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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Does it make DeSantis look silly and buffoonish to his supporters, his detractors, the likely voters among them, the unlikely voters among them, the swing vote? Remember, every audience is seeing their own movie. It literally does not matter at all if a million people think this makes DeSantis look bad if they're not gonna vote for him anyway -- and it'd be worth earning all of their disapproval just to make 15,000 people on his side more likely to.. well, support him.

"But he might have alienated more independents than he did excite members of the base", you could argue. And maybe! The political calculations are certainly complex.. in theory.

In practice, though, I think everyone's collectively agreed that exciting the base beats infuriating the enemy, and these complex calculations aren't actually being worked out.

Election security is very important. But if people ask if they can vote and get told they can vote, arresting them seems to not help much. This is not getting us Voter ID. It just looks like the bureaucracy telling people one day they are doing things okay and the next "lol get fukt."

Maybe he's hoping that people will look at this and go 'boy wouldn't it be great if instead of this banana republic bullshit where you can get arrested for doing what a government official told you to do we had a system in place that determines all this shit before the election and sends me something I can use to say "yes this is me and yes I can vote" like we do with plane tickets and driving and buying cough medicine?'

Yeah I agree, that would've been great! You do realize that the text of Amendment 4 simply said "This amendment would restore voting rights automatically upon completion of all terms of a sentence, including parole or probation", right? It was the Republican legislature that worked very hard to enshrine into law that "all terms of a sentence" actually also includes any potentially unpaid fines. They did this despite (or more accurately and less charitably because) everyone involved was loudly raising the alarm that there was no viable system in place for the state to keep track of unpaid fines.

Here's just one excerpt of the mess from the lawsuit that followed:

An example is a flat $225 assessment in every felony case, $200 of which is used to fund the clerk’s office and $25 of which is remitted to the Florida Department of Revenue for deposit in the state’s general revenue fund. Another example is a flat $3 assessment in every case that is remitted to the Department of Revenue for further distribution in specified percentages for, among other things, a domestic-violence program and a law-enforcement training fund.

And here's one guy's efforts to pay all his fines:

Mr. Wrench was convicted of felonies under two case numbers on December 15, 2008. The State introduced copies of the judgments, but it is unclear whether the copies are complete. The criminal judgments, or at least the portion in the record, do not show any financial obligations. But on February 2, 2009, a civil judgment was entered under the first case number for $1,874 in “financial obligations”—no further description was provided—that, according to the civil judgment, had been ordered as part of the sentence. Similarly, on March 15, 2011, more than two years later, a civil judgment was entered under the second case number for $601 in unspecified “financial obligations” that, again according to the civil judgment, had been ordered as part of the sentence. It is unclear what amount, if any, the State asserts Mr. Wrench must pay on these convictions to be eligible to vote.

None of this had to be this way. Voting restoration that only needed to look at when a prison or probation sentence ended would've been infinitely easier to implement that the system Florida chose instead, where the existence of an unnoticed $3 unpaid fine in some court clerk's drawer decides whether someone's vote is legal or a felony offense.

It was the Republican legislature that worked very hard to enshrine into law that "all terms of a sentence" actually also includes any potentially unpaid fines.

I guess I would have assumed that "all terms of a sentence" is implicitly inclusive of unpaid fines from that sentence. I'm not clear why fines would be excluded from either textualist or spirit of the law readings. I appreciate the practical problems that you're covering, and that certainly speaks poorly of the process, but it would seem quite weird to me if "all terms of the sentence" actually meant "the terms of incarceration, but not fines and fees".

I think everyone would agree that "sentence" would include time spent behind bars. If you were to widen the scope of the definition, the concept you'd encounter next would be probation, where you're still under supervision even though you no longer in a prison. If you were to widen the scope even more, you could reach the concept of fines if the definition is expansive enough. But generally the progression here logically goes from most central to the concept, down to most collateral.

So when the amendment says "all terms of a sentence, including parole or probation" it's there to disavow any potential confusion of the scope anyone might have vis-a-vis "prison" and "parole or probation". The fact that they specify parole or probation further anchors the demarcation line. To argue that fines are implicitly included in this expansion, you'd have to establish that fines are logically just as central to the concept of a sentence as parole/probation are within the context of a criminal prosecution. A common analysis technique in statutory interpretation used by courts is where the trailing examples are used as guiding illustrations to set the scope. For example if I ran a restaurant and had a generic contract with a supplier for "dairy, like milk and cheese" and they deliver tubs of whey protein powder, a judge is very likely to rule that violated the contract, even if it was technically correct.

The amendment text could have said "all terms of a sentence, including parole, probation, or fines" in which case there would not have been any ambiguity. It didn't, and the best most charitable interpretation its omission can sustain is that reasonable minds can disagree. But if this was really an edge case of interpretation, it doesn't explain the insistence to choose an implementation everyone knew was going to come with severe practical problems, which is why they're relevant.

Parole and probation are, well, probationary measures; they're a supervised relaxing of a punishment conditional on good behavior, rather than a punishment themselves. If you're out on parole it means you should be in prison but we're trusting you. They don't intuitively map to me as part of the sentence.

A fine, however, is. You get sentenced to a five thousand dollar fine and five year in prison, and during that sentence you might be let out on parole.

A fine is much more centrally a part of a sentence than probation is.

I think there's some merit to what you're saying... but would you agree that there's a difference between the fines given in sentencing and the fines that are tacked on for processing?

I'd probably be fine with saying these people needed to pay the fines referenced by the judge. But if someone is sentenced to jailtime, and then a bunch of fines are tacked on as part of the processing for the court and the jail... those don't seem like they shkuld be part of the sentence.

If those “tacked on” fines aren’t part of the sentence, by what authority are they being imposed? If you are legally obligated to pay a sum of money as a result of a criminal conviction, it seems to me you have been “sentenced” to pay that sum of money.

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