In a 6-3 decision that fell along this conservative court’s usual ideological lines, the court upheld an Oregon city’s policy of doling out civil and criminal penalties to unhoused people who sleep outside even as the city lacked sufficient shelter. 

Unhoused plaintiffs had sued the city of Grants Pass in federal court, arguing that its camping ban violates the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment. 

The six conservative justices on the Supreme Court, however, disagreed. “The Court cannot say that the punishments Grants Pass imposes here qualify as cruel and unusual,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. 

In her dissent, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused her colleagues of criminalizing the very condition of being homeless. She called on the court to “prohibit punishing the very existence of those without shelter.”

The ruling overturns several decisions by the Ninth Circuit, which covers western states, including Oregon and California. In Martin v. Boise, the Ninth Circuit held in 2018 that cities cannot punish people for sleeping outside without providing adequate shelter options. The Ninth Circuit then reinforced that decision in 2022 when it struck down Grants Pass’ camping ban, siding with the plaintiffs. 

These rulings had put in place some protections from aggressive sweeps of homeless encampments in western states. But a vast suite of public officials, including many Democrats, asked the Supreme Court to lift those protections. The court obliged last week. 

Hours after the decision, Bolts held a roundtable discussion on what the ruling means with three people who have closely studied the effects of camping bans: Charley Willison,  an assistant professor of public health at Cornell University who studies public health and political responses to homelessness; Chris Herring, an assistant professor of Sociology at UCLA who has researched the criminalization of homelessness in liberal California cities; and Eric Tars, senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center, a national advocacy organization that filed an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case in favor of striking down the city’s policy. 

In a wide-ranging discussion, these three experts shared their worry that, even if the Grants Pass decision does not mandate any enforcement, it will only increase aggressive policing tactics against people experiencing homelessness instead of long-term solutions to a worsening housing crisis.

“One thing that does concern me is how much more significant rates of homelessness are now, compared to pre-pandemic,” Willison said. “How will elected officials proceed with this, when the crisis is so extreme?” 

Let’s get to the ruling: Is this a decision you were expecting?

Charley Willison: Unfortunately, I think probably for all of us in the room, this isn’t surprising. We know that cities have been using police to respond to homelessness through punitive civil and criminal penalties for a very long time, definitely for over a century, but becoming more formalized in recent decades. This ruling takes us back to the status quo of just allowing cities to be able to do this. 

Eric Tars: Many elected officials get boxed into non-solutions that are the most politically expedient because their constituents are asking for a quick fix response that can sweep individuals off a corner, using the threat of law enforcement or the enforcement of these laws. But because you’re not solving homelessness, for any of those people who are swept, they are just moved somewhere else and remain a problem. 

In the majority decision, Justice Gorsuch does cite all these claims by cities, that past cases somehow bind their hands and limit them in addressing homelessness. The Martin v. Boise decision, far from binding the hands of communities, actually opens up the policy discussion to solutions that actually work. 

It enables a good elected official to say, ‘Look, I agree with you, people should not be sleeping on that street corner. But the courts have told us, we can’t just sweep them away, unless we provide a better place for them to be. So let’s work together to get that solution that’s actually going to solve homelessness permanently, and is going to give both you as a housed constituent and those unhoused constituents a better result altogether.’ 

So communities lost a tool today to get us to the solutions that we actually need to end homelessness. And that’s disappointing and dangerous.

One of the key differences between Gorsuch’s majority opinion and Sotomayor’s dissent was over the question of whether the Grants Pass law was criminalizing the mere action of camping or, as Sotomayor denounced, whether it criminalized the status of being homeless. What do you make of this distinction?

Tars: No, there is really no distinction, as the dissent makes clear. One of the things that the dissent gets right, but the majority opinion deliberately gets wrong, is that this is not even a case where the rich and the poor of Paris are equally forbidden to sleep under the city’s bridges: This law only applies to people who are putting down blankets and sheltering themselves to form a temporary habitation. 

That means that if you have your own permanent residence and are just going out to enjoy the park, you can put down a picnic blanket, stargaze, whatever—and that’s fine. But if you are doing it because you have nowhere else to go, then the law applies to you and you are forbidden from doing it, and can be penalized for doing it. 

That’s why this does, in fact, criminalize only people who have the status of not having permanent housing or who are homeless. Despite the majority’s opinion, it was designed explicitly to be cruel to people experiencing homelessness.

Chris Herring: In the oral argument, there was a line of questioning to Grants Pass’ attorney asking, ‘Are there any cases of you giving tickets to say, a person passing through as a backpacker in town? Or anyone else who wasn’t actually homeless?’ They could not point to an example. So empirically, we know that the ticketing and this punishment was only also going to those who are unhoused. 

Let’s back up a bit and talk about how U.S. cities currently deal with homelessness. Why do so many places readily turn to police for enforcement of anti-homelessness statutes? What’s the history behind this? 

Willison: A huge part of the history of policing in the United States was about controlling public behavior for the benefit of politically privileged groups. During the 19th century, and through the 20th century, we saw explicit criminalization ordinances, quite similar to the ones we see today, start to be utilized by police departments to control the visibility of people who are sleeping in encampments. It was about hiding the visibility of poverty, of public displays of mental illness, for the preservation of property values for wealthy constituents. 

When the federal government got involved to start formalizing responses to homelessness in cities across the United States, they built this structure known as the “Continuum of Care,” off of the nonprofit structure that already existed—shelters, soup kitchens, things like this. [Editor’s note: A “Continuum of Care” is a local planning body that receives homeless assistance funds from the federal government.] Today, we have a whole wealth of expertise within the “Continuum of Care” system, but in the majority of cities they actually don’t have any teeth to be able to carry out policy responses to homelessness. This is the case in Grants Pass: The “Continuum of Care” is a regional entity that is not a part of local government. 

Tars: The opposition [in the Grants Pass case] pointed to the existence of vagrancy laws at the dawn of the country to say this is something that was baked in at the founding. But those vagrancy laws specified two things. One was that people from outside the city could be criminalized just for coming in and not having a job. They also mandated support to people who became homeless and were residents in the community. So the founders actually would have been appalled by the behavior of Grants Pass, who is criminalizing its own citizens who have lived there, often for decades but have been trapped like so many Americans by the rising costs of housing, while they don’t have rising incomes. 

So this is not in keeping with the more generous parts of the history of our country. That history was renewed during the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt saw one third of his nation with no house and said we are adopting a second bill of rights, including “the right to a decent home” for every American, and he put that rhetoric into policy. From the 1940s up through the 1970s, we did not have mass homelessness in this country; we had a social safety net.

For the past 40 years, we’ve been losing deeply affordable housing, and that has produced the modern homelessness crisis. And their response has not been to renew our commitment to those programs that worked really well for decades, but instead to turn to the law enforcement approach. 

Now that the courts have ruled in favor of the city of Grants Pass, how will this affect the way cities and states criminalize homelessness? Do you expect more people to be fined and even taken to jail? For example, I saw that the city of Missoula, Montana, just passed a new anti-camping law. Do you expect more such ordinances to pop up in the wake of this ruling? 

Herring: I think it’s important to understand what the status quo was, even with the protections of the Ninth Circuit [Martin v. Boise in 2018 and Grants Pass in 2022]. In Grants Pass, what people faced even then was an incredibly punitive system; they currently have to pack up their stuff and move park-to-park every three or four days. Many receive over $200 fines when they’re not able to move quickly enough. 

Similarly, in San Francisco, after the city acknowledged Martin v. Boise, policing and criminalization actually increased. The only difference was that now they had to offer people shelter, and that shelter could be anything; at one point during my research, officers were offering people a one-night bed. If you were surviving on the streets with your survival gear and were offered a shelter for one night, sure, you could go to that shelter. But you’d have to give up your tent, your backpack, and after staying in shelter one night, you would be back on the street with nothing.

This just goes to show that these protections were very minimal to begin with. 

All that was being protected against was a ban of sleeping with a blanket for 24 hours. Now that that’s removed, that means that places can do that. That’s what we’re gonna have to see. Now, in places like San Francisco or certain liberal strongholds, there’s not the political will to be so blatant about that. But in places like Florida, and other conservative areas, absolutely. [Editor’s note: A new Florida law is set to go into effect in October that will ban homeless people from sleeping in public or face the threat of jail.]

This could lead to a race to the bottom of increasingly more punitive policies, moving people around. 

Tars: There is a really well-funded effort being made by billionaires with template legislation that they are shopping around to state legislatures right now, to criminalize homelessness at the state level, to create relocation camps. 

This is also explicitly part of former President Trump’s platform for the presidency, that he wants to create a national camping ban and relocation camps for people who simply can’t afford housing in their jurisdictions. He had similar plans back when he was in office, and the fact that the Supreme Court did not take up Martin v. Boise back in 2019 was what stopped him. 

So now the Supreme Court has basically paved the way both for cities, states and potentially the federal government to engage in more criminalization of people experiencing homelessness.

The court rejected the Eighth Amendment argument, so are there still constitutional protections for people experiencing homelessness? For example, a Justice Department investigation recently found that the Phoenix Police Department violated the civil rights of people experiencing homelessness in its sweeps of encampments. What mechanisms are still in place to be a check on police enforcement?

Herring: This [Eighth Amendment defense] was holding cities accountable. It was the leading legal strategy to give some baseline protection and injunction in cities. It definitely had a huge symbolic effect and moral authority; I think one reason that we saw California lawmakers asking for the court to hear [Grants Pass] in the first place was that they really didn’t like being portrayed supporting cruel and unusual punishment. 

There’s lots of other ways that these legal cases are going to be pursued under the Fourth, Fifth, 14th Amendments dealing with privacy property and due process. But that doesn’t carry the same moral charge to say “you’re not following due process” as committing cruel and unusual punishment. I think that will also have a big impact on how these cases are covered in the news media, and are thought about politically.

Tars: This ruling doesn’t mean we don’t have any legal tools left, the decision was explicit that there are other legal avenues that we can still take. The National Homelessness Law Center is going to be working with all of its legal partners across the country, to continue to find ways that we can vigorously defend the rights of people experiencing homelessness. 

But at the end of the day, even if the Supreme Court had ruled in our favor, that was never going to end homelessness on its own. It was going to give us an important platform that we could build on.

States and localities need to be doing all that they can to address homelessness, including things like increasing funding for truly affordable housing, changing zoning laws to allow for more housing, expanding health care coverage—and at the bare minimum, again, at least rejecting the false notion that jails and fines will solve homelessness.

Do you think there are any positive examples of U.S. cities that are addressing unsheltered homelessness without resorting to punitive solutions? 

Willison: Almost all cities across the country unequivocally use civil and criminal penalties, even in places where they will also have concurrent supportive housing policies that are using housing-first principles to provide people with access to housing and essential social and medical services.

So when we think about how do we move the needle, thinking about intergovernmental incentives is really important. One thing that came up in 2022, is the use of Medicaid 1115 waivers: A lot of states across the country are starting to do this so Medicaid can now pay for time-limited direct housing costs. This is something that’s brand new; these Medicaid 1115 waivers are explicitly targeting homelessness and are providing either direct housing cost or tenancy supportive services for people experiencing homelessness.

Herring: There are also more immediate alternatives to criminalization, which are alternatives to policing. We’ve been seeing cities create new models for responding to 911 calls regarding people experiencing homelessness and mental illness crises. These reroute calls that would go to police to other trained specialists, such as social workers or psychiatrists. 

Of the examples we have, the longest running one is in Eugene, Oregon; it’s called Cahoots. They handle over 20 percent of the total calls; they handle 24,000 calls a year, and of those, only 250 need police backup. [Editor’s note: These are the numbers for 2019.] So police can be involved when necessary but it’s not the go-to response, as it is in so many cities today. 

But some of the places doing best on creating housing also have more anti-homeless laws and some of the highest intensity of policing. The issue is we often hear that these have to go hand in hand: One of the arguments put forward in these liberal cities, and also written into the majority decision, was that these laws supposedly help cities push people into services. And this is just a myth. None of the empirical evidence points to this. Dozens of social scientific studies say rather that this sort of criminalization actually undermines people accessing those services. 

Criminal records prevent people from getting jobs, prevent people from getting housing, prevent people from even getting government assisted housing or getting into drug rehab, and in some cases, even accessing shelters because they have outstanding warrants. It’s really important to recognize how this is counterproductive rather than supportive.

Willison: You have these notions that criminalization must be necessary in some way. We know it makes it so much harder to end homelessness, but these notions persist because of the ways in which people experiencing homelessness continue to be systematically marginalized or excluded from policy debates. And I think something to consider, beyond big and small policy changes, is how to get people into the room. 

There’s a lot of great things that are happening through tenant union organizing, or representation through Continuums of Care, or other other advocacy networks where you can provide adequate representation in policy debates for groups that can’t be there themselves. Right now it’s really one sided, and until we shift the power dynamics, we won’t see shifts in the narratives, which is essential to changing these institutions.

The roundtable has been edited for length and clarity.

The post “Designed to be Cruel”: How Grants Pass Will Ramp Up the Policing of Homelessness appeared first on Bolts.

The moderator of an April candidate forum hosted by the City Club of Central Oregon wanted to know: Could the Republicans running for secretary of state confirm that, if elected, they’d certify the results of Oregon elections, even when their preferred candidates lose?

That would depend, candidate Dennis Linthicum responded. He’d first want to check with citizen activists.

“No detective will ever find a body in the backyard if he doesn’t look,” said Linthicum, who is currently a state senator representing a district in south central Oregon. “So, at some point, the public is the best lookers we have. They’re out there, they’re investigating. You’ve got people doing the math. You’ve got people chasing ballots and understanding how ballot harvesting has been harming the public.”

At no point in the forum did Linthicum provide evidence of widespread voter fraud in Oregon—there isn’t any—but that has never stopped him. He is part of a nationwide network of conservative officials and cultural influencers who have stoked election-related conspiracies for years now. Three years ago, he joined lawmakers from around the country in calling for an audit of the 2020 presidential election in all 50 states based on unspecified “fraud and irregularities.” 

Linthicum last week easily captured the GOP nomination to be secretary of state, Oregon’s top elections official. The office oversees voter registration and voting procedures, and is also charged with certifying election results.

In November, he’ll face Democrat Tobias Read, currently Oregon’s treasurer, who won his own contested primary last week. (The sitting secretary of state is not running.) Read is the clear favorite in this blue-leaning state, which hasn’t elected a Republican in any statewide race since the secretary of state election in 2016.

Mirroring many of the conspiracy theories pushed by allies of Donald Trump since his loss in the 2020 presidential race, Linthicum traces his unfounded claims to mail voting. He’s running on a platform of eliminating vote by mail, and forcing people to only vote in-person.

“There’s a giant chain of custody problem that’s associated with mail-in ballots,” he said at the April forum. “Balloting by ID, in a local precinct, where it can be managed by locals within the community, is the appropriate way to go.”

This change would end a system that Oregon pioneered a quarter-century ago, and one that has both boosted turnout in the state and inspired a policy shift in many other parts of the country. ​​Oregon first allowed mail ballots in 1987, and in the 1990s it became the first state to adopt universal mail voting, meaning that every registered voter got a ballot in the mail. Today, most states allow any eligible voter to vote by mail. Eight states have universal mail voting. 

Read, the Democrat, told Bolts he’ll work to protect the system if elected. “Oregonians are rightly proud of our long tradition of vote-by-mail elections,” he said. “I will look to strengthen it by making it more transparent and accessible, and protect it from cynical efforts to undermine our elections.”

Bolts reported in April that Read was running on incremental changes that would make it easier for people to vote. For example, he wants to set up a system that would send voters digital notifications of the status of their mail ballot so that they can follow it and feel confident it counted.

Voting by mail has grown to be very popular in Oregon, to the point that only a slim minority of people there vote in person anymore. Paul Gronke, who has been conducting public opinion research on this topic for nearly a decade, told Bolts that prior to Trump, voting by mail was “really overwhelmingly supported” in Oregon, among Republicans and Democrats alike.

“There were really very few questions,” said Gronke, a professor at Reed College and director of the Portland-based Elections & Voting Information Center. “Everybody loved it because we’d really adapted to it.”

But many conservatives soured on mail voting starting in 2020, and circulated widely debunked conspiracies that it enabled mass fraud. GOP-run states adopted new restrictions on mail voting and ballot drop boxes, which are used to collect mail ballots. No state has outright banned mail voting nor has any state with universal mail voting rolled that back, including conservative Utah. 

The unfounded claims about mail voting have resonated in parts of Oregon—the May 21 primary saw some protesters gather in Bend to demand an end to mail voting, for instance—even if the state was not competitive in 2020. 

Linthicum has had a hand in that. Alongside some conservative allies, the lawmaker filed a lawsuit in 2022 looking to strike down Oregon’s vote-by-mail system. 

The lawsuit alleged that mail voting is so unsafe and opaque that its availability violates citizens’ civil rights under the U.S. Constitution. It asked the courts to end mail voting altogether in Oregon, even as it contained no proof about issues with mail voting in Oregon. Relying largely on the debunked conspiracist documentary 2,000 Mules, it argued that “organized criminal” officials may be covering up fraud, and that the public cannot know “whether our elections are indeed safe.”

That suit was dismissed by a federal judge last year, and the U.S. Supreme Court last week declined to take up the case.

Linthicum has still repeated his claims against mail voting on the campaign trail. “Today, people, not necessarily citizens, can vote using a centralized non-transparent black box using mail-in ballots with nothing but a signature to validate the authenticity of the vote,” he wrote in a campaign newsletter in January. (Noncitizens are barred from voting in federal elections everywhere, and studies show these laws are not broken at any significant scale, but Republican politicians have increasingly spread false information on the issue.) 

Linthicum did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. 

As secretary of state, he would be limited in his ability to force the reforms he envisions. 

The daily tasks of Oregon election administration are handled by county-level officials. The secretary of state acts largely as a coordinator, and has no unilateral power to make significant changes to the election system. That work mainly falls to the state legislature, and if he wins in November, Linthicum would very likely have to contend with a statehouse controlled by Democrats, who strongly support mail voting. (Oregon voters are also electing the entire state House, and half of the state Senate, this fall. Democratic governor Tina Kotek, who won by just three percentage points in 2022, is not up for election until 2026.) 

The secretary of state may be involved in future litigation around mail voting. The office was named as a defendant in the lawsuit filed by Linthicum and others in 2022, and the state defended the system’s constitutionality. The secretary of state’s responsibility to certify election results may also prompt some chaos if Linthicum wins, given his hints that he could look to stall the process. 

In other contexts in which election deniers have refused to certify elections, courts have stepped in, and here, too, Oregon’s liberal supreme court looms as a backstop. But Trump allies have theorized that creating a “cloud of confusion” around results can gain them an advantage.

Election observers also commonly warn that individuals gaining a platform to spread false narratives about election integrity has an insidious effect on people’s confidence in democracy. 

“The challenge our system faces in the U.S. is not the reality of election fraud, or weakened election integrity, but the belief that voters have,” said Gronke, the professor and researcher. 

He added, of Linthicum, “Having someone with the bully pulpit like that can exacerbate that level of distrust.” 

While calling on conservative activists to help prove election fraud, Linthicum has also directly embedded himself within that corps. He was the only sitting elected official to put their name on the lawsuit against vote-by-mail, joining a group of plaintiffs that included advocates with the conservative citizen organization Free Oregon and the Election Integrity Committee of the state Republican Party. 

Linthicum has found other allies within the halls of power in some of his endeavors. Two Oregon lawmakers, state Senator Kim Thatcher and state Representative Lily Morgan, joined him in signing the 2021 letter demanding an audit of all states’ presidential results. 

Linthicum’s opposition to his state’s government has led him to champion the efforts of some in rural Oregon counties to secede from the state. He filed legislation seeking to force the state to open discussion on a far-fetched plan to join eastern Oregon with Idaho. Thirteen counties have approved advisory local measures to signal support for secession, including Klamath County, where Linthicum lives. 

Linthicum’s bid for higher office comes after a tense 2023 legislative session that saw him and nine other Republican state senators stage an extended statehouse walkout in protest of Democratic legislation on abortion, gun rights, and transgender health care. Voters in 2022 had passed a ballot measure to punish absenteeism among lawmakers, and the state supreme court confirmed in March that Linthicum was barred from seeking reelection as a result. 

Democrats have used their authority in Salem over the last decade to pass a string of reforms to make democracy more inclusive, extending beyond just mail voting. Perhaps most significantly, the state was the first in the country to adopt an automatic voter registration program for eligible voters, and is now among a handful of states pushing the federal government to let that program grow even further. 

Read, who is now running to keep Democrats in control of the secretary of state’s office, says he wants to build on that work, proposing tweaks but no big overhaul, Bolts reported last month.

“Any effort to make it easier for people to vote, to remove barriers, is a good thing,” Read said.

Phil Keisling, who helped champion the creation of universal mail voting as secretary of state in the 1990s, noted that this issue has long been partisan. Initially, he told Bolts, it was Oregon Republicans who pushed to codify universal mail voting in state law, and Democrats, including Keisling at first, who resisted the idea. “Heck, I voted against it. I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. By the mid-90s, he was sold, but, he added, “I was spending most of my time trying to convince Democrats this wasn’t a nefarious Republican plot.”

Keisling, who now advocates for this reform nationwide as chair of the National Vote At Home Institute, said that the program over time became very normalized in Oregon. Of Linthicum’s call to eliminate mail voting, he said, “I think it’s an issue the majority of Oregonians are going to pretty soundly reject.”

“If you ask most in the state what they think of mail voting,” he said, “their response will be, ‘Don’t you dare take it away, we love it.’”

The post The Republican Nominee to Lead Oregon Elections Wants to Stop All Mail Voting appeared first on Bolts.

“I never once saw a piece of paper, or a sign,” Pickens told Bolts. Sometimes he’d talk about the election with others detained alongside him, he said, but though adults held in Oregon jails are technically eligible to vote, “nobody else had any idea of how to get it done.”

Pickens was later convicted and transferred to the state prison system. His two-decade term there coincided with yet another major reform to election administration in Oregon: In 2015, the state kickstarted what would become a nationwide shift to automatic voter registration. But this move to make elections more inclusive again did not touch Pickens; like other Oregonians in prison over a felony, he’d lost his right to vote. 

Pickens regained that right when he was released but he was dismayed to find that formerly incarcerated people he encountered rarely knew that they also could vote. In 2022, his first full year out of prison, Oregon led the country in voter turnout. It didn’t feel that way in his circles.

“The lack of education is extensive,” Pickens said. “The people who have the knowledge and the power about voting really aren’t making it as available as they could.”

Pickens’ friend Sterling Cunio, who was detained at the same prison and also let out in 2021, echoed that sentiment, telling Bolts, “When we were inside, the only way we knew that we had our rights restored once we got out is because the prisoner population was educating each other.” Young adults, people living in poverty, and Native Americans, among other groups, also experience lower turnout and less access. “Oregon can say, ‘Hey, yeah, everything is great,’ but I want to see effort to engage, to educate all underserved populations in voting,” Cunio said. 

Even a state with a reputation for generally excellent voter services always has room to improve, their testimonials stressed. 

That is not lost on the leading Democratic candidates to be Oregon’s next chief elections official. 

James Manning, a state senator, and Tobias Read, Oregon’s treasurer and a 2022 candidate for governor, each told Bolts that they believe the state can do more to encourage participation and broaden voter access.

But they also offered different priorities and visions for what needs fixing. In his interview with Bolts, Manning emphasized the urgency of reversing the restrictions and structural neglect that keep some at the margins, including by ending the ban on people voting from prison. He talks of lingering exclusions as stains on democracy, stemming from a history of racism that Oregon should immediately confront.

Read feels the state should focus on fine-tuning the mechanics of Oregon’s existing systems before considering an idea, like voting from prison, that may be more divisive. His priorities, he said, include ironing out Oregon’s universal mail voting and automatic registration laws to address ways in which they may be tripping up the people that they’re meant to help.

Read, who has a fundraising lead and more endorsements from the state’s Democratic establishment, will face Manning in the May 21 Democratic primary. Also in the running are James Crary, Paul Damian Wells, and Dave Stauffer, candidates who have never held state-level office and have raised almost no money. 

The Democratic nominee will move on to face the winner of a three-way Republican contest in November. Oregon rarely elects Republicans in statewide races, though general elections are often competitive. The victor will replace LaVonne Griffin-Valade, who came into the role last summer after Democrat Shemia Fagan resigned in scandal. Griffin-Valade is not seeking a full term.

The next secretary of state will inherit a vast bureaucracy with which to tackle stubborn participation gaps. They’ll have a significant bully pulpit from which to push for change. 

They’ll also be first in line to replace the governor in the event of a vacancy. That’s how Kate Brown, who served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2015, entered the governor’s mansion in 2015; her predecessor there, John Kitzhaber, resigned—also in scandal—just a month into his fourth term. 

Recalling her own work laying the foundation for automatic voter registration, a program she backed as secretary of state and then signed into law as governor, Brown told Bolts via email, “the next Secretary is going to have to be willing to take risks, innovative, and strategic.”

“What actions can the Secretary take that will create the greatest amount of good (in this case access) for the most number of folks?” added Brown, who has not endorsed in this race.

Manning says the work of strengthening democracy is something he takes “personally.” The lawmaker, who is Black, told Bolts, “Let’s go back over history. We know during Jim Crow and even before that, people that look like me had to fight for the right to vote.”

Since joining the Senate in 2016, Manning has sponsored a bevy of legislation to grow the state’s voter rolls, often tailoring bills to groups that are less likely to be registered—if not explicitly barred. 

Last year, he sponsored a bill to expand the scope of the state’s automatic voter registration program. As adopted in 2015, the program applies to people who are getting or renewing a driver’s license; it left out people who don’t interact with the state’s DMV. The reform he carried, which became law last year but cannot be implemented without the federal government’s approval, would automatically register people when they interact with Medicaid offices. 

State data indicate that 85 percent of eligible residents who are unregistered to vote are Medicaid recipients, meaning that they are necessarily among the poorest people in Oregon. 

Manning this year unsuccessfully pushed separate legislation to implement automatic voter registration on college campuses. In 2019, he sponsored a successful effort to have Oregon cover the cost of postage on mail ballots. 

He is also a rare politician who has made it a cause to give the right to vote to any citizens regardless of a criminal conviction, including while they’re incarcerated. He’s a lead sponsor of legislation to enfranchise state prisoners. In the U.S., only Maine, Puerto Rico, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., allow everyone to vote from prison, though this is more common in other countries. 

“I think that every American, regardless of if they have been rehabilitated or if they are serving time, still are American citizens,” he said. “Democracy is something we should all engage in, and we have to allow people to participate.”

It’s a change Manning says can’t come soon enough: “At some point we are going to deal with the inhumanity of all of these years of what incarceration has cost us,” he said.

But the legislation on voting from prison has repeatedly fizzled at the committee stage. Some fellow Democrats have sided with Republicans to say that it goes too far, too quickly, and could cost too much money to implement. 

Read, Manning’s opponent in May, is among those Democrats who believe Oregon should not at this time consider restoring voting rights to people in prison. He told Bolts that he isn’t convinced that people convicted of certain crimes deserve to vote. “Does someone who’s convicted of identity theft get treated the same as another crime? Someone who is convicted of murder? I think the nature of the crime might be part of the conversation,” he said.

In any event, Read continued, now is not the right time to have that conversation. Instead, he said, the state should focus on activating people whose rights are already restored, pointing to persistently low outreach and participation among people with past convictions; this is a widespread problem around the country, as Bolts has reported in Kentucky and Michigan.

“I think there is still quite a lot of work to do to make sure that people who are coming back into society know about their rights and are using them,” Read said. “If you’ve had your voting rights restored but didn’t know it, what difference does it make?”

Manning rejects the idea that Oregon can’t do both things at once. “I am honored to be able to bring those ideas that others may be afraid to, even though they know it’s right,” he told Bolts. “Somebody has to stand up, somebody has to be up front, and I accept that challenge.”

Manning often speaks highly of his own ability to shepherd such big changes. “I’m a visionary,” he said during a candidate debate earlier this month. “I think ahead. I see things that could be and then I implement those. I am result-oriented. There is no one like me.”

Several civil rights advocates in Oregon who support letting people vote from prison say they’ve been frustrated that the state is not prioritizing the reform. 

“Constantly being told this is ‘not the right time’ is only furthering the racist undertones of how we got to this position,” said Zach Winston, who used to be incarcerated and now works at the Oregon Justice Research Center. In Oregon, as elsewhere, felony disenfranchisement is a relic of 19th-century schemes to deprive people of color of all kinds of civil rights.

Added Winston, “Oregon has never shied away from leading on voting rights, which begs the question: Why not, on this? Do they actually value people who are in prison?” 

While Manning speaks in maximalist terms—he says he wants to get Oregon to at least 98 percent turnout—Read speaks the language of incremental change: “Any effort to make it easier for people to vote, to remove barriers, is a good thing,” he said. His rhetoric may be less lofty but he says he’ll pay proper attention to the weeds of a system that’s often anything but flashy.  

“That grinding, diligent implementation approach really matters,” he told Bolts, “to make sure it’s done well.”

In fleshing out his priorities, Read proposed a statewide program that would send people notifications when their ballots have been accepted and again when they’ve been counted. He described this move, which some other states have already made, as a way to bolster Oregon’s existing mail voting program, ensuring that those who are using the system can trust that their votes are being counted, and take action if something seems amiss. 

“The payoff may well be worth it, just because of the increased confidence people will feel,” he said.

Read also wants to advocate for a bill to give voters more time before elections to declare a party affiliation, as a way to close what he sees as a loophole in the state’s automatic voter registration system. When Oregon automatically registers people to vote, it does not assign them to any party, and so, Read worries, some voters find themselves locked out of the state’s closed party primaries by the time they want to participate. 

His proposals would require action by the legislature, but Read says he’d use his standing as secretary of state to promote them. 

Manning’s priorities would also demand changes in the law; matters like voting from prison cannot be unilaterally reformed by the secretary of state. He told Bolts that he has built strong relationships in the legislature that will enable him to pass his agenda. When asked about input he’s received from colleagues who oppose prison voting, though, he said, “I don’t know. I’ve not asked them. But I think it would be a good conversation.”

Neither candidate offered many specifics as to how they’d run the secretary of state’s office, and what new initiatives they want to put in place in areas that fall under its direct supervision. 

Read signaled more comfort with the status quo in the office. Three former secretaries of state have endorsed him.

When asked how he would shape the office budget, and how he would distribute resources to match his priorities, Read often deferred offering details. And when asked how his office would improve communications with various groups—including formerly incarcerated Oregonians, whose engagement he said he wanted to improve before debating voting from prison—he did not mention a particular program. He repeatedly said he’d want to first consult and partner with community leaders before proposing any fixes.

Manning, too, told Bolts that he could not offer specifics on some of his plans since he is not yet the secretary of state.

While he generally expressed discontent at the pace at which the state implements voting rights measures, he didn’t identify any instances of frustration when asked to elaborate. “Until I’ve been actually in and have the opportunity to conduct sessions with the staff of the secretary of state’s office and also all of our county elections officers, only then will I be able to make a clear assessment of what it is we can fix and how fast we can get it done,” he said.

The secretary of state has discretion to innovate with programs that can reach voters in new ways and make elections smoother, stressed Brown, the former secretary of state and governor. 

Brown said maximizing the position’s potential may come down to realpolitik skills. “Where do you have the votes? What are the costs and available resources?” She said she supports voting rights from prison, though she isn’t convinced that can pass. The next secretary, she said, will need to get creative and “to literally throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks in terms of reaching out to these important and diverse populations.” 

Others experienced in Oregon’s elections system also hope that the state can keep improving, whether with ambitious projects or administrative fixes. 

“There’s a general sense that Oregon has proudly been a leader in so many ways, but it is a laggard in others,” said Phil Keisling, the former Oregon secretary of state who championed vote-by-mail in the 1990s. 

He fired off a slew of improvements he’d like to see. For one, he said, the state should allocate funds to cover elections costs so that local offices don’t have to scrap with their county commissions for funding. And he wants counties to set up more physical voting centers, so people don’t have to travel long distances if they want to access in-person services. 

Keisling, who today advocates for mail voting nationwide as chair of the National Vote At Home Institute, has endorsed Read in this race, though he told Bolts he’ll make this case to whomever wins this year.  “Oregon has often pointed to where the future needs to go, and is often a testing bed for new ideas and new approaches to enfranchise people,” he said. “I’ll be pushing whoever gets the nomination to continue that tradition.”

Others much more removed from the halls of power in Oregon say they have trouble seeing how their state can purport to lead on voting rights so long as it continues to block from voting the roughly 12,000 people held in its prisons at any one time. Black and Native American Oregonians are most disproportionately affected by that practice, a situation fueled today by the large racial disparities in the state’s criminal legal system.

“Oregon has led the way with our democratic values, but continued disenfranchisement undermines the very legitimacy of our democracy in the state,” said Mariana Garcia Medina, a policy advocate at the ACLU of Oregon. She wants Oregon to move past its “history of anti-Blackness and white supremacy,” referencing an 1857 constitutional convention that set up felony disenfranchisement and a suite of other explicitly racist restrictions on civil rights. 

Pickens expects that advancing a reform as significant as prison voting rights will be difficult regardless of who wins. He says he has observed firsthand that Oregon’s reputation as an elections trendsetter belies frequent general indifference, and occasional hostility, toward the concept that every Oregonian should have a voice in democracy. 

“For the working-class white American that’s been voting their entire lives, I’d point exactly that out: you’ve been doing it your entire lives. For entire generations,” Pickens said. “We were set up to be excluded.”

The post In Oregon Primary, A Study In Contrasts on How to Strengthen Democracy appeared first on Bolts.

Lawmakers in Oregon, a state that already leads the nation in electoral engagement, adopted legislation this summer that would make voting even more inclusive. If it is signed into law by the state’s Democratic governor, House Bill 2107 would instruct state Medicaid offices to automatically register people to vote when they open or renew a health plan. 

The bill could add tens of thousands of people to voter rolls by allowing the Oregon Health Authority to forward basic information it collects from people applying for Medicaid coverage—age, residence, and citizenship status—to election officials. These officials would then use it to register anyone who is eligible to vote and but not already signed up to do so.

This process, which would still give people the chance to decline being registered, is nearly identical to Oregon’s existing system of automatically registering people. But that system only applies at the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services department, leaving out Oregonians who don’t visit the DMV. 

“Voter registration shouldn’t be dependent on going to the DMV, because not everybody does,” said Isabela Villarreal, policy director for Next Up Action Fund, a group that helped bring automatic voter registration to Oregon in 2015, explaining that lower-income and younger Oregonians are less likely to use DMV services. “We just want to make sure we’re capturing every single person and allowing them to participate.”

According to the secretary of state’s office, 85 percent of all Oregonians who are not registered are enrolled in Medicaid, a program that serves people living near or below the federal poverty line. That’s roughly 170,000 people in this state of 4.2 million who could be added to the voter rolls if the state began automatically registering Medicaid recipients. 

“This is a critical opportunity to register people that have been historically and currently excluded from our electoral systems,” Villarreal said.

The reform, however, comes with a catch: It would not actually change anything unless Oregon wins the blessing of the federal government, which for years has held up similar proposals in other states and told Bolts it’s still reviewing the issue. Medicaid is a program administered by states but regulated by the federal government, which largely bars a state’s Medicaid office from disclosing information to other agencies without the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ authorization.

Colorado, for one, adopted a reform similar to Oregon’s in 2019, only to see the federal agency that administers Medicaid stall its application over privacy concerns. Colorado’s secretary of state, Democrat Jena Griswold, shared her frustration with Bolts last week, saying she struggles to even get answers from federal officials. “It would be great for Colorado to implement it,” she said. “We should be working to streamline people’s interactions with the government.”

Advocates for expanding voter registration hope that the growing number of states seeking to automatically register Medicaid recipients will motivate the Biden administration to revisit its stance and greenlight new  reforms in Colorado, Oregon, and elsewhere.

Oregon eight years ago became the first state to adopt automatic voter registration, or AVR, and today similar systems exist in almost half of U.S. states. The design differs greatly by state, but the core idea is simple: Instead of expecting people to take proactive steps to register, a government agency uses the information they already collect to register people, while still giving them an opportunity to opt out. 

AVR has been proven to boost registration and turnout, and make the electorate more diverse. In Oregon, roughly 94 percent of eligible residents are now registered to vote. 

But in Oregon, as in many states, AVR is limited to people who visit the DMV, an agency with which many people, especially low-income residents, just don’t interact. Oregon voting rights advocates say this helps explain why nearly 200,000 eligible voters in the state—roughly 6 percent of the voting-eligible population—remain unregistered. They’re hoping that reaching Medicaid recipients gets the state closer to universal registration.

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a national voter advocacy organization, says including Medicaid recipients would make AVR systems far more inclusive. 

“These are the people who generally fall through the cracks in our voter registration system: people who might be more transient, people who are less affluent, people who are unable to take time off work to go vote, older individuals who don’t have their documentation in order,” she told Bolts. “These are the type of people that, in general, face more barriers to the ballot. If we can reach those people with something like this, I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t.”

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who has until late July to take action on HB 2107, did not respond to questions for this story. Local observers told Bolts they expect she will sign the legislation.

Several other states, including Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada and New Mexico, have already had the same idea and passed legislation to extend AVR systems to government health programs. “The DMV seemed like the big first place to get the most people registered,” Griswold, the secretary of state of Colorado, told Bolts. “We believe Medicaid is that second place.”

But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency housed within HHS that oversees the Medicaid program, has left most of those states in limbo for years. Oregon may be next, as state officials there say HB 2107 cannot be implemented without CMS authorization. 

CMS rules bar state Medicaid agencies from using or disclosing client data for purposes that are not directly connected to the Medicaid program, but a state can request a waiver to implement a specific proposal, or ask CMS to determine that the way in which it plans to use the data is indeed legitimately connected to health care administration. Medicaid law experts say the prohibition exists to protect people from having their information used against them—police can’t turn to Medicaid for a person’s last known address, for instance, nor can prosecutors in states that punish abortion patients.

Colorado’s attempt to implement AVR through Medicaid has gone nowhere since 2019, first under the Trump administration through early 2021, and then under the Biden administration. When Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet wrote a letter to CMS last year imploring the agency to green-light Colorado’s reform, CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure wrote back that the agency “had previously concluded that [the state’s proposal] appears to be inconsistent with the Medicaid privacy protections in current laws and regulations.” 

But Brooks-LaSure, who was nominated to the position by President Biden, also referred to an executive order Biden issued soon after his inauguration directing all agency heads to “evaluate ways in which the agency can, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, promote voter registration and voter participation.” Brooks-LaSure added that CMS is “exploring opportunities to enhance Medicaid’s role in promoting voter registration.”

CMS told Bolts in a statement on Monday that “this issue is under review.”

CMS did not say whether it had reached any new conclusion since Brooks-LaSure’s letter to Bennet more than a year ago. When Bolts first reached out to CMS seeking clarity, the agency said in a statement that AVR systems “may” breach Medicaid’s confidentiality rules but a CMS spokesperson reached out days later to say the agency’s initial response had been rushed and “provided in error,” and reflected the view of the Trump administration. The agency then issued another statement that kept the door open to new state initiatives.

“In keeping with the President Biden’s Executive Order directing federal agencies to promote access to voting, we recognize the importance of state Medicaid agencies assisting in expanding voter access and registration activities for the populations they serve,” CMS said. 

CMS did not reply to follow-ups requesting more information about its review process.

The picture gets fuzzier considering Medicaid services are already automatically registering people in Massachusetts. States Newsroom reported last week that the state had seen a large jump in registration as a result. 

Michelle Tassinari, an attorney in the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office, told Bolts she is confident that the state is compliant with federal rules because Massachusetts asks people, during their initial interactions with the health agency, if they’d prefer that their information not be used for the purpose of voter registration. Washington state also registers people through its health agency using a similar approach, a process known as “front-end” AVR. 

Automatic voter registration looks different in Oregon, as well as in Colorado. Instead of being asked if they want to opt out of registering during their transaction with an agency, prospective voters receive a mailer later on; they must respond to it if they do not wish to be registered. Data show that this approach, known as a “back-end” system, registers many more people to vote than when people are asked up-front, and more states have been switching to this model.

CMS did not answer Bolts’ questions when asked if these design distinctions were relevant to how the federal government is assessing state-level AVR programs. 

This confusion reflects what officials in the states that are in limbo have experienced. 

Griswold told Bolts that she’d be happy to hear the federal agency’s specific concerns and reach a workable solution, including by adjusting the exact design of Colorado’s system, but that CMS hasn’t even created the opportunity or shared precise feedback.

“We do not see a big difference between AVR at the DMV versus at Medicaid offices,” Griswold said. “If CMS thinks there’s a big difference, we can always address that in the law, we can go back and tighten the law if they want. But they need to give us guidance.”

Griswold doesn’t dispute the importance of protecting privacy but she believes this isn’t that complicated or fraught. “I think you can design the system where states never interact with the underlying data,” she said. “We do not need to know anything about people’s medical information, nor do we want to know that information.”

Other election experts also point out that the design of existing AVR systems already integrates privacy protections. The goal, they say, is to make use of data the government already collects without weaponizing it.

“If it’s administered correctly, I don’t see it being any different than [automatic voter registration] through the DMV,” Lacey Donaldson, the elected clerk in Pershing County, Nevada, and the head of that state’s county clerk association, told Bolts. Nevada’s plans for automatic registration of Medicaid recipients is also in limbo due to CMS.

One difference between the DMV and health services is that Medicaid recipients interact with the state more frequently. In Oregon, Medicaid recipients must renew their plans and update their information—including their mailing address—annually, whereas many people go years without visiting the DMV. This means that administering an AVR system through Medicaid would be likelier to keep voter rolls up-to-date.

“This is a win-win-win-win for lots of different people,” says Amber McReynolds, a national expert in election procedures who was appointed to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors by Biden. “The people who want to make sure more people are registered to vote, for people who care about making sure voters addresses are accurate, for people who want more efficient government. It’s one of these concepts I always think that everybody should like.”

In Oregon, the concept was championed by Shemia Fagan while she was secretary of state. Fagan, a Democrat, resigned in May after Willamette Week revealed she’d been accepting lucrative consultant payments from cannabis entrepreneurs who have been top donors to her political career. Still, the legislation passed based on strong support from Democratic lawmakers who run both chambers; Republicans opposed the legislation. 

Other states may soon join the CMS waiting chamber. A new bill introduced last month in New Jersey proposes expanding that state’s AVR system to include Medicaid services.

“We’re hopeful that CMS will reconsider its reading of the law, which we think is currently incorrect,” Griswold said. “State pressure is mounting.”

The post Oregon Wants to Register Medicaid Recipients to Vote. Will Biden Officials Allow It? appeared first on Bolts.

Enrique Rivera turned eighteen inside Oregon’s MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility during the 2000 presidential election. Rivera had never been very interested in politics, but his father had taught him to care about the planet, so he was interested in Al Gore’s candidacy from an environmentalist perspective. But when he asked the facility’s officials about the election, he said they told him that prisoners couldn’t vote. 

In prison, Rivera started to connect the dots between voting and the criminal legal policies that had determined his fate. He had been charged as an adult under Measure 11, a harsh mandatory minimum ballot initiative approved by voters just a few years earlier, in 1994. “I realized that I was now in this situation as a juvenile, being charged as an adult, because folks decided that that’s what they wanted to happen,” he recalled. “I wasn’t just born into these laws that existed since time immemorial—people decided these things. I wanted to be a person that could decide things.” 

Rivera got out in 2004, and he’s been voting ever since. Recently, he submitted a letter to the state legislature affirming his support for Senate Bill 579, a bill that would allow incarcerated Oregonians to vote. The bill, which is sponsored by Democratic Senator Floyd Prozanski and a broad coalition of voting rights and social justice organizations, is now on its third try after failing to even make it out of committee in the previous two legislative sessions. Last week, it advanced past its first committee this session.

If it passes, Oregon would join Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., in extending the right to vote to all voting-age citizens, including those who are incarcerated. Technically, this would make Oregon the first state to restore voting rights for people incarcerated with felonies after taking them away—Maine and Vermont never stripped people of the right to vote in the first place, and D.C., which adopted this reform in 2020, still isn’t a state—and proponents hope this propels a national movement forward.

The bill would extend the franchise to those with felony convictions among the nearly 15,000 people in the Oregon prison system, which incarcerates Black people at a rate significantly higher than their share of the state’s population. Oregon currently disenfranchises people who are incarcerated over a felony conviction, though people detained pretrial and with misdemeanors can vote, and it restores their voting rights upon their release. This bill would require ballots and other voting material to be sent to all registered voters at carceral facilities in Oregon, and people in prison would be considered registered at their last known address, meaning they would be able to weigh in on elections where they have family and community ties, rather than wherever their prison is situated. 

Oregon is known for being a leader on voting protections: the state has automatic voter registration and a universal vote-by-mail system, and has long allowed people with felony convictions who have finished serving their time to vote. This legislation represents perhaps the highest test of those commitments, and the public debate on the issue reveals a deep philosophical divide between those who believe voting is a fundamental right, and those who believe it is a privilege that can and should be taken away. 

The US constitution mentions the phrase “right to vote” a number of times, but that right has often been restricted and contingent on which populations were seen as deserving at any given time. Long after voting rights were extended to formerly enslaved men and women of all classes, the most durable example of disenfranchisement remains people in prison or with felony convictions. 

“Anything that infringes on a fundamental right like voting should draw strict scrutiny from the courts,” said Christopher Uggen, a sociologist and expert on felony disenfranchisement who teaches at the University of Minnesota. “That means we should look very skeptically at any attempts to restrict the franchise—but we have this big carve-out for people convicted of crimes, at least as interpreted by the Supreme Court in what’s been a durable precedent. It’s sort of saying, you know, it’s not quite a fundamental right—and especially not for these folks.”

Many states enacted felony disenfranchisement in response to the expansion of voting rights to Black people after the Civil War. “It is clear in the United States, it is tied to the threat of racial power relations being overturned or undermined or subverted in some way,” said Uggen. “Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal,” Michelle Alexander writes in her seminal book The New Jim Crow. 

Oregon’s felony disenfranchisement law dates to 1857 and can be traced back to the state’s attempts to exclude non-white people from settling there. Many laws that originated in racism “to this day haven’t been changed and continue to be shadows in our lives,” said Anthony Pickens. Like Rivera, Pickens got interested in politics while incarcerated. “I did a lot of reading at that time on the history of the United States, the history of movements and a lot of stuff from the Panther era,” he told Bolts. Today, he works as a paralegal for Oregon Justice Resource Center, one of the main organizations sponsoring the legislation. 

Pickens said he often shares the history of Oregon’s felony disenfranchisement law with skeptical interlocutors. “A lot of people honestly don’t have an understanding of that background and are shocked and surprised…somehow,” he told Bolts. 

To Pickens, allowing prisoners to vote would force politicians to see them as a constituent group and hopefully do more to prevent abuse and mistreatment behind bars. As it stands currently, incarcerated Americans have little recourse to address prison conditions short of strikes. “The majority of individuals that are incarcerated in our prisons and jails, they don’t end up having a voice and a lot of misconduct is able to be covered up or never even heard of because of that,” he said. 

In recent years, states around the country have enacted laws that expand voter eligibility and restore ballot access to millions of people. The most recent example is Minnesota, which adopted a law earlier this month to allow people on parole or probation to vote.

Given this momentum, Jessica Maravilla, policy director at the ACLU of Oregon, said she’s optimistic about Senate Bill 579 passing this time around. “Legislators are a lot more educated because there has been several years of this legislation,” she told Bolts. “We’re seeing a lot of movement in this area, there’s more than 20 states that are working to re-enfranchise incarcerated people. And so it really puts Oregon in a position to lead the way.”

 But there is still a sharp divide between the political success of measures advocating for the rights of formerly incarcerated people versus those for currently incarcerated people. Proposals to extend the franchise into prisons have indeed multiplied —especially since a national prison strike named this as a core demand in 2018. Since then, bills have been filed in California, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and other states—but they have largely stalled, other than a landmark win in D.C. three years ago. 

The Oregon legislation’s supporters will also have to work to overcome the increasingly partisan associations of felony re-enfranchisement, which is likely connected to heightened polarization around both criminal justice reform and voting rights. “There was a time 15-20 years ago where it was the Republican governors who had political cover to do slightly bolder reintegration and reentry programs,” said Uggen, referencing then-Texas Governor George W. Bush’s signing of a 1997 bill restoring voting rights to Texans with felony convictions who had completed their sentences. “In recent years, it’s become a much more partisan story.” 

The bill could pass without bipartisan support, given that Democrats control both chambers of the state legislature.After passing the Senate Judiciary Committee last week by a 3-2 vote, the bill will move on to the senate’s appropriations committee before a full floor vote. In recent years, the bill has been hampered by fiscal estimates that would require more full-time staff to implement the bill. Oregon Justice Resource Center believes its chances are better than when it was introduced last year, during Oregon’s short biannual 35-day legislative session, but OJRC policy director Zach Winston said at a recent briefing that the sponsors are open to pushing out the start date in order to lessen concerns about implementation. 

The Oregon GOP has been consistent in its opposition to the legislation. A Republican senator from Portland told the Senate that the bill would “allow the worst evil––the ability to vote while incarcerated for child rape and other horrific crimes.” Republicans also argue that people in prison will vote for politicians they perceive as softer on crime. In 2021, the communications director for the Oregon Republican Party said that if the right to vote is extended to prisoners, “they might be electing your county commission and city council pretty soon.” 

The deep-seated beliefs about crime, punishment, democracy, and redemption that the subject of prison voting tends to bring up were on full display at a late-January Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on SB579. Rivera’s letter of support was one of an unusually high number of written testimonies submitted on both sides of the issue. 

“The fact that felons are felons means they are losing their liberty/right to vote,” wrote one woman. “After all, we don’t want them voting for someone who would pardon or commute their sentence for votes, now would we.” Another person wrote: “Let people experience the consequences of their poor choices. Stop protecting the criminals and start protecting the victims and the truly innocent people!” 

This level of emotion around prison voting is somewhat unique to the United States, according to Uggen. Many democracies around the world have either restored the right to vote to incarcerated people, or never took it away to begin with. Nearly every European country allows some or all incarcerated people to vote. France has in recent years worked on reforms to increase voter turnout from prisons after restoring the right back in 1994. “US crime policy is heavily driven by emotion and stigma,” Uggen said. “I was asked once at a talk radio show whether I believe that Charles Manson should decide who the President of the United States should be.” 

By contrast, Uggen said, “I attended a conference in Barcelona not long ago, where the fulcrum of debate was whether you can hold office from prison. I get a little whiplash going from there to Florida.”

One sign of this increased polarization is the talking point that Democrats only support prison voting because they want to pad their voter rolls. Supporters of the bill, by contrast, argue that felon re-enfranchisement is a civil rights imperative that promotes civic engagement and keeps people connected to their communities.   

This idea of re-enfranchisement as partisan political play didn’t jibe with Rivera’s experience in prison. “A lot of folks came from very rural communities, so their upbringing was a bit more conservative,” he said. “I don’t think that these folks would have voted for somebody that they saw as like a liberal or whatnot, regardless of their stance [on criminal justice policy].”

Maravilla also stressed that ACLU Oregon does not see prison voting as a partisan issue. “We’re looking at this as an equal rights bill on access to democracy, so we have reached out to Republicans as well,” she said. “We have had conversations with constituents of Republican legislators who are very much in support of this legislation. We’ve also spoken to a lot of incarcerated individuals who consider themselves Republicans who support this bill.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing received a number of letters from currently incarcerated people. One was from John Landis, who submitted testimony from the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario, Oregon. 

“I am a registered Republican and I believe all American citizens have a right (even a duty) to vote,” he wrote. “I served my country in the US army to protect citizens’ rights.” 

Phillip Bates, who is incarcerated at the same facility, also wrote in. Bates noted that while incarcerated, he went out of his way to place his name on the non-active voter registry. “To switch to becoming an active voter would mean the world to me,” he wrote. “Allowing me to vote would tell me that I am worth something.”

The post Oregon Tries Again to Restore Voting Rights in Prisons appeared first on Bolts.

One of the first things they saw when they walked into the prison was the wheelchairs. 

One after another, something like 40 chairs and walkers were lined up neatly outside each cell, stretching away into the distance. It was a jarring sight even for Kyle Hedquist, who’d worked for many years as a hospice volunteer during the decades he spent locked up there. 

Hedquist never thought he’d get out of prison. When his sentence was commuted in mid-2022, he certainly didn’t expect to be back so soon. But in mid-January, he found himself on the Oregon State Penitentiary’s E Block, this time accompanied by high-ranking prison officials and a dozen state lawmakers—all staring at this endless line of equipment for prisoners who were too elderly or sick or disabled to walk on their own. 

It was a powerful testament to an uncomfortable truth about America’s prisons: Increasingly, they contain elderly people, who are serving life or many decades for crimes that were adjudicated in the wake of the United States’s turn towards harsh sentencing schemes like mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws. Many of these people will die inside-–despite the fact that nearly every state possesses some form of compassionate release program that could allow terminally ill prisoners to spend their final days at home.

Oregon has a higher percentage of aging prisoners than most states. Hedquist was there that day to show legislators the prison infirmary where he had worked, in hope that they might support legislation, Senate Bill 520, that would overhaul the state’s compassionate release system. Hedquist was hired after his release as a policy and outreach associate by the Oregon Justice Resource Center, an advocacy organization that has been trying to improve the compassionate release process in Oregon for years.

Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a national organization that supports criminal justice reforms, has been researching the issue for almost two decades, discovering that in almost every case, compassionate release is more of an idea than a reality. Last year, the organization released a report grading each state’s compassionate release system. Amidst generally poor results, Oregon failed in every category that FAMM used to measure systems—scoring higher than only five states, including two that had no compassionate release programs at all at the time. “It’s kind of a bare bones system,” said Daniel Landsman, FAMM’s deputy director of state policy. “It just falters in every category.” 

According to data FAMM obtained from the state’s department of corrections, only seven out of 47 applicants won compassionate release in Oregon in 2019, while six people who had applied died before their cases could be processed. In 2020, no one who applied got out via compassionate release. 

“We would say that those low numbers don’t reflect how many people are discouraged from even trying to apply by the complexity of the system, how opaque it is, the lack of a clear path through it or timeline,” said Alice Lundell, OJRC’s director of communications. “It’s very difficult to quantify how many people are just not even attempting this because it is beyond them, particularly in a very poor state of health to even begin.” 

Applicants are first required to be terminally ill or elderly and medically incapacitated to qualify, though no definitions for these terms are supplied. These extremely sick or dying people must initiate the compassionate release process themselves and then complete a lengthy and complicated petition on their own that involves a medical report documenting their condition, a detailed post-release plan including treatment and housing, and a personal recommendation from the prison superintendent. 

In the unlikely event they clear each of those hurdles, their petition arrives at the state’s board of parole, which in any given term, “may or may not have a medical professional on the board—usually they don’t,” says Hedquist. “They’re only looking at the crime, saying, ‘Well, hey, this dude’s got a 40 year sentence for A, B and C. We’re not going to let him out.’” 

Aliza Kaplan, who runs the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic at the Lewis & Clark Law School, says the prison superintendent recommendation requirement in particular makes it extraordinarily difficult to advance past that point in the process. “We are lawyers who have a lot of access and know people—and we couldn’t get anyone to write us back or talk to us about our cases,” she told Bolts.

Kaplan’s clinic has stopped even trying to use compassionate release as a mechanism to get people out of prison. The enormity of the system’s failure became particularly stark during the pandemic. “My law school was shut down,” she said. “I was sitting in my office anyway. And I was being inundated with letters and phone calls from folks in prison and family members afraid that their loved ones were going to die.” She went on: “There was nothing to even offer people because I knew that the law on the books, the compassionate release law, was never going to help them.” 

In a 2019 essay for PEN America’s Prison Writing Contest, Hedquist detailed his experience working in hospice. “Death, I would learn, comes on its own terms and in its own time,” he wrote. But the urgency that attends the last few months of someone’s life is nowhere to be found in the compassionate release system. “The board of parole gets to these cases when they get to them,” said Zach Winston, OJRC’s policy director. 

SB 520, the proposed compassionate release legislation, seeks to revamp the compassionate release process to make it more of a viable option. First, it creates a duty for prison officials to recommend terminally ill people with less than a year to live for compassionate release, taking the onus off of the critically ill person themself to start the process. It also gives doctors more control over the process, establishing a board of medical professionals to evaluate compassionate release requests, and attempts to crack down on the mechanism’s delays by requiring the board to rule on applications within 45 days, or within 14 days if the applicant has a prognosis of less than a year to live.

The doctors’ recommendation would have greater weight in the final outcome by setting a higher burden for carceral officials to overturn it: Landsman said the bill would establish a “presumption of release to people who have been proven by medical professionals to truly be terminally ill or medically incapacitated.” People could still get denied if they were found to be a danger to public safety or, more likely, didn’t have a robust post-release plan. 

Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization that works on public health and social justice issues, is also sponsoring the legislation. “This bill ensures that Oregon’s compassionate early medical release process is health-centered and that [adults in custody] can better exercise their right to access the medical care and treatment that they need,” the group told Bolts in a statement. 

SB 520 was reintroduced in Oregon’s legislature for the 2023 session after failing to pass in 2021 and 2022. Oregon Republicans denounced the legislation for “letting people out of prison,” stripping it of the end-of-life context, which advocates say proved damaging to their efforts amidst the glut of soft-on-crime attacks on Democrats in advance of the national midterm elections. But Oregon Democrats defended the governor’s mansion and their large legislative majorities in November. 

One sticking point for the compassionate release bill last session was its budget. Proponents make the point that the bill would save money for the state by shifting the burden of paying for the care of sick and dying people in prison. “Prisoners are not eligible for their veterans benefits, and many of these guys are veterans,” Hedquist said. “Prisoners are not eligible for Medicare, Medicaid, because they’re incarcerated. And so these are direct tax dollars.” But Winston of OJRC said that the bill had been hindered in prior sessions by estimates that it would require new staff to implement. 

 There are bills to reform compassionate release pending in a handful of other states this year. Illinois established a new mechanism for the first time in 2021, leaving Iowa as the only state without one, and California overhauled its compassionate release system last year to enable more people to leave prisons. Still, many states’ compassionate release systems remain barely functional; past reporting by Bolts and New York Focus has found that a few prison officials in New York State routinely deny hearings to terminally-ill New Yorkers, for instance.

Like California’s new law, where prisoners serving life without parole remain ineligible for compassionate release, some Oregonians still won’t be able to access compassionate release even if the legislation passes. People convicted of any of 21 crimes that fall under Measure 11, a mandatory minimum ballot measure approved by voters in 1994, are categorically excluded. Amending Measure 11 would require a two-thirds majority in the state legislature, though Hedquist called the carve out “a bitter pill.” 

There could be other barriers as well. With the departure of Kate Brown, the term-limited governor who greatly expanded clemency, and a good deal of rookie lawmakers who may not be versed in the nuances of crime and prison policy, Kaplan is worried that criminal legal reform bills won’t be a priority this session. SB 520 is currently sitting in the Senate’s healthcare committee. 

“A lot of new legislators means that those of us who do criminal justice work need to spend time educating people and you know, it’s going to make all criminal justice legislative matters harder this year,” she said. 

That was the point of getting lawmakers to visit the prison infirmary, Hedquist says. “Unless you have a loved one in prison, you almost have zero connection to the prison,” he told Bolts. “And so when you talk about voters, when you talk about senators—if they don’t know someone in prison, they just don’t know. And you can’t pass good legislation if people don’t know.” Many of the lawmakers, he suspected, had never been inside a prison. It was just an abstraction for them, a matter of policy.

For Hedquist, it was anything but abstract. It was ten people dying a month of Hepatitis C in the ‘90s; it was bathing dying lifers, playing cards with them, hearing their deathbed confessions. “Hospice was really the place where you could strip away all that prison was or all that prison tried to make us be and just be human to human,” he said. 

He wanted to make that a reality for the lawmakers too. “It’s almost like once you see it, you can’t unsee it,” he went on. “So if anything, some of these folks are going to be in a position where they can’t just close their eyes and turn their head and say, ‘Well, I’m sure DOC will figure it out.’”  

The post In Oregon’s Prisons, Terminally Ill People Are Left with Little Recourse appeared first on Bolts.

Her decision was the largest gubernatorial act of commuting people’s death sentences since 2003. Seventeen people who began the week under a sentence of death no longer face the prospect of the state killing them. 

“It’s certainly unacceptable to me that I would leave office without taking one final action to ensure that none of these individuals will be executed by the state,” Brown told NPR. Brown had, even before this step, established a legacy for her “historic use” of her clemency powers.

Over the years since the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized the use of capital punishment in 1976 after a brief moratorium, only a handful of governors have taken similarly sweeping steps—most notably, Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican who in 2003 commuted the sentences of the 167 people on death row there. 

Brown’s mass clemency comes at a time where new death sentences and executions are at low levels nationwide. As the Death Penalty Information Center wrote in its year-end report, released this week, 2022 was the “[e]ighth consecutive year with fewer than 30 executions and 50 new death sentences.” There are 2,400 people on the nation’s death rows today, however, with blue California and red Florida leading the way.

But her actions also highlighted the stark partisan divide on the death penalty today, with two Americas drifting apart in their leaders’ willingness to carry out or block executions.

On the day Brown granted her clemency, Mississippi was preparing for the final execution in the United States this year. The state executed Thomas Loden Jr. on Wednesday, despite ongoing litigation against its lethal injection protocol. In all, 18 people were executed in the country this year, with Texas and Oklahoma carrying out five executions each. Arizona carried out three executions, Missouri and Alabama two each, and the final one in Mississippi. 

All six states that carried out executions this year are currently led by Republican governors.

Democratic executives have largely blocked executions. No sitting Democratic governor has overseen one; the last to do so was Virginia’s then-Governor Terry McAuliffe, who oversaw what became the state’s final execution, of William Morva, in 2017. McAuliffe later announced his opposition to the death penalty, and Democrats abolished it in 2021 shortly after taking control of the state government. In 2020, Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted the sentences of the three people on Colorado’s death row while signing a bill abolishing the death penalty.

With Brown’s latest act of clemency, there are now 24 states that have no one on death row. 

That number came close to inching up to 25 on Tuesday. At the urging of Nevada’s Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak, the state’s Board of Pardons was set to consider a motion at its quarterly meeting to commute the death sentences of everyone on Nevada’s death row.

But Carson City Judge Jim Wilson on Monday blocked that item from the meeting’s agenda, ruling that the state had not given enough notice to victims’ families. Sisolak is set to be replaced in January by Republican Joe Lombardo, a sheriff who pledged to “reverse Sisolak’s soft-on-crime policies.”  

Sisolak acknowledged during Tuesday’s board meeting that there would be no vote on his proposal. “Placing this matter on the agenda was done as an act of grace, and with the understanding that the death penalty is fundamentally broken,” he said. “The administration of the death penalty is not fair and not equitable and cannot be corrected.”

District attorneys had rushed to ask courts to stop the commutations after Sisolak’s proposal. Wilson, the judge, is himself a former DA in Elko County. Nevada prosecutors have a lot of clout: Last year, state Democrats failed to repeal the death penalty despite running the legislature after a bill derailed in the state Senate, where multiple Democratic leaders have day jobs as prosecutors in Clark County, where the DA’s office is prone to seeking death sentences. Sisolak’s comments at the time also helped stall the bill. 

“The fact that prosecutors in Nevada once again took steps to ensure the government is able to execute people is of little surprise since they continue to use the threat of execution as a means of coercion in criminal prosecutions,” Athar Haseebullah, the executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, told Bolts.

“I am glad the governor made this most recent push for commutations, but the last four years provided Nevada leaders, including the vaunted Democratic trifecta, multiple opportunities to address this issue and we walk away on this issue four years later in the same predicament we were in four years ago,” Haseebullahhe added. 

The partisan divide is similarly complex in other states.

Some Republican governors have been far more aggressive than others in carrying out executions. And Democratic Party leaders have also been split on how much they should do to bring capital punishment to an end. And major tests loom in 2023 for Democratic officials—in Arizona, as well as in the White House.

Brown’s announcement in Oregon could put more pressure on her Democratic peers, starting with President Joe Biden.

Biden campaigned on a promise to “eliminate the death penalty” and Attorney General Merrick Garland put a moratorium on executions in 2021. But Garland’s Justice Department is continuing to support ongoing capital cases and his administration on Dec. 15 cast a vote against a United Nations resolution calling for a global death penalty moratorium. In a memorandum explaining its vote, the United States Mission to the United Nations stated, in part, that “the U.S. does not understand the lawful use of this form of punishment as contravening respect for human rights.” 

Of particular importance on the federal level is the fate of the more than 40 people on federal death row now. Former president Donald Trump launched an execution spree after more than 15 years of no federal executions, ultimately resulting in 13 federal executions under his watch. Since Biden took office, many opponents of the death penalty have urged him to use his clemency power to commute sentences and prevent a later president from carrying out a similar spree. Thus far, Biden has taken no action. 

The failure of the Nevada Board of Pardons to commute death sentences before the end of Sisolak’s term leaves the door open to executions since Nevada has 57 people on death row. Nevada has not executed anyone since 2006, but prosecutors this year tried to secure an execution date before a supply of lethal drugs expired.

Apart from the federal government and Nevada, the other jurisdictions with people on death row and Democratic executives at this time are California, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. None have held an execution in over a decade, many much longer.

In California and Pennsylvania, Democratic governors have imposed moratoriums but have not pushed for mass clemency. Governor Gavin Newsom retained his office last month in California; in Pennsylvania, Governor Tom Wolf, who set up the moratorium in 2015, will soon be replaced by Governor-Elect Josh Shapiro, the outgoing attorney general. Shapiro, who had a mixed record with criminal justice progressives as attorney general, said this year that he agreed with Wolf’s approach and that he would not sign a death warrant while governor. 

But an incoming Democratic governor will soon be under scrutiny in Arizona, a state that carried out multiple executions last year, and test the party’s consistency in blocking executions.

In November, Katie Hobbs became the first Democrat since 2006 to win the gubernatorial race and she already faces decisions—including her appointment to a vacancy on the state’s Board of Executive Clemency, a body that must recommend clemency to the governor—that will shape Arizona’s criminal justice future.

A Hobbs spokesperson did not respond to questions about her plans for addressing the death penalty and executions in her state. 

Arizona’s outlook is complicated by the fact that it is not yet clear whether Hobbs will be working with a Democrat or Republican attorney general come January. The November race was so close—Democrat Kris Mayes led by 510 votes in the initial tally—that an automatic recount is underway. Outgoing Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, fought in court to restart executions in Arizona after a several-years halt following the botched execution of Joseph Wood in 2014. The state executed three people in 2022, and Brnovich has asked the Arizona Supreme Court to set an execution date for Aaron Gunches.

Oklahoma stands out among the states led by Republicans. Recently re-elected Governor Kevin Stitt is on a killing spree, the state set 25 executions over a two and a half year period, through the end of 2024, although two of the planned executions (Richard Glossip and John Hanson) have already not gone ahead. 

Earlier this year, Stitt pressured the chair of Oklahoma’s pardon board to resign due to his support for clemency petitions. The board had repeatedly urged Stitt to commute the death sentence of Julius Jones, a man who had maintained that he was innocent for decades; Stitt did eventually agree, breaking with Attorney General John O’Connor, a Stitt appointee who has supported his execution spree and clashed with the board in pushing for Jones’s execution. 

O’Connor, however, lost his re-election bid in the Republican primary this year to Gentner Drummond, who ran as what The Oklahoman described “an attorney general who would be independent of the governor’s office,” and the approach that Drummond will strike on capital punishment-related issues is a big question heading into 2023.

Texas, like Oklahoma, continued apace with five executions, lower than it has in past years (except for 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic even led Texas to halt executions for some time), but still the most in the nation this year. The state largely re-elected its leaders last month.

For all his bluster in fighting prosecutors who oppose the death penalty, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, with the second largest death row in the country behind California, has not carried out an execution since his first year in office, when he oversaw two executions. But the supreme court that he reshaped has made it considerably harder to challenge death sentences. 

Botched executions and ongoing litigation over the availability of lethal drugs stalled the death penalty in a number of GOP-led states. DPIC dubbed 2022 “The Year of the Botched Execution,” finding seven of the 20 execution attempts were visibly problematic as a result of executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves. 

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is going to finish his first term in office having not carried out a single execution despite more than 100 people facing death sentences in Ohio. The governor has issued multiple reprieves as pharmaceutical companies continue to refuse to sell lethal drugs. In Tennessee, similarly, after questions arose about the state’s preparation of execution drugs for a scheduled execution in April, Governor Bill Lee issued a reprieve to stop that day’s scheduled execution. Soon thereafter, he went further and orderied a review of the state’s execution process and a halt to executions for the year. 

In Alabama, however, Governor Kay Ivey chose to stay with the more aggressive group of governors — until there was, effectively, no other option than a pause. After one horribly botched, three-hour ordeal in executing Joe Nathan James Jr., the state proceeded to attempt two other executions that were both halted before lethal drugs were administered. Only then, on Nov. 21, did Ivey order a “top-to-bottom review” of the state’s clearly failing execution process and request that no execution dates be set during the review. 

The news out of Oregon didn’t change the state’s day-to-day reality: Oregon had not carried out an execution in 25 years. Still, opponents of capital punishment celebrated Brown’s commutations as a critical move, stressing that a future governor who supports the death penalty could have lifted the moratorium on executions currently in effect in the state.

“Our state still has the death penalty. Two out of three candidates for governor in last month’s election were committed to resuming executions,” Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, told Bolts. “While the winner, Tina Kotek, said she would continue the moratorium, it’s a reminder there’s no guarantee that Oregon will be free of executions while we have people under death sentences.”

Despite Brown’s clemency, the state retains the death penalty on the books. State Democrats passed a law in 2019 that very significantly restricted its use, but repealing it altogether would demand a constitutional amendment and referendum. (Oregonians last voted on the death penalty, inscribing it in the state constitution, in 1984.)

“Voters would have to overturn it at the ballot,” Singh said, “but we shouldn’t underestimate how influential Brown’s leadership will be in moving us toward abolition.”

The post Landmark Push for Clemency in Oregon and Nevada Show Split Paths on Death Penalty appeared first on Bolts.

Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt knows he has an image problem. 

Schmidt, who took office during Portland’s racial justice protests in August 2020, says he feels squeezed between two sides—a common sentiment among prosecutors who have promised a progressive approach to the job, some of whom now face recall efforts and primary challengers. While right-leaning residents have blamed Schmidt for rising gun crime and an increase in visible homelessness in the region, many progressives who helped elect him now question his commitment to reforms that he campaigned on but hasn’t yet delivered, like restorative justice programs and sweeping sentencing reforms.

Now halfway through his first term, Schmidt is asking county officials to add $2.7 million to his office’s $44.8 million budget for a new program that he says aims to build trust with a skeptical community. Dubbed the Multnomah County DA’s Access Attorney Program (MAAP for short), Schmidt’s proposal would assign four pairs of prosecutors ​​to the county’s four regions, focusing each attorney’s work on crimes taking place in their particular geographic area. Schmidt says those eight attorneys would share office space with local community groups and forge relationships that help the DA’s office better understand neighborhood-level issues impacting crime and, ideally, find solutions that go beyond police and prosecution. 

“I think having us back into community spaces to build relationships, to show that we are doing the work and we do care… I think that can go a long way to actually work on community challenges that people are facing and also push back against that narrative that nobody’s doing anything, because it’s just not true,” Schmidt said during an interview with the Mercury and Bolts about the program. 

Some of Schmidt’s local progressive critics, though, worry that the program would double down on the traditional tools of law enforcement to address Portland’s problems just as the county has made strides toward pursuing alternatives. They are concerned that MAAP would mark a retreat into old-school approaches at a time criminal justice reform is facing vigorous pushback from opponents throughout the country.

In recent years, the county’s board of commissioners has shifted funding from the DA’s office to other areas of county government to support more social programs, like behavioral health services and supportive housing. But Schmidt’s proposal for neighborhood prosecutors is a large request for additional funding. The county’s board of commissioners is expected to consider the DA’s request in coming weeks and decide by the time of their annual budget vote on June 16, and three of the board’s five commissioners have already expressed their support of MAAP in public forums.

Schmidt’s proposal isn’t a novel idea in Multnomah County, but rather the latest iteration of a neighborhood prosecutor program that garnered national attention for the local DA’s office in the 1990s. That earlier program, which dedicated particular prosecutors to individual neighborhood police precincts, was inspired by the tough-on-crime style of law enforcement that Schmidt has pledged to move the office away from—and thus he envisions something very different with his newest version. 

With MAAP, Schmidt has proposed installing his neighborhood DAs in the offices of trusted nonprofits and community centers, an attempt to project the image of the DA as a community service provider rather than only an authority figure. If someone in the area is frustrated with repeated car thefts on their block, for example, they could arrange a meeting with their neighborhood prosecutor to flag the problem or learn what kind of evidence they could collect to help law enforcement in any ongoing cases.

Schmidt’s revival of the neighborhood DA program has garnered cautious support from some community groups, while also alarming local civil rights leaders who aren’t convinced by the rebrand. Kelly Simon, legal director for the ACLU of Oregon, is worried that more resources to the DA’s office will only exacerbate racial disparities already seen in local charges and sentencing. Simon also said she was uncomfortable with Schmidt’s framing of prosecutors as a social service. 

“The ‘access attorney’ frame is interesting to me, because DAs don’t represent individuals impacted by crime, they represent the State of Oregon in every case they work on,” Simon said. “The only tool that prosecutors have is punishment. We have a lot of significant challenges from housing to mental health in the community, but punishment isn’t a good tool to respond to that.”

Schmidt maintains that his neighborhood prosecutor program is not intended to increase prosecutions. “That will happen, a little,” he acknowledged. “But really though, what it’s about is having our prosecutors in the community who know what we’re working with—and we can partner with other organizations and come up with a solution… My intention is to be helpful, not more harmful.”

The Multnomah County DA’s Neighborhood Unit was the first of its kind in the nation when it was created by then-DA Michael Schrunk in 1990. Schrunk created the unit in response to rising crime in Portland’s Lloyd District area, all characterized by Schrunk as “quality-of-life” crimes: car thefts, robberies, prostitution, dumping, and vandalism. Local businesses had lobbied Schrunk to create the program and even pitched in some funding for the new neighborhood prosecutors. 

The neighborhood prosecutors worked to turn law enforcement-friendly Lloyd District residents and business owners into “citizen informants,” educating them on what kind of evidence prosecutors needed to convict someone for low-level crimes like drug dealing. A 1997 story on the program published in the urban policy magazine City Journal described the process this way: “Residents then watched, kept logs of traffic into houses suspected of drug activity, and contacted officers with their information.”

After crime fell in the Lloyd District, Schrunk got public funding to open eight additional neighborhood DA offices across the county. The program dovetailed with the increase of “broken windows policing” or “quality of life law enforcement” across the country, like stop-and-frisk in New York City, that disproportionately targeted people of color. 

A 2016 investigation by Street Roots reported that neighborhood prosecutors—“your friendly neighborhood prosecutor”—often prioritized non-violent behavioral offenses that churned people through the local justice system. MCDA data obtained by the publication showed that 24 percent of people charged with “quality-of-life” crimes were Black, while less than 6 percent of Multnomah County’s population was Black. This data, paired with the public’s growing discomfort with private businesses covering a portion of the neighborhood DA salaries, slowly pushed the program out of favor until it ended under countywide budget cuts later that year. 

Schmidt said he was inspired to rebuild his office’s neighborhood prosecutor division after talking with other prosecutors around the country at a recent DA conference. He says he modeled MAAP after a program in Cook County, Illinois, that places “community prosecutors” in neighborhoods across Chicago to help “problem-solve individual, neighborhood or community issues that may or may not be criminal in nature but impact the quality of life.” That program has had a proven impact on reducing the rate of violent crime, with a much smaller impact on property crimes. 

Along with eight additional prosecutors, Schmidt has proposed funding for eight other positions to support the neighborhood DA offices—two victim advocates, an office assistant, a legal assistant, two investigators, a data analyst, and a “social service navigator” to help connect crime victims with resources. He says he plans on hiring experienced attorneys—either promoting from within his office or hiring new prosecutors—who won’t carry the full and oftentimes crushing caseloads shouldered by their colleagues at the county courthouse.

Schmidt says he hopes the program gives people whose concerns have historically been ignored by the office more access to prosecutors and their resources. He says neighborhood prosecutors will attend community meetings and other local events to meet people in the area and make themselves more available to the public. He called the program “a democratization of power.”

Schmidt says he also hopes the neighborhood DAs help ease current anxieties around crime—even if those worries are rooted in flawed assumptions. While homicides by gun have skyrocketed in Portland since Schmidt entered office, overall crime rates in Portland have held steady in that time period. 

“We can look at the data, but that doesn’t change the fact that people don’t feel safe in our community,” said Schmidt. “And that’s a problem.”

Although it’s not yet clear where the MAAP offices might go, Schmidt has proposed placing them in community spaces across the county. Schmidt said he met with numerous community organizations, some of which have expressed cautious support for the idea, to get their feedback before proposing it to county officials. 

“I’m really hoping they’ll be a good liaison to our community and a true resource,” said Nancy Haque, director of LGBTQ+ rights nonprofit Basic Rights Oregon (BRO). Haque said that, after years of watching victims of hate crimes and their families feel ignored by law enforcement, she would like to see MAAP attorneys truly act as victim advocates in the community. 

“It does seem like there’s an opportunity for the DA’s office to create change by making themselves more of a resource for the LGBTQ communtiy,” Haque said. 

Haque added that BRO’s support of the program hinges on Schmidt’s involvement. “We’re supporting this program at this particular time under the leadership of someone who’s trying to create progressive change at the DAs office,” she said.

Other groups were even more cautious with their support for the idea. Social justice nonprofit Unite Oregon declined to be interviewed about MAAP, but sent the Mercury and Bolts a statement saying the organization “supports the program at its early stage and will continue to evaluate its ability to impact the communities we serve in a positive way.”

Moms Demand Action, the Northwest Carpenters Union, Portland Business Alliance, and Business for a Better Portland have issued more full-throated endorsements of the program. Like with the 1990s iteration of the neighborhood prosecutor program, business leaders are eager for the DA’s help, especially in the wake of the pandemic’s economic downturn.

“Many of our independent retail and restaurant members are struggling with the impacts of crime on their businesses,” said Ashley Henry, director of Business for a Better Portland. “We know that there is no single solution to these challenges, but ensuring that there is more connection between law enforcement and the community is certainly a critical step. Having an additional resource from the DAs office on the ground, in direct communication with businesses and neighbors about the issues they face, is among those steps.”

Schmidt, whose progressive proposals have often attracted criticism from local law enforcement, has garnered their support for MAAP. Portland Police Bureau spokesperson Nathan Sheppard told the Mercury and Bolts in an email that the bureau would “embrace” the return of a neighborhood DA program. 

“Having the help and guidance of the same attorneys who will be trying these cases in court increases the chances of a positive outcome for victims,” Sheppard wrote. “It’s important to remember that the goal in arresting someone is not merely to book them into jail (many times suspects are out within hours) but to have the cases resolved with successful prosecution.”

Some community organizations are skeptical of MAAP’s promises. Simon, with the ACLU of Oregon, fears that, despite Schmidt’s best intentions, the program could disproportionately prosecute marginalized communities for “quality of life” crimes.

“At the end of the day, the program is increasing the number of prosecutors in Multnomah County and putting those prosecutors in communities that have historically been harmed by prosecution practices,” Simon said. “If repair work is not done first to build trust, I’m afraid that will be repeated.”

Simon said she sees value in DAs doing more to understand the communities they work in, but she doesn’t believe that approach should be limited to just eight prosecutors.

“If we don’t require that kind of engagement from every prosecutor we will continue to see systemic racism, frankly,” Simon said.

Chris O’Connor, a longtime public defender currently with Multnomah Defenders Inc., worries about how the new program and messaging from the DA’s office might influence defendants. O’Connor says he already encounters clients in court who are often under the mistaken impression that the DA is on their side.

“People get confused about which attorney is working for you… We get that all the time,” O’Connor said. “This program creates a misunderstanding that the DA’s office is working as counsel for communities, which is ethically dubious. Prosecutors can’t be a social worker.”

O’Connor called Schmidt’s proposal a “PR stunt.” If the county genuinely wanted to help the community, he said it could use the MAAP funds to instead hire community lawyers to help advocate for people who aren’t familiar with the court system, or go further and help bankroll more public defender programs. Multnomah County is currently experiencing a historic deficiency in public defenders, to the point where people who can’t afford a lawyer are being held in jail for weeks without access to an attorney. On May 16, a group of Oregonians with criminal charges sued Governor Kate Brown and the state’s public defense department for violating their constitutional rights to an attorney in a reasonable amount of time. 

“There are ways to fund access to legal services that don’t involve a [prosecutor],” O’Connor said. “It’s the wrong tool for the wrong problem.”

The post ‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Prosecutor’: Portland DA Seeks to Revive Broken Windows-Era Program appeared first on Bolts.

In a new campaign video for Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton, a narrator asks: “Why does safety matter?” Several people then give vague answers about family and community until a woman with a worried expression delivers perhaps the most direct response: “Because I don’t want our county turning into Portland.”  

Although more than a thousand Portlanders live within Washington County, Oregon’s second most populous county, Barton has made the city a bogeyman in his race for a second term in the nonpartisan prosecutor’s office. Ahead of the May 17 election, Barton has accused his opponent of wanting to defund law enforcement and framed himself as the only barrier keeping suburban Washington County from descending into Portland-level lawlessness. 

“We have the advantage, I think, of watching Portland’s mistakes and not repeating them,” Barton said in an interview with the Beaverton Valley Times last October. “One of those mistakes is the defunding of the police and public safety systems within Portland. We know that simply taking money away and taking resources away from public safety is a dangerous road to go down.” 

Like many U.S. cities, Portland has seen an increase in violent crime since 2020—a year that brought a global pandemic, racial justice protests, investment in police alternatives at Portland City Hall, an increase in visible homelessness, and turnover at the district attorney’s office in Multnomah County, which encompasses most of Portland city limits. Barton’s ads allude to the fact that in 2020, Portland officials also shifted $15 million from policing toward community programs and a pilot project to send mental health clinicians to some 911 calls instead of armed officers, reducing the city’s annual police budget by about 3 percent compared to the previous year; Barton’s ads do not, however, mention that the police budget headed to Portland City Council for approval next month is about $15 million more than what the city approved in 2019, the largest in the city’s history.

In a recent community forum hosted by Washington County, Barton rejected the idea that his campaign was trying to divide voters in the Portland region. “I’m not creating any type of division between Multnomah County and Washington County, the leaders in Multnomah County are crazy,” said Barton.  “They have ruined the public safety system.”

Fears about Portland “defunding” police have been central to Barton’s campaign against his opponent Brian Decker, a former public defender who also has experience working as a federal prosecutor. In campaign ads, Barton accuses Decker of being “an extremist who wants to defund police and abolish prisons.” Barton, who declined to be interviewed for this story, as justification points out that Decker helped establish the Washington County Justice Initiative, a nonprofit whose website calls for “defunding police, prosecutors, and prisons.” 

Decker says Barton’s ads are an inaccurate portrayal of the kind reforms he actually supports. “I have said we need to fund essential police services and we need to reallocate funds to fund addiction treatment, homeless services, mental health care, and other social services,” Decker said. “Most people in Washington County agree with that, but Barton conflates that with zeroing out the budget of the police, because he knows that rhetoric will rally his right wing base.”

Previously a Republican bastion, Washington County has veered to the left since the 1990s, with a steady succession of Democrats representing the county at the state legislature. While the district attorney’s office is nonpartisan, Barton’s politics skew conservative—especially compared to Decker. 

This is Barton’s second contested district attorney’s race, which itself is a rarity in Oregon. In 2018, Barton beat out Max Wall, a well-financed progressive candidate who joined the race at the last minute. Thanks to Wall’s support by billionaire George Soros, the campaign became the most expensive district attorney race in Oregon’s history. Decker, who currently has $238,000 in his campaign coffers, has raised much less than Barton’s previous challenger, while the incumbent has just over $277,000 in cash on hand, including hefty donations from Nike founder Phil Knight, Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, and local conservative political action committee ActionPAC. Decker’s biggest donations have come from Aaron Boonshoft, a local philanthropist funding an Oregon campaign to decriminalize sex work, Oregon Department of Justice attorney Nicholas Greenfield, and former Oregon Democratic Senator Chip Shields 

The outcome of the May 17 election could influence criminal justice policy in Oregon’s second-largest county. Decker criticizes the incumbent for favoring long sentences, charging an inordinate amount of youth as adults, and offering little in terms of actual rehabilitation to incarcerated people. Decker says these factors contribute to Washington County having the highest recidivism rate in Portland’s tri-county metro area. Decker is also interested in bringing restorative justice programs to Washington County, which can allow crime victims to choose a mediation process with a defendant over a trial, allowing both parties to resolve their issues and reach an agreement outside of the carceral system.

“We need more options,” said Decker. “When you act like locking people up is the only strategy, and then you come across a case where that’s not the right solution, you end up doing nothing to create a safer community. I want to use every appropriate resource.” 

He says his past work prosecuting criminal cases qualifies him for the DA job, while his work as a public defender in Washington County would help him reform what’s not working in the county’s criminal justice system. 

“Washington County is the most extreme county I’ve ever worked in, and that’s because of the tough on crime, war on drugs, lock ’em up and throw away the key fanaticism coming from the DA’s office,” Decker said.

Barton’s lobbying work indeed illustrates a certain resistance to reforms. He has discouraged lawmakers from scaling back Oregon’s mandatory minimum sentencing policy for violent crimes, called Measure 11, which charges adolescents as adults, and pushed back against a bill that would require judges take domestic abuse into consideration during sentencing if it was a contributing factor to a defendant’s criminal behavior. Barton also opposed Measure 110, a law that decriminalized small amounts of illegal drugs and funded substance abuse recovery programs. Barton has instead promoted what he calls “responsible reforms,” including the creation of a pilot diversion program for criminal defendants with mental health issues and a new resource center for children impacted by domestic abuse. 

Barton’s demonizing of Portland and weaponizing of the debate around police funding worries Bobbin Singh, director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center (OJRC). 

“Barton says he doesn’t want to turn into Portland, which is saying he doesn’t want to talk about racial justice issues or talk about accountability within law enforcement,” said Singh. “As a Washington County resident and person of color, when I hear rhetoric like that, it’s alarming.”

Washington County has grown to be Oregon’s most racially and ethnically diverse county, according to the 2020 Census. Singh sees Barton’s approach is in line with a national conservative backlash to the racial justice protests of 2020, which sends a clear message to the county’s residents of color. 

“Either Barton is doing it intentionally to create this wedge between voters, or he doesn’t know what he’s doing and he’s ignorant to it. Either way, it’s reckless and dangerous and sends a strong signal that we’re not welcome here.” 

For Singh, Barton’s campaign draws historic parallels to the political environment following the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“The response to the civil rights movement of the ‘60s was tough on crime policing,” said Singh. “Any time we see success on civil rights, like the response to George Floyd’s murder, we see a national pushback that’s tough on crime. I think that’s what we’re seeing here.”

Shannon Wight, deputy director of Safety and Justice Oregon, an organization that lobbies for criminal justice reform bills, says Barton’s campaign has painted him as a progressive reformer by evoking the idea of “responsible reform” and acknowledging past harms the criminal justice system has inflicted on marginalized communities, showing he’s at least paying attention to larger calls to change the system. By invoking Portland as an allusion to violent crime and homelessness, however, Wight argues that Barton is pointing to problems he helped engineer by “prioritizing locking people up, tough sentencing policies, and ignoring people’s real needs.”  

Blaming Portland’s rise in crime on marginal changes in police funding and wrongly claiming that his opponent wants to zero out law enforcement budgets seems to be working for Barton. 

Tigard Mayor Jason Snider, one of seven Washington County mayors who have endorsed Barton, said he spoke with Decker and agreed with him on many fronts—for instance, “I agree that we don’t need to be throwing the book at people for minor crimes.” But what made Snider uncomfortable about Decker, he said, “was hearing that he had a ‘defund the police’ agenda. There are a lot of things that need more investment in the community, like mental health and recovery, but that doesn’t mean we need less police.”

The post Portland Plays the Bogeyman in Neighboring DA Race appeared first on Bolts.

The filing period for candidates to run for prosecutor closed in five states over the past month, adding clarity to the question of where the midterms may shake up the criminal legal system’s status quo. With primaries looming as early as May, criminal justice reformers are pressing their case from North Carolina’s biggest cities to Omaha and the Portland suburbs.

Public defenders and legal aid advocates are running in Arkansas, Nebraska, and Oregon, enlivening proceedings in places like Little Rock and Salem that have not seen a contested election in decades. In North Carolina, where racial justice protests drew thousands into the streets in 2020, challengers are now running on reform promises. And Utah brings the uncommon sight of a Republican reform incumbent who faces a tough-on-crime challenger. 

But away from those fireworks, the filing deadline is more often than not the end of the road for a prosecutor election, as most races only drew one candidate. In Oregon, whose filing deadline passed on Tuesday, just two of 15 DA elections feature multiple contenders. 

The situation is only slightly less desolate in Arkansas and North Carolina, where filing deadlines passed last week. Roughly one-third of their elections will be competitive this year. In each of Nebraska and Utah, the two most populous counties at least will have contested elections. (In Texas, as Bolts reviewed last month, 76 percent of elections are uncontested this year.)

Still, those elections that will be contested offer rare opportunities to confront local injustices. Arkansas, for instance, has a unique law that criminalizes falling behind on rent, empowering local prosecutors who choose to use it. And North Carolina allows children to be prosecuted at an unusually young age, though the state reformed its statutes last year. 

Below is Bolts’s preliminary guide to the prosecutor elections in those five states.

Arkansas

Larry Jegley has been the prosecutor in the state’s most populous judicial district (Perry and Pulaski counties, home to Little Rock) since 1997, and yet he has never faced an opponent—not once, over eight elections. This year Jegley is retiring, and voters will get a choice for the first time in decades. And it may be a historic election: Alicia Walton is running to become the first Black prosecutor in the history of a district whose population is 37 percent Black.

Walton, a public defender, vows to reform what her website calls a “fundamentally flawed” criminal legal system. Her opponent Will Jones is the chief deputy prosecutor in a neighboring district who worked under Jegley for more than a decade. 

Another public defender, Sonia Fonticiella, is running for prosecutor in the eastern part of the state, in a district that covers Clay, Craighead, Crittenden, Greene, Mississippi and Poinsett counties. She will face deputy prosecutors Martin Lilly and Corey Seats. And in Northwest Arkansas (Madison and Washington counties), incumbent Matt Durrett faces Stephen Coger, who says incarceration is too high in the district and that he would change bail and jail practices, though Coger also attacks Durrett for being too lenient toward people accused of higher-level crimes.

The state has five other contested races, all in smaller jurisdictions (twenty districts drew only one candidate). The full list of candidates is available here.

These are nonpartisan elections scheduled for May 24.

Nebraska

Each of Nebraska’s 93 counties will elect its prosecutor this year, but stakes are highest in the only two counties with at least 100,000 residents with a contested election.

Both races pit a Republican incumbent against a Democratic challenger who proposes some reforms in counties that went for Joe Biden in 2020. In Lancaster County (Lincoln), County Attorney Pat Condon faces Adam Morfeld, a former lawmaker who founded the progressive organization Civic Nebraska and helped lead efforts to expand Medicaid in the state.

But the state’s premier battle is in Omaha: Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine switched to the GOP two years ago after the Democratic Party accused him of furthering white supremacy; he had brought no charges against the man who killed James Scurlock, a Black protester. In November, Kleine will face Democratic challenger Dave Pantos, the former director of Legal Aid of Nebraska, whose platform is largely centered on reform themes.

North Carolina

Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties, each jurisdictions of more than one million people, mirror one another this year. 

In each, a Democratic DA is seeking re-election but must face a defense attorney in the May primary. In Charlotte, challenger Tim Emry has been part of the local coalition Decarcerate Mecklenburg, which has sought to reduce jail population during the COVID-19 pandemic; he faces DA Spencer Merriweather. In Raleigh, Demon Cheston, whose criminal defense practice involves capital punishment cases, is challenging DA Lorrin Freeman. Cheston and Emry are each running on progressive platforms that include never seeking the death penalty and accountability for police officers who lie or commit misconduct. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Charlotte and Raleigh drew thousands of protesters who demanded action against racial injustice and more accountability for the police. 

Other populous North Carolina districts are hosting competitive DA elections as well.

In Forsyth County (Winston-Salem), the race will come down to the November general election. In this county that voted for Biden by 14 percentage points, Republican DA Jim O’Neill will face Democrat Denise Hartsfield, a retired judge who is also a former prosecutor and attorney with the Legal Aid Society.

There are also Democratic primaries to watch in Buncombe (Asheville), Durham, and Guilford (Greensboro) counties, though some of the candidates who filed do not appear to be running active campaigns as of publication. In Buncombe, the incumbent faces tough-on-crime attacks from at least one challenger.  In Durham, two defense attorneys filed to run against DA Satana Deberry, who has built a reformer profile, rolling out bail reform and clearing thousands of old fines and fees. Deberry testified in Congress earlier this week on behalf of progressive prosecutors. “Stop pretending reform is the real threat to public safety,” she said.

The North Carolina primaries are on May 17th. The full list of candidates is available here.

Oregon

Even by low national standards, Oregon has a striking problem with democracy when it comes to its DAs. It has long been marred by a pattern of DAs resigning shortly before their terms conclude—with governors filling the resulting vacancies by appointing deputy prosecutors who then get to face voters as incumbents. That dynamic struck again in 2022, though only in one county. What’s more shocking is that only two elections out of 15 drew multiple candidates.

At least both of those races offer voters a real choice on the direction of local criminal justice policy.

Populous Washington County, right next to Portland, features a clear-cut divide between DA Kevin Barton and challenger Brian Decker, a public defender who is active in various reform drives and advocates for investing in programs that fall outside the criminal legal system. Barton is attacking Decker’s views as “dangerous” and holding up neighboring Portland, which is led by a reform-minded DA, as a boogeyman. (Barton’s 2018 election featured a similar contrast, and he won with some ease after an uncommonly expensive campaign.) Further south, in Marion County (Salem), public defender Spencer Todd is challenging DA Paige Clarkson, saying he wants to turn the page of “tough on crime” policies. Marion County has not had a contested DA race since at least the 1990s.

Oregon’s DAs are notoriously active in opposing criminal justice reform legislation, making these elections meaningful for statewide policy as well. However a coalition of three reform DAs formed in the wake of the 2020 elections, with the new DA of Multnomah County (Portland) banding together with those of smaller Deschutes and Wasco counties to defend reform bills. But the group is set to lose one of its three members as Deschutes County DA Jon Hummel is retiring. He will be replaced by Steve Gunnels, a longtime prosecutor who is the only candidate who filed. (The Multnomah and Wasco DAs are not on the ballot this year.) 

Oregon’s DA elections are nonpartisan elections that are scheduled for May 17. The full list of candidates is available here.

Utah

David Leavitt is the rare Republican prosecutor who grabs headlines for championing criminal justice reform. As county attorney of Utah County, he established new diversion programs after he came into office, and last fall he announced he would no longer seek the death penalty. “It simply demonstrates our societal preference for retribution over public safety,” he said of capital punishment in a public release. 

Leavitt’s re-election race will test the GOP’s appetite for such changes. He faces Jeffrey Gray, an assistant Utah solicitor general who touts his ties to law enforcementand promises to bring back the death penalty if elected. 

Over in Salt Lake County, Democratic prosecutor Sim Gill triggered a national furor during the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, filing gang enhancements against protesters accused of spilling red paint in front of his office, which threatened sentences of up to life in prison (the charges were later amended). Protestors were criticizing Gill’s decision to decline charges against officers who killed 22-year-old Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal earlier that year. But Gill is in relatively good shape in his reelection bid this year; he drew no challenger in the Democratic primary, which can be decisive in this blue-leaning jurisdiction. Republican challenger Danielle Ahn has no campaign website or campaign account as of publication.

Utah only has two other contested prosecutor races: one in Washington County where a GOP incumbent faces a Libertarian challenger, and one in the very sparsely populated Grand County.

The primaries will be held on June 28, followed by the November general elections. The full list of candidates is available here.

The post Public Defenders Shake Up Key Prosecutor Races from Arkansas to Oregon appeared first on Bolts.