Court rules Florida felon law does not discriminate against Black women - Yahoo News
Voting rights advocates claim the law disenfranchises people of color.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s rejection of gender discrimination claims against Florida’s Senate Bill 7066 (SB-7066) on Monday.
The bill requires former felons to pay all legal financial obligations before they can vote, Courthouse News Service reported. Voting rights advocates claim the law disenfranchises inmates of color long after their release from prison.
A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based appeals court unanimously determined that Florida‘s Republican-led legislatures did not have any “discriminatory intent” in passing SB 7066. The claims of discrimination brought by Rosemary McCoy and Sheila Singleton failed to demonstrate that the bill discriminates against low-income women of color, the court said.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle found that Florida’s pay-to-vote felon law does not discriminate based on gender. In an 11-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. Circuit Judge Jill Pryor, a Barack Obama appointee, agreed with Hinkle and noted that the plaintiffs failed to prove discriminatory intent in the law.
“The equal protection gender discrimination claim McCoy and Singleton advanced can be sustained only upon a showing of discriminatory intent. Because McCoy and Singleton did not attempt to make this showing, their equal protection clause claim fails, and the district court was correct to reject it,” Pryor wrote.
The appeals court also rejected the women’s challenge that their 19th Amendment rights were violated.
“It is true the Supreme Court has never held that the Nineteenth Amendment contains an intentional discrimination requirement. But given what the court has said about the two amendments, we as an inferior court are not at liberty to craft a different rule for the Nineteenth than the one the court has applied to the Fifteenth.”
Southern Poverty Law Center attorney Nancy Abudu, who represents the plaintiffs, noted that Black women “are statistically unlikely to be able to satisfy their financial obligations under the law due to higher rates of unemployment and lower wages.”
source: https://news.yahoo.com/court-rules-florida-felon-law-184933175.html
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