California moves to allow felons to serve on juries.

[WolfMan]

Bad move Calif.

How long before NYS does the same?

https://www.ocregister.com/2019/06/13/california-moves-to-let-felons-serve-on-juries/

[WolfMan]

.

[Bingoloid]

Here's a radical thought:

The medieval origin of the word "felony" meant giving up the entirety of your property and goods. It was reserved for crimes serious enough to justify stripping you of everything you had.

The problem isn't that felons should have their rights to vote, serve on juries, and carry firearms restored.

It's that too many things have become felonies despite not actually being serious enough to justify the lifelong consequences of having a felony record.

[binghamtonian]

Forgery and vandalism can be charged as a felony in California. Should someone have their rights stripped away because they decided to tag a bridge underpass when they were 18?

[Bingoloid]

17 minutes ago, binghamtonian said:

Forgery and vandalism can be charged as a felony in California. Should someone have their rights stripped away because they decided to tag a bridge underpass when they were 18?

Exactly. The idea that there's such a thing as "felony car keying" is ridiculous, as if some time in county and restitution wouldn't make that right.

Yet, according to the article, the bill in question makes no distinction between violent and non-violent felony offenders, and also includes parolees, which, if true, is absurd.

[WolfMan]

35 minutes ago, binghamtonian said:

Forgery and vandalism can be charged as a felony in California. Should someone have their rights stripped away because they decided to tag a bridge underpass when they were 18?

In such a case no IMO. But did you read the article to see what the bill encompasses?

[binghamtonian]

Yes, it's an Opinion piece. So it very quickly came across as being a bit biased. Just because someone has a prior felony charge doesn't mean they can't be unbiased against another individual who's facing charges. If someone already has the right to vote, then why should they be barred from sitting on a jury. It should be part of their civic duty. He was trying to compare apples to oranges, especially with the following:

"People who have a family member in law enforcement are excused from jury duty all the time because of the possibility of bias, even unconscious bias."

Sure, they can be excused, but they're not barred from serving. They could do the same thing to someone that had a felony, ask about it, then move to strike them. There, they showed up, they were excused and you don't need to call them back for x amount of years. 

"A “jury of your peers” doesn’t mean having a foreman with the same ankle monitoring device as the defendant."

Really? If they have an ankle monitor on, it's a good excuse to excuse them from jury duty. A lot of this guys issues can easily be resolved during voir dire.

[PeteMoss]

2 hours ago, Bingoloid said:

Exactly. The idea that there's such a thing as "felony car keying" is ridiculous, as if some time in county and restitution wouldn't make that right.

Yet, according to the article, the bill in question makes no distinction between violent and non-violent felony offenders, and also includes parolees, which, if true, is absurd.

There is a little more to "felony car keying" than what you are making it sound like.

" Vandalism can be charged as a felony if the value of the damage is over $400 and you have prior convictions, gang affiliations, or the vandalism was a hate crime. "

https://www.tulare-kings-attorney.com/blog/2018/february/keyed-a-car-in-california-here-s-the-worst-that-/

[Bingoloid]

1 hour ago, PeteMoss said:

There is a little more to "felony car keying" than what you are making it sound like.

" Vandalism can be charged as a felony if the value of the damage is over $400 and you have prior convictions, gang affiliations, or the vandalism was a hate crime. "

https://www.tulare-kings-attorney.com/blog/2018/february/keyed-a-car-in-california-here-s-the-worst-that-/

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but the statute is clear and this agrees with every other source I found that the only requirement is $400, at which point the prosecutor can bump up the charge if they feel like it.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PEN&sectionNum=594.

"(b) (1) If the amount of defacement, damage, or destruction is four hundred dollars ($400) or more, vandalism is punishable by imprisonment pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 1170..."

A bit ago, it was widely reported that the Los Angeles Police Department recommended felony vandalism charges against Justin Bieber for egging his neighbor's house, as damages ended up estimated around $20,000 due to the home's expensive plaster having to be replaced. (Prosecutors declined)

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-justin-bieber-egg-case-expert-20140709-story.html

$20,000 is a lot of money, but it's also money that can be repaid by the perpetrator and the damage repaired - and it's somewhat odd to reason that egging someone's worthless shack is somehow inherently less criminal than egging a mansion. In neither case is the perpetrator benefiting from the money, and they're both someone's private home.

In New York, the cutoff is actually lower, at $250: http://ypdcrime.com/penal.law/article145.htm?zoom_highlight=145#p145.05

Obviously, most of these get plead down, but my point is simply that in a rush to enact tougher sentences, we've stretched the meaning of "felony" beyond all recognition. It is historically a class of crime that was meant to have serious and permanent consequences. Blackstone wrote that it had come to mean crimes punished by hanging - along with the forfeiture of their property.

It can now mean incredibly little. As a result, you have a situation where there are many convicted felons who, to a reasonable observer, did something wrong but not proportional to the lifelong stigma that comes with a felony conviction after they've served their time, and a lot of people who are understandably sympathetic to their situation and want to help them by reducing that stigma. 

In my view, this is the wrong solution to the right problem. I don't believe that we should need to leave it to voir dire. This has been and should be settled by statute and limited to crimes that really need to carry a lasting stigma and represent such disregard for other people that the perpetrator's participation in civic life is no longer acceptable.