the ambiguity around who is and who is not eligible, others try to register to see what happens. Often, the ambiguity only continues. Martha Shearer, 53, and an organizer with Greater Birmingham Ministries, a nonprofit organization that is a plaintiff in the suit, has been voting for years here. She had a felony drug conviction nearly three decades ago, but her brother, who also had a conviction, tried to register to vote himself and was rejected. So she assumed that registrars policed eligibility and that she was in the clear. Last year, Ms. Shearer went to the State Board of Pardons and Paroles with the hope of gaining a full pardon. She showed an official her paperwork, her two master’s degrees, her uninterrupted work history. The woman asked if Ms. Shearer wanted to vote again. “I said, ‘Well, I’ve been voting,’” Ms. Shearer said. The answer startled her. “She told me,” Ms. Shearer recalled, “that I had been committing a crime.”