Thousands have their rights restored as Clemency board reviews cases
By Brent Kallestad

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Thousands of former felons will be able to vote, serve on juries and take a job with state-licensed firms after having their civil rights restored by Gov. Jeb Bush and the Cabinet, sitting as Florida's clemency board.

Bush announced Thursday that state officials completed a review this week of 125,000 cases included in a lawsuit filed against the state on behalf of felons released from prison between 1992 and 2001.

About 22,000 of them were found to be eligible to have their rights automatically restored. Of those, half have already regained their privileges. The severity of the crime is a factor in deciding whether rights will be restored automatically.

Of the remaining 103,000, about half are likely to get their rights restored if they seek a hearing. Many of the other half won't be eligible. "Some are back in prison; some have committed other crimes that make it such that they can't get their rights back," Bush said. Others may have died or moved out of state.

Last year a judge ordered the state to help former prisoners get their rights back because the Department of Corrections failed to provide them with an application as they left prison between 1992 and 2001.

"We've gotten through it, and it was a good thing to do," Bush said.

In addition to the 125,000 cases covered in the lawsuit, Bush also said that officials restored civil rights to another 20,861 in the past year and reduced the backlog of people waiting to hear about their case to just more than 8,000.

Florida is one of six states that does not automatically restore civil rights to people who have completed their sentence on a felony conviction.

An attorney for the ACLU, Randy Berg, said the clemency panel's work still represents only a fraction of the 600,000 Floridians he thinks are disenfranchised.

"That figure is not going to go away until the governor and Cabinet make restoration automatic," said Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute. "That ain't going to happen."

The number of former felons potentially denied the opportunity to vote has been part a particularly incendiary political issue in Florida since the 2000 presidential election when Republican George W. Bush won the state by a margin of only 537 votes of more than 6 million cast.

"In matters like this, the real issue is the agony ... families have to go through," Gov. Bush said.