The block was lifted by the Nebraska Supreme Court, which ordered state officials to immediately comply with two related laws—one from 2005, and another passed this spring—that allow people to regain voting rights after completing their felony sentences. The court’s ruling on Wednesday reversed the actions of Nebraska’s Republican secretary of state, Bob Evnen, and attorney general, Mike Hilgers, who together in July abruptly declared both laws unconstitutional and blocked Nebraskans with past felony convictions from voting.

The court’s decision means that nearly 100,000 Nebraskans who’d already regained voting rights over the last two decades because of the 2005 reform law, only to see their rights thrown into question this summer, are once again unambiguously eligible to cast a ballot. It also allows approximately 7,000 Nebraskans who were enfranchised by the law adopted this year to finally register to vote.

Justice Lindsey Miller-Lerman, who ruled with the majority, criticized Evnen and Hilgers for attempting such a massive rollback of voting rights right before a major election. “Why now?” she wrote. “Why not take the opportunity to challenge the laws long ago with available remedies, rather than creating uncertainty at this time?”

Voting rights advocates celebrated the court’s decision but they remain outraged at Evnen and Hilgers for the confusion and delays they created. The timing of the court’s decision gives advocates little opportunity to help people who might be confused about their voting rights because of Evnen and Hilgers: It came just two days before the Oct. 18 deadline to register to vote online. The cutoff for people to register in person is next week, Oct. 25. 

“The rush to get this word out is going to be intense,” Aaron Pettes, a formerly incarcerated organizer in Nebraska, told Bolts. “The challenge now is to shout about it from the rooftops.”

Pettes, 44, has never voted and says he’s thrilled that he’ll now get to. But he is also concerned that time is running out to convince others to engage in a process of voting “that essentially booted them out” less than two months ago.

“Letting people know is one thing, but getting them to reinvest, to actually cast a ballot, will be hard, but not impossible,” he said. 

The Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition, which comprises many nonprofit groups in the state, vowed to try. “Our teams will soon be in the field, reaching out to Nebraskans so that they can restore their vote and reclaim their voice,” the coalition said in a statement shortly after the court made its ruling. 

Nebraska previously disenfranchised anyone convicted of any felony for life. But in 2005, the state passed Legislative Bill 53, which allowed Nebraskans to restore their right to vote two years after completing their sentence. The law instantly restored voting rights to some 59,000 people, according to the ACLU of Nebraska. In the nearly two decades since, the law has enabled another 38,000 people to regain their rights. 

Nebraska’s GOP-run legislature decided to go further this year. With broad, bipartisan support, it passed LB 20, which removed the two-year waiting period for rights restoration and made Nebraskans eligible to vote as soon as they complete their sentence, including any post-incarceration term of probation or parole.

With that law set to go into effect on July 19, the Voting Rights Restoration Coalition and its allies spent months preparing to contact the roughly 7,000 people affected by the 2024 reform—that is, those who completed felony sentences less than two years ago—to help facilitate registration.

But on July 17, less than 48 hours before this new law was to go into effect, Hilgers issued an advisory opinion in which he declared that both the new legislation and the 2005 law unconstitutional. Hilgers argued that only the state’s board of pardons—a three-person body comprising Hilgers, Evnen, and Republican Governor Jim Pillen—had the power to restore voting rights. 

Absent a direct pardon from this body, Hilgers said, the state constitution demands that Nebraskans with felony convictions be barred from voting for life. Only a couple of states in the U.S.—Virginia and Tennessee—enforce a system of disenfranchisement that’s comparably strict. 

Evnen, the secretary of state, promptly followed Hilgers’ guidance and directed county elections officials to cease all new registrations of Nebraskans with previous felonies. Their acts also threw into question the rights of many Nebraskans with past convictions who had already registered and voted in previous elections. 

The nonprofit Civic Nebraska and three disenfranchised plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU, quickly sued, and the Nebraska Supreme Court heard the case in late August. 

On Wednesday, the court rebuffed Evnen and Hilgers and ordered state elections officials to follow the 2005 and 2024 laws. The ruling came on a 4 to 2 vote, with each of the justices writing a separate opinion; a seventh justice concurred with the majority only in part.

John Gale, a Republican who preceded Evnen in office and disagrees with his actions to undermine the reforms around rights restoration, told Bolts that Wednesday’s supreme court ruling was “a very clear victory.” 

“The fact that the legislature has passed two statutes over 20 years, in an effort to expand the franchise to people who have successfully completed the discharge of their sentences as felons, seems clear to me to be a true, solid expression that the majority of people in Nebraska believe this is appropriate,” Gale said. 

Chief Justice Michael Heavican, who joined Wednesday’s majority ruling, lamented in a concurring opinion that the court was presented this question only a few months before the November election. “Even under this expedited timeframe, there was relatively little time between the submission of the case to this court and the onset of deadlines related to the 2024 general election,” Heavican wrote.

Voting rights advocates alleged throughout this summer and fall that Hilgers and Evnen deliberately tried to suppress voter turnout. Some also faulted the court for taking so long to rule given the fast-approaching registration deadline and election. “The inaction from the Supreme Court on this issue is unacceptable,” state Senator Terrell McKinney, a Democrat, posted on X on Oct. 2, after the lawsuit had already languished for weeks. 

Those who just regained their voting rights are disproportionately people of color, as a result of profound racial disparities in the state’s criminal justice system. Nebraska’s Black imprisonment rate is almost 10 times higher than that of white residents; Latino and Native American people are also imprisoned in Nebraska at high rates. 

According to the Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition, a disproportionate share of the people who risked losing their right to vote live in the areas of Lincoln and Omaha, the state’s population centers and host to several pivotal elections this year. 

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are competing for an electoral vote in Nebraska’s swing 2nd Congressional District, which centers around Omaha; the district also features a competitive U.S. House race. Nebraskans statewide are deciding other high-stakes races, including measures on abortion rights and paid sick leave, and a heated U.S. Senate race.

Advocates had planned on spending the summer and fall spreading the word about the new state law giving back voting rights to thousands more Nebraskans. Now they only have days before the deadline for registering new voters, and they feel like Hilgers and Evnen got away with throwing people’s voting rights into turmoil ahead of a critical election.

They also worry that even Nebraskans who have already been registered since 2005 may now have second thoughts about voting, out of fear of violating state law.

“The voter suppression has worked,” Jason Witmer, a policy fellow at the ACLU of Nebraska who used to be incarcerated, said at a rally in Omaha held hours after the court ruling landed. “There are a lot of people who are not going to speak to us, who have no more interest in being a part of it this year. So, it has worked to suppress many, many people’s voices.”

Bolts has reported that some states have confusing rules about who has the right to vote, which creates a climate of fear that can discourage people from participating even if they are eligible. Several formerly incarcerated Nebraskans told Bolts over the summer that they would sit out this election regardless of how the court ruled.

“I’m that concerned about going back to prison,” Tommy Moore, who was released from prison in 2009 and who has been legally voting in Nebraska for a decade, told Bolts in August. “I never want to encounter that humiliation again, and I prefer not to vote than to take the risk.”

Reached by text this morning, Moore said that he was still digesting the ruling but that he’d changed his mind: “Right now, I think I will vote,” he wrote.

The post Nebraskans Rush to Undo Harm, After Court Rebuffs GOP Bid to Block Thousands of Voters appeared first on Bolts.

The Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition was ready for July 19. A new state law, Legislative Bill 20, would take effect that day, instantly granting voting rights to some 7,000 people with past felony convictions. Because the law requires state officials to do very little to notify people of their newfound eligibility, let alone to automatically register them, the work of contacting and assisting those affected would largely fall to community groups.

And so the coalition reserved ad space on print, digital, and radio platforms. It organized registration drives in Omaha and Lincoln, each to be held in the first days of the law’s enactment. Those events were to kick off a statewide campaign that would touch many more towns and cities, and go through late October, when Nebraska cuts off new voter registration ahead of the general election.

But the ads never ran. No one was registered at the events in Lincoln and Omaha. More than a month after its planned launch, the campaign has yet to begin.

That’s because two Republican elected officials in Nebraska—Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Secretary of State Bob Evnen—halted implementation of the new law, shutting down new registrations for people with past felonies and throwing into question the voting rights of tens of thousands of other Nebraskans who, until last month, were legally, unambiguously eligible to vote.

Nebraska voting rights advocates maintain hope that the actions of Hilgers and Evnen will be reversed soon, but they also worry that profound, lasting damage will have already been done: this registration shut-down has prompted so much confusion and fear, they say, that it could cause many people to disengage entirely with the democratic process.

On July 17, less than 48 hours before LB 20 was to take effect, Hilgers issued an advisory opinion stating that the new law was unconstitutional. But Hilgers didn’t stop there; he also declared unconstitutional a 2005 reform law ending lifetime disenfranchisement of anyone convicted of any felony; the 2005 law, Legislative Bill 53, allowed Nebraskans to vote two years after completing their sentences, a waiting period that LB 20 was set to eliminate. 

In his opinion, Hilgers wrote that the state Board of Pardons—a three-member body composed of him, Evnen, and Republican Governor Jim Pillen—has sole discretion over whether to restore someone’s voting rights. Right after Hilgers issued his opinion, Evnen, the state’s top elections official, emailed county-level elections offices, ordering that, based on the AG’s stance, “we will not be implementing LB 20 and will no longer register individuals convicted of felonies.”

These moves by Hilgers and Evnen shocked Nebraskans who have spent years pushing for voting rights restoration. The new law had overwhelmingly passed the Republican-controlled legislature earlier this year, and Nebraskans with past felonies have been registering to vote, and actually voting, for almost 20 years with little issue or outcry.

“For two guys, working with one mind, to come in and say, ‘Eh, you know what, never mind; we’re taking it back and also jumping in our political DeLorean and removing the law’—it’s outrageous,” Aaron Pettes, a formerly incarcerated organizer and advocate in Omaha, told Bolts. At 44, he’d been poised to vote this fall for the first time in his life. “When it was revoked, it was traumatic. It felt like I was back in prison,” he said. 

The nonprofit Civic Nebraska and three disenfranchised plaintiffs, represented by the state branch of the ACLU, sued Evnen and two county-level elections officials in late July, seeking to compel them to allow citizens who have finished all terms of their convictions to register to vote, in accordance with both the new reform law and the one that passed nearly 20 years ago. The state supreme court in early August agreed to hear the case, and plans to hold oral arguments on Wednesday.

“We didn’t have any problem finding plaintiffs, because so many people who had been excited to register to vote were so upset,” Adam Morfeld, a former state lawmaker who helped found Civic Nebraska, told Bolts. “It’s a mess.”

The mess, said Pamela Pettes, Aaron’s wife, has left many nervous about even trying to register. Mass confusion can be a potent voter suppressant, especially when people are scared they could be criminally charged for trying to register, as changes around felony disenfranchisement in states like Virginia and Kentucky have recently demonstrated. 

“There are so many questions going on surrounding this that people are scared,” said Pamela, who lost her voting rights almost 20 years ago due to a felony conviction, regained them in 2011 and then became a regular voter—and who now, thanks to state GOP officials, fears she has lost her voting rights once again. 

“People are scared they’re going to get charged with something if they try to vote and can’t vote, so a lot of people will just wash their hands of it—are already washing their hands of it,” she told Bolts. “They don’t want to go and vote unless they have a clear idea of what’s going on. They don’t have that.”

LB 53, the 2005 law, ended a Nebraska policy dating to 1875 that imposed blanket, lifetime felony disenfranchisement—a practice that as of 2005 was unusually harsh, and one which only persists today formally in Virginia, functionally in Tennessee, and hardly anywhere else in the world.

About 59,000 Nebraskans with felony convictions were instantly granted the right to vote after enactment of the 2005 law, which made people eligible two years after they completed their full criminal sentences—including parole, probation, and any debt of restitution. The reform disproportionately benefited people of color: Nebraska’s Black imprisonment rate is almost 10 times higher than that of white residents, an unusually high disparity that is about 50 percent above the U.S. average. Latinx and Native American people are also dramatically overrepresented in Nebraska jails and prisons.

The ACLU of Nebraska reports that, in addition to the 59,000 people whose voting rights were restored in 2005, another 38,000 have gained voting rights in the 19 years since, thanks to that reform. But advocates for rights restoration say that many of the people made eligible by that law still never registered; it’s not always realistic, they say, to expect people already grappling with all the challenges of prison re-entry to keep track of a two-year countdown clock and maintain interest in registering once that clock expires. 

Jake Shaddy, who was previously incarcerated in Nebraska and now runs a group of halfway houses in Omaha, says there’s an information void around voting rights for currently and formerly incarcerated people. He says he has spent years believing he’ll never be able to vote again, and that he knows many who think the same.

“A lot of people who’ve been incarcerated give up on politics and tune off, because they feel like it doesn’t apply to them,” Shaddy told Bolts. “I’ve worked with probably over 500 guys at my halfway houses, maybe more, and they are all under the impression they are unable to vote.”

This environment of misinformation was a primary target of LB 20, the law that passed this year. Advocates in Nebraska worked for many years to get rid of the two-year waiting period baked into the 2005 law, because, they argued, immediately restoring people’s voting rights upon sentence completion would reduce uncertainty and fear over voting for people with prior convictions.

Though it took years of sustained advocacy to become law, LB 20 ultimately proved quite popular in Nebraska’s legislature. It was introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, then passed the statehouse by a vote of 38-6 in April. Governor Pillen declined to sign the bill, but he also declined to veto it, and so it went into law.

In his opinion calling LB 20 unconstitutional, Hilgers challenged the legislature’s ability to restore people’s voting rights and said those powers rest solely with the state’s pardons board—in other words, up to the discretion of just him, Pillen, and Evnen, the secretary of state. 

“A pardon is an act of grace that relieves a person of legal consequences of his crime. A legal consequence of a felony is losing the right to vote,” Hilgers wrote in his opinion. “Restoring that right is an act of grace that undoes a legal consequence of a crime. In other words … (T)he act of restoring civil rights is a pardon and within the exclusive power of the Board of Pardons.”

The ACLU, Civic Nebraska, and many others argue this is out of step with existing law. The state’s supreme court has traditionally agreed: In a 2002 case, it ruled that the legislature can determine through statute policy concerning voting rights restoration. State court precedent also casts doubt on Evnen’s interpretation of Hilgers’ recent opinion; in a 1983 case, the court determined that an attorney general’s opinion “has no controlling authority on the state of the law discussed in it.”

Evnen’s decision to order county officials to cease registration of people with past felonies has not only reversed the will of the many lawmakers who supported the reform, but has also drawn the ire of his immediate predecessor. John Gale, a Republican who served as Nebraska’s secretary of state from 2000 to 2019, signed on to a brief in support of the lawsuit pending now at the state supreme court. That brief predicted that Hilgers and Evnen abruptly upending state law on voting rights “would lead to disorder in this year’s general election.”

“Secretary Evnen and I are old friends,” Gale added in a press announcement last week. “In this case, I strongly believe the Nebraska Legislature acted with clear authority and LB 53 and LB 20 should be enforced as the law for the 2024 election and future elections.”

If Hilgers’ opinion were to hold up, it would carry heavy consequences moving forward; Nebraska releases more than 2,000 people from prison every year, and those people would re-enter society under a legal presumption of lifetime disenfranchisement. After his order to county elections officials, Evnen promised to seek approval from the pardons board to restore the rights of people who had registered since the 2005 reform, though he has put that on hold pending a state supreme court ruling.

Danielle Jefferis, an assistant professor of law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies criminal punishment, said Hilgers’ opinion, and Evnen’s subsequent order, are not only constitutionally unsound, but cruel. 

“There’s just so many ways in which the criminal legal system dehumanizes people, including taking away their democratic voice,” she told Bolts. “To get that voice back, it’s a way of feeling like a human again, a way of feeling like a member of the community again. Yes, you made a mistake, yes, you owed society a debt, but you paid that debt. And for the attorney general to issue that decision so abruptly—it’s hard to find another word than whiplash.”

Aaron Pettes was convicted at 18 and sentenced to a term of incarceration, and then probation, which he only just finished in January. He works today at RISE, Nebraska’s largest nonprofit organization promoting successful community re-entry for people as they transition from incarceration back to free society. He talks often with the people he serves about voting, and was himself excited to finally vote this fall. He had been thinking lately about which candidates and issues he’d support in November. 

Aaron says he will be ready to register if and when the state supreme court, which has a conservative majority, rules against the actions of Hilgers and Evnen. But he’s doubtful that other formerly incarcerated people he works with every day would do the same. 

Aaron says the recent loss of voting rights and the continued uncertainty over them, even for those who’ve completed a sentence, is just one of many ways government subjects people to unending punishment and demoralization.

“Incarceration just confirms to people that this system shouldn’t garner any support from them, because it’s broken, and then they get out and they’re not welcomed back into the community but allowed back in, with minimal rights, minimal resources, and the system waiting to trap them again,” he said.

Against that backdrop, Aaron says he’s often found it challenging to convince formerly incarcerated people to vote. They were typically skeptical before Hilgers’ bombshell, and are even more so now, he says.

“You tell them to come out and vote, that they can make a difference, and they’re finally like, ‘OK, fine,’” Aaron added. “Then this happens, and they’re like, ‘See, I told you.’”

RISE is a part of the Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition, which was poised to launch the statewide campaign to convince people their vote matters, and to then help them exercise it. The group remains ready to make that case if LB 20 and LB 53 are ever restored, but Aaron isn’t optimistic about restarting the engine. 

“After all this, to encourage people to re-engage, it’s going to be difficult,” he said. “We were right there, and with one swoop of a pen we were ushered out again.”

Tommy Moore of Lincoln, Aaron’s colleague at RISE, has been out of prison since 2009 and voting since he got off probation and finished his full sentence in 2013. He says he’s worked hard to chart a successful course post-incarceration: He earned a doctoral degree, started teaching at a community college, and now works to improve local systems of mental health care and prison re-entry services. Voting, he says, is one part of his overall mission to contribute positively to society. 

But Moore says the present uncertainty over his voting rights in Nebraska makes him wary to even attempt to participate in this election, regardless of what the state supreme court may command in coming weeks. He says he is too afraid of being accused of breaking election law.

“I do not plan on voting, which is really sad because it’s a pretty critical year,” Moore told Bolts. “I’m that concerned about going back to prison. I do not want to affiliate myself again with the opposite side of the criminal justice system. I never want to encounter that humiliation again, and I prefer not to vote than to take the risk.”

The post Nebraska Reverts to 19th-Century Voting Restrictions, Clouding Rights for Thousands appeared first on Bolts.

The 16-year incumbent in this race, County Attorney Don Kleine, was a Democrat until two years ago. Then, amid the Black Lives Matter citizen uprising of 2020, Kleine garnered statewide controversy after he declined to press charges against white bar owner Jake Gardner, who fatally shot Black protester James Scurlock in downtown Omaha, the county’s population center. Gardner was eventually indicted by a grand jury, before killing himself in Oregon the day before he was set to turn himself in.

For his determination that Gardner had acted in self-defense, Kleine faced the wrath not only of furious activists, but also of his party base: Nebraska Democratic delegates from across the state passed a resolution declaring that Kleine had “perpetuated white supremacy” in his handling of the case. Two weeks later, Kleine switched parties and received a hero’s welcome from the Nebraska GOP.

“You could call Don Kleine a jerk or clown or whatever,” Kleine told The Reader of Omaha. “But white supremacist or racist? Yeah, sorry, I couldn’t handle that.”

He now faces Dave Pantos, a more reform-minded Democratic challenger, and the former executive director of Legal Aid of Nebraska. Pantos told Bolts that he agrees with his party’s resolution slamming Kleine as racist, and that he believes that Gardner should have been charged with manslaughter and several other offenses. 

“Clearly there was a sense of, ‘Hey, let’s give this guy a break because he was on our side,'” Pantos said. “He should have been arrested. He should have been charged.” 

The contest could be tight. Douglas County voted for Democratic President Joe Biden by 11 percentage points in 2020, but local Republicans have fared better in other races, and the mayor of Omaha is a Republican. Kleine may also benefit from the decisive advantage incumbents usually enjoy in prosecutor elections, though his decision to run with a new party affiliation will test that proposition.

Pantos is running amid controversy of his own. The Omaha World-Herald reported last month that he was fired from Legal Aid of Nebraska in 2014 after the organization’s board of directors investigated an affair he was having with an employee, and a promotion he gave to that employee. Pantos admitted to the affair but told the World-Herald that the employee was already promoted when the affair began; he repeated that explanation to Bolts.

Kleine, who declined to be interviewed by Bolts, didn’t switch parties quietly in 2020, telling reporters he’d voted for former President Donald Trump and that it was an “easy choice.” He held a press conference in 2020 with conservative Nebraska Republican leaders, and vowed at the time that he would not switch his approach to the job of county attorney. He told reporters, “I didn’t change who Don Kleine is. You get what you get here with me, and that’s the way I am. That’s the way I’m going to continue to be. … (I)t’s not going to change how I run the Douglas County Attorney’s Office.”

He was no progressive before his switch, having earned a reputation among local reform advocates as a Democrat resistant to criminal justice reform. Kleine’s office, for instance, has prosecuted four of the five people placed on death row in Nebraska in the years since he was elected, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. (All cases were before his party switch.)

As a Republican, he pushed back against a would-be landmark bill this year that was designed to stem prison overcrowding. Despite being part of the committee that recommended the changes, he did not support the package, and opposed its provision to lower the severity of drug-related charges, among other changes. The bill failed.

Progressive Omaha activist and organizer Morgann Freeman said she’s observed no shift in Kleine’s approach on the policy front. But one change she’s seen in him, she said, is that he seems much more willing to explain himself to the public, even when she’s disagreed with his decision-making. 

“That’s the fascinating and traumatizing part: because of what happened with the protests, there was a lot more scrutiny put on his practices that he didn’t have before,” said Freeman, who was standing a block away when Gardner shot Scurlock.

“When he was still listed as a Democrat, he got away with structural racism in a way that I don’t think we’ll ever fully understand.”

The World-Herald’s analysis of U.S. Department of Justice data shows that Nebraska is one of only two states that grew their prison populations between 2010 and 2020, alongside Idaho. While the national average prison population went down by 24 percent during this period, Nebraska’s increased by 16 percent. 

Douglas County is overrepresented in Nebraska prisons. In 2020, it comprised a 38-percent plurality of state prison admissions, despite having only 30 percent of the state population, a state commission found. Substantial racial disparities are fueling this dynamic: Research from the University of Nebraska Omaha showed that, as of 2019, one in eight Black residents in Douglas County, which is substantially less white than the state as a whole, had been arrested at some point. That compared to just one in 45 white Douglas County residents. 

“I think Omaha is one of the places where you really understand America’s tale of two worlds,” said Ja Keen Fox, the organizer who authored the “white supremacy” resolution against Kleine in September 2020. Fox had recently been removed from a city advisory board by Omaha’s mayor over tweets he wrote in 2016 about a man who killed police officers in Dallas; the mayor’s decision drew a protest from longtime state Senator Ernie Chambers, a Black Democrat who represents Omaha.

“There’s a Black Omaha and there’s a white Omaha,” Fox said. “Don Kleine, to white Omaha, was a stand-up guy.” To Black Omaha, Fox added, “He’s someone that would arrest and prosecute to the maximum, for any kind of crime.” After Pantos entered the race, Fox worked for his campaign but is not currently involved.

Fox pointed in particular to Kleine’s treatment of young Black people accused of crimes; in one well-documented case, he charged a 14-year-old Black boy as an adult in a homicide case. At a hearing this spring, a Democratic state senator who represents Omaha faulted Kleine’s decisions for fueling particularly high incarceration rates among the city’s Black residents. 

Pantos is proposing a very different route on criminal justice policy. He criticized the legislature’s failure to contain prison spending and population this legislative session. 

He told Bolts that he supports the provision Kleine had taken the most issue with: reclassifying of drug possession cases to make them lower-level misdemeanors rather than felonies.

“If we treat them as misdemeanors, we can still divert them into drug court,” Pantos said, referencing a reason Kleine has given for opposing this change, “and have them come out the other end without having that felony prevent them from getting a job or housing.”

Pantos added that he personally believes many drug possession cases shouldn’t be prosecuted at all but that voters—and systems—may not be ready for such a change. 

“It’s recognizing that Nebraska and Douglas County are in the 1980s camp. We need to move from that to the middle first,” he said. “We need to walk before we run … the ultimate goal would be people aren’t being charged at all, but I don’t think the resources are in place yet, and we need to keep the horse in front of the cart.”

Pantos says he would take a similarly incremental approach on other issues to to bringing reform to the prosecutor’s office: He said cash bail amounts to the “criminalization of poverty,” but that he would still seek cash bail in certain cases rather than switching the prosecutor’s office “all at once” in that area. 

He said he opposes the death penalty, but that, because Nebraska voters have supported it by repealing a law that had abolished it in a 2016 referendum, he wouldn’t rule out seeking capital punishment if elected. (Douglas County residents also voted in favor of repeal, 52 to 48 percent.)

“I don’t want to put a political scientist hat on too much, but I don’t think the issue of criminal justice reform has been really tested in Nebraska,” Pantos said. “I want to be mindful of the culture and where folks are at. I guess we’ll know more [on Nov. 8] how ready folks are for change.”

Update: This article was updated on Nov. 7 with information about Ja Keen Fox’s previous work on the Dave Pantos campaign.

The post Omaha Prosecutor Seeks Re-Election, Two Years After His Party Accused Him of Racism 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.

The racial justice uprisings of last summer, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, have turned mayoral races across the country into a focal point amid demands for leadership committed to representing marginalized communities. 

In Omaha, Nebraska, a city rocked by protests against police violence, some see the upcoming mayoral election as an opportunity to chart a new course on policing, public safety, and racial equity.

Protests erupted in Omaha last year after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, and again in November when Omaha police fatally shot Kenneth Jones, a Black man, during a traffic stop. Police crackdowns on the protests and the murder of a Black demonstrator by a white man known for bigotry further escalated tensions and fueled demands to defund police.

Mayor Jean Stothert, a Republican who first took office in 2013 and  is seeking her third term, instead proposed to increase police funding. Now the Omaha Police Officers Association, which did not endorse a mayoral candidate in 2017, is backing Stothert.

“This is us rewarding loyalty for a mayor who has stood with us,” announced the association’s president, Sgt. Tony Conner. 

Local activists are rallying behind two Democratic challengers: criminal justice reform advocate Jasmine Harris and school board member Kimara Snipes. The election of either Harris or Snipes would give Omaha its first Black female mayor. Both candidates have spoken about the need for a more holistic approach to public safety that recognizes the root causes of crime that simply increasing policing doesn’t address.

Two other Democratic candidates, high school teacher Mark Gudgel and real estate firm owner RJ Neary, will also appear on the ballot for the nonpartisan April 6 primary. The top two vote candidates will move on to the May general election

“When we’re talking about the city [government], this entity that’s supposed to represent us, it needs to have the same work ethic and reflect the diversity and the makeup of the people who are doing the work,” said Dawaune Lamont Hayes, founder of a community-led local news outlet, North Omaha Information Support Everyone (NOISE). “Because we’re out here, and we’re making it happen.”

Hayes launched a short-lived bid for Omaha mayor with a wide-ranging platform that included restorative justice, equitable transportation, and environmental sustainability. They withdrew from the race after not receiving enough verified signatures to get on the ballot, but that has not deterred them from becoming a driving force for voter engagement along with local grassroots groups. 

No matter who wins this year’s municipal elections, Hayes said, “we still need an engaged electorate that’s going to hold those people accountable.” Hayes is among the activists supporting Harris and Snipes, describing them as “brilliant coalition-building women who have offered incredible ideas.”

Public safety is a key issue in this race. More than 36 percent of the city’s budget goes to policing. During heated fiscal debates last summer, Omaha City Council president Chris Jerram proposed a measure to remove $2 million that Stothert added to the police budget and put it toward mental health services and employment training. The council shot it down, but then passed an amendment to pull $1.8 million from the city’s cash reserves to fund those services. Stothert vetoed the amendment saying it would be “reckless” and “irresponsible” to take money from the contingency fund during a pandemic. 

Harris said one of her first priorities as mayor would be to review all agency budgets to identify programs that need reworking for greater efficiency and equity. She said the police department is no exception. 

“When people talk about public safety, they’re always saying ‘we need to add more police to keep the public safe,’” said Harris, who works as the advocacy and policy director for RISE, a statewide organization that supports people coming out of prison and advocates for initiatives to reduce incarceration. “But at the end of the day, everybody doesn’t feel safe with the police. So we need to ensure that public safety encompasses everyone. And for me that’s taking on a preventative and proactive approach.”

Harris said she would work to decriminalize activities that traditionally have led to interactions with police, like panhandling. She also wants to demilitarize the police by restricting their use of riot gear and chemical weapons. To ensure police accountability, there should be “a transparent misconduct process where our community members know what’s going on along the way,” Harris explained. “That means creating an independent police oversight board. So that way, they have authority to be able to do investigations and to have the discipline afterwards.”

Harris wants to see the Omaha Police Department’s behavioral health and wellness unit further expand and receive proper funding and support. Last year, Omaha implemented a program that pairs precincts with mental health co-responders. The program debuted shortly before the city settled with the family of Zachary Bear Heels who was shot with a Taser and beaten while handcuffed in June 2017. He was having a mental health crisis and died as a result of the officer’s conduct.

Harris pointed to the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon, and the STAR program in Denver as models she supports. These programs send mental health responders to some emergencies instead of, rather than alongside, police.

Snipes, an elected member of the Omaha Public Schools Board, told the Political Report in an email that she would take a holistic approach to public safety, including expanding the role of mental health professionals. 

“To be a 21st century city, we need to jettison 20th century politics,” wrote Snipes. “That means we need to show an openness to change and innovation.”

Snipes wants to establish an all-civilian police oversight board. And she told the Political Report that public safety requires addressing the root causes of crime, “including unemployment and underemployment, mental health, homelessness, poverty and inequities.”

During  a forum held by the League of Women Voters of Greater Omaha this month, Snipes criticized the mayor’s handling of protests. “The people should not have to wait on leadership,” said Snipes. “[Mayor Stothert] showed she was out of touch with the community when we were dealing with the social justice protests.”

NOISE reported last month that the ACLU of Nebraska obtained emails showing the city of Omaha and police had coordinated surveillance of racial justice organizers. Lieutenant Sherie Thomas told NOISE via email that officers acted in consultation with the city’s legal department to determine which sources of intelligence they could legally access. 

The events they monitored were generally regarded as protected First Amendment activities, including a sidewalk chalking event, a former NOISE reporter’s livestream of a City Council meeting, and a prayer vigil for James Scurlock, a Black protester killed by a racist white bar owner. 

Omaha Abolition Research (OAR) is among several local groups that have pushed for the city to move away from policing. In an email, the group told the Political Report that in different neighborhoods, “safety differences are not correlated with police presence. … Safety is correlated with economic stability or instability and the continued impact of class and racial divides.” 

OAR named affordable and safe housing, transportation access, a clean environment, and access to food and healthcare as some of the things that make a neighborhood safe.  OAR added that Omaha’s status as a city with a large per capita share of millionaires enables wealthy people to disproportionately influence the city’s priorities.

“Omaha would benefit greatly from a participatory budgeting process so that middle and lower class residents … are able to have a voice in how public funds are allocated,” explained the OAR team. 

Participatory budgeting is underway in Seattle, where community organizers and elected officials are using the process to reallocate funds cut from the police budget. Harris said in a forum in January that she would like to use participatory budgeting to “let the community members decide how funding will be spent.”

That could lead to investments in housing and transportation, which Harris named as two major issues affecting residents in the city. 

“In Omaha, people live in one area and jobs are in another,” Harris explained. “And our public transportation isn’t set up to conducively get people from their home to their job, or back from their job to their home if they have a late shift.” She pointed to the struggle to find living wage jobs as a key challenge for many community members, particularly people who were formerly incarcerated. 

Snipes expressed a similar concern during the League of Women Voters forum, citing a shortage of approximately 80,000 affordable housing units. She referenced a study from the Sherwood Foundation that found that the shortage is concentrated in majority-Black North Omaha.   

Gudgel echoes these stances. He told the Political Report that tackling issues like affordable housing, better public transportation, and access to higher education is the way to address the “poverty that breeds crime.” Gudgel also expressed an interest in having an independent police review board, decriminalizing marijuana, and demilitarizing the police. “Military grade weapons, such as tear gas, should never be allowed for use against civilians,” Gudgel wrote in an email. 

But Gudgel’s commitment to racial equity was called into question this month when anti-Black Lives Matter comments made by one of his primary campaign donors came to light. Gudgel, who is white, apologized and cut ties with the donor.

Neary, who has raised the most campaign funding among those challenging Stothert, did not respond to requests for an interview.

Despite Neary’s financial advantage, Hayes is skeptical he could beat Stothert in the general election. They make the case that Neary lacks the grassroots support necessary to build the kind of multiracial coalition they think it will take to win. The campaigns that Snipes and Harris are running are “emblematic” of Omaha politics shifting toward electing “a mayor that represents the people,” Hayes said.

The post This Election Could Transform Policing in Omaha appeared first on Bolts.

The Idaho ballot initiative to expand Medicaid got a lift in September when the Idaho Sheriffs Association endorsed it, citing in part the effect it could have in relieving the criminal justice system. “Their endorsement was a big boost to our campaign,” Luke Mayville, a founder of Reclaim Idaho, the group that put this initiative on the ballot, told me. “They’ve seen the extent to which drug addiction problems are interwoven with criminal justice and incarceration, and they believe that the kind of drug treatment and addiction treatment that Medicaid would provide would be an aid to their effort to reduce crime.”

Calls for criminal justice reform and efforts to expand Medicaid boosted one another nationwide during the 2018 campaign.

Stacey Abrams, Georgia Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee, explicitly connected these dots in a detailed criminal justice reform platform that featured the expansion as a core plank. “When individuals receive Medicaid and can finally access mental health and substance abuse treatment in their communities, crime rates drop,” the document states, describing the expansion as “a vital investment in public health and public safety.”

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) significantly expanded Medicaid eligibility for low-income people. But some states have refused to expand the program, depriving millions of the public insurance that the ACA was meant to provide. This harms people released from incarceration. “They most likely will be uninsured because they won’t come out and have a job with employer benefits, and they’re unlikely to be able to afford private insurance,” Robin Rudowitz, an associate director for the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “Without coverage, those individuals do not have access to affordable, comprehensive medical care.” It also leaves many individuals who experience mental health or addiction issues unable to afford treatment, making them more vulnerable to punitive policies.

Stacey Abrams fell short in Georgia. But voters in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah all voted to expand Medicaid via referendums.

Molly McCleery, the deputy director of the health care program of Nebraska Appleseed and an adviser for Nebraska’s expansion campaign, and Mayville both said that criminal justice reform messaging did not feature prominently in their states’ campaigns. But they both also believe that it proved potent with conservative voters worried about the opioid crisis and “the severity of drug addiction,” as Mayville put it.

Mayville recalls encountering criticism that expansion meant providing public benefits to people who are addicted to drugs. “I made the case that far from it being a problem that people on drugs would be on Medicaid, that’s one of the main positives, a tool to fight drug addiction,” Mayville said. “Once I framed it in terms of, we’re trying to give people a way out of addiction, rather than just simply giving benefits to people who are wallowing in addiction, once I framed it as these benefits giving people a way out of addiction and the incarceration that comes with it, I found that to be a good argument.”

Similarly, McCleery told me that the opioid crisis came up during community presentations in Nebraska, and that expansion proponents emphasized the care that Medicaid coverage enables.  “One thing people really understand is that if you don’t have insurance you are relying on safety net services, a patchwork of services, and you may not get the full scope of treatment you would get if you had insurance,” McCleery said. She noted that this resonated in rural areas, which have been hit by hospital closures nationwide and in Nebraska.

The successful referendums are just the beginning for Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah. Beyond the questions about how officials will implement them, eligible individuals who interact with the criminal justice system still encounter obstacles to coverage. The Kaiser Family Foundation has released multiple reports on how to facilitate actual access to care, for instance by helping people sign up before they are released or suspending rather than terminating their coverage while they are incarcerated. “The Medicaid expansion created more incentives for states to link [the justice-involved] population to coverage and care,” Rudowitz said.

The post How Medicaid Expansion and Criminal Justice Reform Boosted Each Other in 2018 appeared first on Bolts.