More than a half-million people in Florida cannot vote because they are ex-felons. They've served their time. Many have become productive, law-abiding citizens. But antiquated disenfranchisement laws prevent them, not just from voting, but from serving on a jury, running for public office or holding certain jobs.
Eddie Lee Darien Jr. was one of them.
The 61-year-old taxpaying, home-owning, five-time felon spent two years trying to win his voting rights back from a state that is one of only four in the nation that strips civil rights from ex-felons without providing automatic restoration. Other states either don't remove those rights or restore them automatically at some point after felons have served their time.
Not Florida.
The state's felon disenfranchisement goes back to the Reconstruction era, when it was used to keep blacks from voting. The provision was rewritten in 1968 and has passed several court tests, including most recently when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to its constitutionality.
The legal arguments do little to put a human face on the millions of people who have paid for their crimes but have been stripped of their civil rights — people like Eddie Lee.
In Darien's modest home in the Southeast Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa, there's jazz on the stereo — Hank Mobley's lyrical tenor sax — and jazz on the walls. Pictures of jazz greats like saxophonist Wayne Shorter serve as reminders of concerts Darien attended and his ability to find his way backstage to meet the stars.
He's soft-spoken and introspective about his upbringing in West Tampa's public housing projects and his exposure — and eventual addiction — to drugs. His contemplative nature reflects his devotion to Buddhism, the result of meeting jazz pianist Herbie Hancock — a practicing Buddhist — after a concert in Nashville in the 1970s.
Darien grew up in the segregated era of the 1950s, living with his grandmother when his mother died in childbirth. He lived in North Boulevard Homes, with lots of free time out on the streets. "Everybody's mother was your mother back then," Darien recalled. "We took pride living in the projects."
He went to the old Blake High School, one of two for blacks in Tampa in the '50s and '60s. Central Avenue was the main African-American nightlife drag, where big-name entertainers came and the party raged in places like Happy Tony's, Lincoln Bar and the Pyramid Hotel. "Those of us who were rebels were exposed to the drug era" by sneaking into the clubs there, he said. His Wolf Brothers wardrobe earned him the nickname "Fast Eddie," and over the years from high school to adulthood he developed a predilection for jazz and a taste for Robitussin AC cough syrup and marijuana. Back then, you could buy a joint for a dollar, a matchbox full of weed for $5.
His life took him first to Ybor City and its abundant drug scene in the 1960s, then to Dearborn, Mich., and the Ford plant, where he worked on the first Mustangs. As the decade wore on, and plant workers returned from Vietnam with heroin addictions, Darien started snorting powdered heroin. The Detroit riots chased him back to Florida before he moved to Harlem. Better jazz. More drugs.
Barring felons from voting and other parts of civil society, proponents say, is a punishment that is deserved. Some argue that ex-felons, if allowed to vote, would support politicians with nefarious agendas (like, say, repealing drug laws). Opponents say the law is not only unfair, it's motivated by Republican politics, removing large numbers of African-American Democrats from the voting pool.
But on this overcast Saturday morning in January, the five people sitting in a conference room at the Enoch Davis Center in St. Petersburg don't want to argue the fine points. They just want their vote back.
The five would-be voters, all African American, are full of hope at the start of the 9:30 a.m. session. Each one fills out a one-page form that will begin the odyssey to regain full citizenship.
Their stories are similar. Some did drugs and got trapped in that world, eventually getting caught dealing. Mable (she declined to give her last name) was arrested and convicted for transaction fraud.
Over the next half hour, they meet with counselors from the American Civil Liberties Union, which is part of a drive to reform voting rights in Florida. They all hear a variation of the story: If you qualify for restoration without a hearing, you might get your rights back in six months. If you have multiple felonies or have committed a crime that requires a clemency hearing before Florida's Cabinet, the wait can stretch into years.
There is no way of knowing how long it will take. There is only the grind of the bureaucracy and the whim of the Cabinet: the governor, attorney general, agriculture commissioner and chief financial officer sitting as the Board of Executive Clemency, which meets just four times a year. More than 13,000 Floridians are already waiting for a determination or a spot on the agenda.
The five enter the room with hope, looking to retrieve another piece of their dignity post-prison. They leave with a harsh — and disheartening — reality check.
As Mable said before she left the workshop, "You're nobody when you're a felon."
Darien knows how frustrating the process can be.
"It's disheartening," he said. "They're going to put you on hold. They're going to tell you whatever to disarm you in your pursuit of what is rightfully yours. It's double jeopardy — you're paying and you're still paying."
Darien avoided paying the price for his addiction for decades, living in places like Harlem, where he watched pianist McCoy Tyner play and where he added speedballs — an injected blend of heroin and coke — to his repertoire. But although his drug addiction continued, he kept pushing his life forward, earning an associate degree in community mental health in 1972. "I was a hustler," he said, but "I never lost sight that education was the key to black people surviving in the system that we are in."
He left New York City for Nashville, and left there for North Carolina State A&T, where he remained high, stayed in school and earned a bachelor's degree, again in community mental health.
He returned to Tampa in 1976, a secret junkie. He ended up working as a substitute middle school teacher and eventually as a drug counselor, "still not admitting that I was an addict. The addiction had taught me to be manipulative. I was a functioning, literate drug abuser."
By the end of the 1980s, however, his luck had run out. As he put it, "once you bend the law for so long, you end up breaking the law." He had his first drug arrest in 1989. Four others in the 1990s followed. He went to the state prison at Lake Butler three times, Hillsborough County jail five times.
When he got out in 1998, Darien was a five-time convicted felon with no civil rights. He couldn't get a license to work in community mental health. He couldn't vote. For 15 years.
Here is Florida disenfranchisement by the numbers:
827,000 Floridians cannot vote because they are convicted felons, according to an estimate derived from U.S. Department of Justice statistics compiled in 2000.
That represents 7 percent of the total number of voting-age Floridians who would otherwise be eligible.
Of those, 613,000 have served their time in prison and completed their sentences.
Of those, 13,329 have applied for the restoration of their civil rights and are awaiting either a determination from the state or a hearing in front of the Cabinet.
Those 13,329 will wait anywhere from a minimum of six months to a more likely two to three years to get an answer.
256,000 of Florida's disenfranchised are African American.
Of those, 167,000 have completed their sentences and served their time and earn the label "ex-felon."
Those ex-felons represent 10 percent of the African Americans of voting age. If you add current inmates, this means that nearly one in five black Floridians cannot vote.
120,000 of the disenfranchised are Latino, again a disproportionately high number.
One study estimated that 35 percent of all those disenfranchised — both in prison and those who have completed their sentences — would vote in any given election if they could.
Those currently disenfranchised voters would have voted 70-percent Democratic, based on an analysis of their race, gender and other demographic factors.
That's a lot of Democratic votes, more than enough to sway close elections in a state where narrow margins are commonplace.
The effect of these laws, opponents say, is to keep African Americans from voting, part of a package of Reconstruction-era barriers that included poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses. By extension, then, opponents claimed, the laws hurt the Democratic Party, which counts on nearly monolithic African-American balloting to propel its candidates.
Today, social scientists are proving those claims are correct. One study has, in fact, shown how felon disenfranchisement actually cost Democrats eight U.S. Senate seats and one presidency over the past three decades.
Sociologists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza, the authors of the upcoming Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, have published research about the phenomenon and its implications for democracy and politics since 2002.
"Among post-industrial democracies, the United States is virtually the only nation to permanently disenfranchise ex-felons as a class in many jurisdictions, and the only country to limit the rights of individuals convicted of offenses other than very rare treason or election-related crimes," Uggen and Manza wrote in a 2002 study published in the American Sociological Review.
"While a number of other countries (including the United Kingdom, Russian, and many of the post-Soviet republics) deny voting rights to prison inmates, the United States is unique in restricting the rights of nonincarcerated felons (who, as we show below, make up approximately three-quarters of the disenfranchised population)."
Two states — Vermont and Maine — allow all felons to vote, even from prison. Fourteen states allow felons on parole to cast ballots. Just four — Florida, Alabama, Virginia and Kentucky — bar voting by ex-offenders unless they seek restoration.
Uggen and Manza's meticulous work comes to a dramatic conclusion: Felon disenfranchisement has altered the course of American history.
In eight U.S. Senate races over the past two decades, allowing disenfranchised felons — both those in prison and those who completed their sentences — to vote would have tipped the scales from a Republican victory to a Democratic win, according to the research. Those races include Republican John Tower's 1978 victory in Texas and John Warner's win that same year in Virginia.
Closer to home, the sociologists found, Republican Connie Mack would have lost the 1988 Senate race against Buddy MacKay in Florida, as the Democrat would have received more than 40,000 additional votes from disenfranchised felons and ex-felons.
More striking is what the researchers insist was the cumulative effect of those wins and the subsequent Republican victories in those eight Senate seats. If felons and ex-felons had been allowed to vote, the actual Republican 54-46 advantage in the Senate would have become a 50-50 draw by 1982. Democrats afterward would have controlled the Senate (again, with the votes of felons and ex-felons) through the year 2000 instead of Republicans regaining a majority starting in 1994.
Most famously, the study confirmed what most Floridians already knew: The votes of ex-felons alone would have tipped the 2000 presidential election to Al Gore by giving him as much as a 62,000-vote margin in Florida.
Any wonder why many Republicans want to keep the current disenfranchisement system and Democrats are desperate to change it?
Overturning the system of disenfranchisement in America is a priority for both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Sunshine State is at the center of that fight.
"Florida is the lead disenfranchiser in the nation," said Catherine Weiss, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center. "It disenfranchises more people than any state in the United States."
Until last year, the strategy focused on getting Florida's law overturned in court. A lawsuit, Johnson vs. Bush, challenged the Florida's system as a violation of the Voting Rights Act, and it held promise until last November, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant certiorari, or cert, to hear the case, leaving a lower court ruling in place that upheld the system as constitutional.
"It was a classically cert-worthy case, the kind of case that the court normally accepts," Weiss said of its constitutional questions and conflicting decisions in the 11th and 9th U.S. Courts of Appeal. "There were plenty of reasons to take the case. [But] this term in the court has been characterized by a very steadfast avoidance of controversy."
Weiss said the Brennan Center's interest is purely on the grounds of civil rights and not politics.
Restoring those voters "improves our democracy," she said. "It would make government more responsive to the diversity of our communities."
And beyond that, there may be another benefit. One study has shown that ex-felons who vote are half as likely to be re-arrested as those who don't vote and have that important connection to civil society.
Convicted felons face plenty of barriers in their lives. The stigma keeps them from working in many jobs. Not too many employers are willing to take that chance.
Disenfranchisement, however, plays a hidden role in keeping ex-felons in poverty and despair. Losing your civil rights goes beyond the right to vote: Hundreds of jobs — pest control company owner, nursing aide, real estate agent are a few — require professional licenses, and once you lose your civil rights, you lose your ability to get many of those licenses. The rules and procedures for regaining your professional license vary so much that even the ACLU's voting project can't enumerate them, said Courtenay Strickland Bhatia, the outgoing director of that program.
The coalition of groups seeking change have two strategies now that the federal lawsuit is dead. The first is to continue to pressure Gov. Jeb Bush to change the executive rules regarding the restoration of civil rights, or Rule 9a. Under those guidelines, you can have your rights restored if you have been arrest-free for five years after completing your sentence, unless you have been convicted of certain offenses. The problem, Bhatia said, are the words "arrest-free," which kicks in even if charges are never filed post-arrest or a person is found not guilty.
Bush and the Cabinet could simply amend 9a to provide for automatic restoration of rights, she said. He has not done that, but has taken steps over the past year to streamline the process and cut the backlog. The Brennan Center's Weiss said those changes "are much more touted than real" and that ex-felons continue to move through the system "at a snail's pace."
Bush spokesman Russell Schweiss said the numbers tell a different story. The rule changes approved last year (which improved 9a from harsher changes made to it, ironically, by Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles) cut the backlog by 22 percent instantly. And where just 5,500 applications to restore civil rights were processed from 1994-99, more than 270,000 applications were processed from 1999-2005 under Bush, resulting in 57,478 felons getting their rights back.
"That's significant," Schweiss said. Bush has proposed more staff to speed the process further, he added. "With a couple of more tweaks, it will eliminate a lot of the backlog."
Those tweaks include more staffing for a process that already costs Floridians more than $4 million a year.
But the governor has no plans to do away with disenfranchisement as one of the penalties for committing a felony crime. "It's a fair process," Schweiss said, "and it's been upheld by the courts."
That leaves opponents headed down the legislative route for change. Several bills are already introduced that would, first, change Florida's Constitution to give the Legislature the power to set the rules for restoration of civil rights and, second, provide an automatic process to give ex-felons back their rights.
The ACLU is backing the bills being drafted by Republican Rep. Gus Barreiro of Miami. Barreiro is well respected on criminal justice matters, and his office confirmed that he is putting together a bill to essentially end disenfranchisement as we know it. The ACLU said the legislation would provide an automatic rights restoration except in cases where someone was convicted of rape, crimes against children or murder.
"We're seeing a growing level of bipartisan support for ending this injustice," Bhatia said. "Restoring people's right to vote and their civil rights is good for our entire society and good for democracy. Our democracy is big enough and strong enough for everyone to exercise the most fundamental rights in it."
Ending disenfranchisement has some unexpected supporters. The highly respected American Correctional Association has called for full voting-rights restoration for convicted felons, saying in 2004 that "the loss of the right to vote does not serve any rehabilitative function." Even the ultraconservative American Spectator magazine wrote last year, "There is no legitimate moral argument for denying those who have regained their status as free citizens through public penance the most basic right of a citizen."
The window for fixing Florida's system, however, could be a narrow one and limited to this year. Unless voters change the Constitution this year, another constitutional amendment on the ballot could require 60 percent margins of victory in future balloting, a hurdle that everyone involved in this issue agree would prove almost impossible to get over.
There is sure to be a lively fight over the idea.
Opponents typically cite a few reasons that disenfranchisement is proper. The most prominent is the idea that losing your civil rights is part of the punishment for committing a crime and breaking the social contract. Weiss countered that she understands that aspect but questions why this particular punishment lasts longer than prison, parole or other conditions of sentencing.
Then there is the almost laughable idea that some forward: Ex-felons could be a powerful voting bloc to support candidates who would strike down punishment for their crimes, or, say, legalize drugs. "Empirically speaking, it is utter nonsense," Weiss said of the hypothesis of an ex-felon voting bloc. "And even if it wasn't, you can't disenfranchise someone because you disagree with them."
After he got out of prison and 63 days of drug rehab, Eddie Lee Darien settled into a life of purpose. He lived for a while at a shelter home and started working there to help out others who battled crime and addiction. "I came back to reality, the bottom line," he said. He asked himself: "What could I do to make this a better world?"
For Darien, that meant counseling other drug addicts in local social programs. He works in Community That Cares Committee, which targets urban youth, is on the board of his neighborhood civic association, and volunteers for any work that lets him speak to kids with drug problems, like the Hillsborough County Anti-Drug Alliance.
But he couldn't vote. And he couldn't work in his chosen profession, community mental health, because he couldn't get a license from the state. He worked his paying job as a waiter at the Marriott Waterside in downtown Tampa instead. Then he heard of the rights restoration workshops from state Rep. Arthenia Joyner's office. He applied to get his rights back, and he solicited support from anyone he could.
"As the Substance Abuse Prevention Planner for Hillsborough County, I wish I could work with more honest hard working individuals like Eddie Darien," Susan Carrigan wrote in a letter to state officials. "He certainly deserves a second chance to make a worthwhile contribution to society."
"Mr. Darien has 'been there and done that' and will continue to be a positive role model," wrote James S. Gatlin, now a high-ranking Hillsborough school official who once hired Darien when Gatlin was principal of Buchanan Junior High.
Joyner herself wrote that Darien's "enthusiasm and affable personality impacts everyone that he meets."
Sometime in 2002, advocates with Joyner's office and volunteers from the George Edgecomb Bar Association compiled his application and sent it off. And Darien began waiting. And waiting.
In early 2004, he heard from Joyner's office that he would likely be on the next agenda for the clemency board.
Then one day in April of that year, he went to the mailbox and saw a letter from the state. He knew what it was before he opened it:
"The Governor with requisite members of the Cabinet have signed Executive Order 2004C-30 dated April 9, 2004, and have authorized me to issue the enclosed certificate granting you restoration of civil rights except the specific authority to own, possess or use a firearm."
The news, he said, filled him with joy.
"At that point I knew I was well on my way to being a productive member of society again. It was all up to me."
A year after he was re-enfranchised, "Fast Eddie" ran into Gov. Bush at the state's Hurricane Conference at the Tampa Convention Center, where Darien was working as a waiter. "I walked up to him," he recalled, "and said thank you for giving me my rights back."
But he went one step further than simply voting: In 2004 he worked as a precinct deputy for Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson, swearing in other poll workers and helping out at a precinct in Tampa Palms. Almost every voter who went through his precinct was white, but Darien's thoughts were about what Election Day meant for him, that "there is hope for this great country that we live in, especially for African Americans."
Three weeks ago, he got another letter from the Supervisor of Elections Office. Would he serve again as a polling deputy, this time at the Compton Park Rec Center?
"Oh, most definitely, man," Darien said. "That's ongoing."
Restoration of Civil Rights Workshops like the one described in this story are held on the second Saturday of each month in Tampa at the East Tampa Business and Civic Association, 2814 22nd Street N., and the third Saturday in St. Petersburg at the Enoch Davis Center. Call the ACLU at call 813-254-0925 for more information.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2006.