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Associated PressAs early as next month, state officials may consider a faster, easier process to restore felons' civil rights.
TALLAHASSEE - Attorney General Charlie Crist said Wednesday that the state may soon make it easier for some felons to get their civil rights restored without having to go through the full clemency process.
Crist is one of four members of the Clemency Board, and he said that although fully automatic restoration of every felon's rights isn't likely to be agreed upon any time soon, a faster, easier process, including possible automatic restoration for some who have committed minor crimes, may be considered by the board as early as next month.
Florida is one of seven states where felons are permanently prevented from voting, holding public office and getting a license for many occupations - civil rights that can be restored only through an arduous clemency process.
"It's got to be sort of a progressional thing, but I think we do need to progress," Crist said.
Gov. Jeb Bush has already allowed some changes and said back in September that he thought some further reforms need to be made. He reiterated that earlier this week, although he didn't discuss specifics.
At the September meeting, another Clemency Board member, Florida Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, suggested creating a panel to review the cases of some or all of the nearly 4,000 felons who are awaiting a clemency hearing. That board could provide quick approval in the easiest cases, with more difficult cases proceeding to the full board.
Talk of reforms follows a July court ruling that ordered Florida to make it easier for felons to get their rights back.
In a case brought by black lawmakers, a state appeals court ruled that the Department of Corrections wasn't following state law requiring prisons to provide departing inmates with an application for a Clemency Board hearing.
The Bush administration went one step further: A week after the ruling, it eliminated the form, and the prisons agency was ordered to start sending the names of released felons and probationers electronically to the clemency office to get them into the system faster.
Randy Berg, the lawyer who represented the black caucus in the lawsuit, said the issue has gotten lots of attention in Florida because of the fight over whether felons are getting their voting rights restored adequately.
"It more importantly affects their ability to get decent-paying jobs," Berg said. Without civil rights, they can't get a license to be a barber, a contractor or one of about 50 other occupations.
"If we want to keep people on the straight and narrow as they get out of prison, it's kind of a no-brainer you need to restore their civil rights," Berg said.
Suggestions that the process should be made easier also come at the same time a Florida newspaper has done a series of stories that found that with the current board and rules, it has been hard for felons to get their rights back.
The Miami Herald's four-part series on the clemency system also found that the backlog of felons waiting for the board to hear their case has quadrupled since Bush took office in 1999 and that under the current system, it could take three decades to clear the backlog.
The Herald reported that the board has rejected more than 200,000 civil rights applications since 1999, the highest rejection rate in at least 16 years. It found that nearly 80 percent of the 50,000 felons released from custody between 2001 and 2003 still can't vote. Many of those are nonviolent offenders who served little or no time in prison.
Berg said Bush and the Cabinet, which has the same membership as the Clemency Board, could easily make restoration automatic. Gov. Reubin Askew and the Cabinet made it automatic for a few years in the 1970s, but it was changed back. The constitution could also be changed to make it permanent, Berg said.