Calif. lawsuit seeks to restore prisoners' votes

Calif. lawsuit seeks to restore prisoners' votes

Bob Egelko

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Tens of thousands of low-level felons sentenced to county custody or supervision under Gov. Jerry Brown's "realignment" of California's penal system should keep their voting rights, advocates argued Wednesday in a suit against the state's top elections official.

The lawsuit, filed in a state appellate court in San Francisco, challenged Secretary of State Debra Bowen's decision in December that felons in custody are not allowed to vote even if, under the new rules, they were sentenced to county jail instead of state prison.

Under state law, felons are ineligible to vote if they are "imprisoned" or on parole. At issue in this case is whether "imprisoned" refers only to the state prison system or, as Bowen's office contends, to county jails as well.

The suit claims Bowen is illegally disenfranchising 85,000 Californians - 30,500 jail inmates and another 54,500 released prisoners who will report to county probation departments rather than state parole officers. The figures are based on state estimates for June 2013.

Legislators approved Brown's realignment plan in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordering California to reduce the population of its overcrowded prisons by more than 30,000 in two years.

Since October, defendants convicted of "low-level" felonies that are not classified as serious or violent crimes or sexual offenses have been sentenced to jail instead of prison. Inmates released from prison after serving time for one of those crimes are placed under county supervision for the period that they would have been on parole.

In a Dec. 5 analysis sent to county voter registrars, Bowen's office said realignment did not restore anyone's right to vote.

Criminals who get felony sentences - a year or more behind bars - are "imprisoned" and ineligible to vote, no matter where they serve time, said Lowell Finley, Bowen's chief legal counsel. He also said county supervision of former prisoners was "functionally equivalent to parole."

Lawyers in Wednesday's suit said Bowen's office missed the point of realignment - a recognition that "California's previous approach to criminal justice was an expensive failure."

After three decades of policies that sent low-level felons to prison, "realignment now returns those California citizens to their communities (where) they have a constitutional right to vote," said American Civil Liberties Union attorneys representing two prisoners-rights groups and the League of Women Voters.

They said laws disqualifying felons from voting restrict fundamental rights and have a disproportionate effect on racial minorities. California courts have recognized those impacts and have interpreted voting rights broadly, the ACLU said, citing a 2006 appeals court ruling that allowed felons to vote if they had been sentenced to county jail as part of their probation.

"People who don't have power need the right to vote so that they can have a voice," said Willy Sundiata Tate of San Leandro, a former inmate and an organizer for one of the plaintiff groups, All of Us or None.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. begelko@sfchronicle.com