Can a suit tied to an 1870 law finally end Va.’s feudal felon rights restoration regimen?

The American Civil Liberties Union sued in federal court this week to void a provision in Virginia law that strips those convicted of felonies of their voting rights for life unless the governor intercedes to restore them.

It’s the most recent attempt to end Virginia’s archaic, inequitable and monarchical system by which those who were convicted of crimes, did their time and honorably paid their debts can be restored to full citizenship only by executive fiat.

Youngkin administration now requires felons to apply to get their voting rights back

Prior legislative and executive efforts to effect needed change have failed. Hopefully, litigation will yield better results.

The Associated Press reported Monday that the lawsuit, brought by the ACLU of Virginia and the nonprofit voting rights group Protect Democracy, alleges that Virginia’s current restoration-of-rights regimen violates a Reconstruction-era law Congress passed setting terms for readmitting Virginia to the Union.

The 1870 Readmissions Act, signed by President Ulysses Grant, bars the commonwealth from disenfranchising people other than those who were convicted of “common law” felonies during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Among those serious crimes were murder, arson, rape, robbery, manslaughter and larceny.

Since then, the AP reported, Virginia expanded its list of felonies that carry automatic lifetime loss of voting rights, including drug offenses. And that is the root of so much of the current system’s inequity.

This isn’t an argument against prosecuting those who traffic in drugs that are increasingly ubiquitous and dangerous, particularly fentanyl and the prescription opiates that have devastated massive swaths of Appalachia. If anything, efforts to interdict those drugs and punish those who distribute them should redouble.

But, as the bromide goes, the punishment should fit the crime.

An 18-year-old drug runner who was convicted as a felon faces lifetime disenfranchisement in Virginia even after he has returned to society as a productive, tax-paying citizen. That’s a punishment indistinguishable from a convicted drug cartel captain. And it comes at a dismaying, racially disparate cost.

Black people comprise just 18.3% of Virginia’s slightly more than 8.6 million residents. Yet they account for almost half of the 312,000 Virginians — the fifth-largest number of any state — who can’t vote because of a felony conviction.

Virginia, however, is not alone. According to the FBI’s most recent Uniform Crime Report in 2019, Black people accounted for 32% of arrests for crimes against persons, including assault, homicide, kidnapping and human trafficking, 30% of property crime arrests (including 57% of robbery arrests, 41% of embezzlement arrests and 37% of stolen property arrests), and 28% of “crimes against society” including 26% of drug offense arrests.

Black people are imprisoned at five times the rate of whites, meaning that one out of every 81 Black adults in the United States is incarcerated, according to a 2022 analysis by The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit criminal-justice reform research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., and the ACLU.

A state constitutional amendment that would restore felons’ voting rights was enacted by a Democratic-controlled General Assembly in 2021 and signed by then-Gov. Ralph Northam, also a Democrat. But to make it to a statewide ballot for voter ratification, constitutional amendments must pass twice with a legislative election in between. Republicans won control of the House of Delegates and the governor’s office in the 2021 election, and the bill was left to die in a House committee in 2022.

Three governors of both parties — Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrats Terry McAuliffe and Northam — all significantly boosted the number of felons whose voting rights were restored. In March, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced that he was ending his predecessors’ policy of automatically granting voting rights restoration for felons who’ve completed their sentences.

Societal and racial dynamics notwithstanding, it’s an unfair, feudal arrangement that’s out of step with the majority of states. Virginia is one of 11 states with the most restrictive processes for restoring felons who’ve paid their due to full citizenship, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Where’s the incentive to reform and rehabilitate, if the hope for regaining one’s dignity resides solely in groveling to the governor and beseeching his favor?

So here we are, in 2023, hoping that a lawsuit pegged to an alleged violation of a 153-year-old law compels Virginia to do what basic decency alone should have accomplished long ago.