{"id":1386,"date":"2010-01-15T15:11:21","date_gmt":"2010-01-15T21:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/crawler\/?p=1386"},"modified":"2010-01-15T15:12:09","modified_gmt":"2010-01-15T21:12:09","slug":"sociological-evidence-overturns-felon-voting-ban","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2010\/01\/15\/sociological-evidence-overturns-felon-voting-ban\/","title":{"rendered":"sociological evidence overturns felon voting ban"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Can't<\/a>According to the Seattle Times<\/a>, evidence\u00a0gathered by\u00a0University of Washington sociologists Katherine Beckett and Robert Crutchfield overturned the state of Washington’s law banning incarcerated felons from voting.\u00a0 The case, Farrakhan v. Gregoire<\/em>, was decided on January 5, 2010:<\/p>\n

The surprising ruling, by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, said the law violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act by disenfranchising minority voters.\u00a0 The decision is the first in the country’s federal appeals courts to equate a prohibition against voting by incarcerated felons with practices outlawed under the federal Voting Rights Act, such as poll taxes or literacy tests.<\/p>\n

The two-judge majority apparently was persuaded by the plaintiffs’ argument that reams of social-science data filed in the case showed minorities in Washington are stopped, arrested and convicted in such disproportionate rates that the ban on voting by incarcerated felons is inherently discriminatory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article details the sociological research in question:<\/p>\n

[The case]\u00a0was built on research by University of Washington sociologists who found that blacks are 70 percent more likely \u2014 and Latinos and Native Americans 50 percent more likely \u2014 than whites to be searched in traffic stops.<\/p>\n

The research also showed that blacks are nine times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, despite the fact that the ratio of arrests for violent crime among blacks and whites is less than four-to-one. One result of that: 25 percent of black men in Washington are disenfranchised from voting.<\/p>\n

The decision, written by Judge A. Wallace Tashima, said the studies “speak to a durable, sustained indifference in treatment faced by minorities in Washington’s criminal justice system \u2014 systemic disparities which cannot be explained by ‘factors independent of race.’ “<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The state of Washington is appealing this ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.\u00a0 To read a somewhat sociological editorial on this decision, you may also want to check out an editorial by Seattle Times<\/em> columnist Jerry Large<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Voter Disenfranchisement Statistics:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"voter-disenfranchisement\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to the Seattle Times, evidence\u00a0gathered by\u00a0University of Washington sociologists Katherine Beckett and Robert Crutchfield overturned the state of Washington’s law banning incarcerated felons from voting.\u00a0 The case, Farrakhan v. Gregoire, was decided on January 5, 2010: The surprising ruling, by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, said the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[39116,403,237,123,355,39110,449,321,39111],"class_list":["post-1386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-crime","tag-deviance","tag-drugs","tag-ethnicity","tag-government","tag-inequality","tag-justice","tag-law","tag-race"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1386"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1395,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions\/1395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}