Opinion ID: 147347
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Equal Protection and the Common-Law Felony Theory of Section 2

Text: Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1. Section 2 further provides, in full: Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 2 (emphasis added). Section 2 provides an electoral penalty against States that withhold the franchise from otherwise eligible voters. If a State disenfranchises some number of otherwise eligible voters, those disenfranchised persons will count against the State's total population for purposes of determining its representation in Congress. But Section 2 lifts this penalty when disenfranchisement is based on (and this is the critical language) participation in rebellion, or other crime. Plaintiffs argue that this language should be read as: participation in rebellion, or other [common-law felony]. As an initial matter, it is not obvious how the scope of this Section 2 language affects a Section 1 equal protection claim; to understand that issue, we turn to the Supreme Court's opinion in Richardson v. Ramirez, 418 U.S. 24, 94 S.Ct. 2655, 41 L.Ed.2d 551 (1974).
Richardson involved a group of convicted felons who had served the entirety of their sentences and sought to compel California election officials to register them as voters. They had been barred from voting under a California statute which excluded from the franchise all persons previously convicted of an infamous crime. Id. at 27, 94 S.Ct. 2655. The California Supreme Court sustained their equal protection challenges to the California law, concluding that the disenfranchisement of convicted felons beyond the expiration of their terms of imprisonment violated the Equal Protection Clause. Ramirez v. Brown, 9 Cal.3d 199, 107 Cal.Rptr. 137, 507 P.2d 1345, 1357 (1973). In reaching that conclusion, the California Supreme Court relied primarily upon a then-recent Supreme Court decision striking down Tennessee's durational residence requirement as a condition on the right to vote. Id. at 1351-52 (discussing Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330, 92 S.Ct. 995, 31 L.Ed.2d 274 (1972)). In nullifying the Tennessee law at issue in Dunn, the Supreme Court held that [i]t is not sufficient for the State to show that durational residence requirements further a very substantial state interest. ... [I]f there are other, reasonable ways to achieve those goals with a lesser burden on constitutionally protected activity, a State may not choose the way of greater interference. Dunn, 405 U.S. at 343, 92 S.Ct. 995. The California Supreme Court followed Dunn 's reasoning and concluded that enforcement of modern statutes regulating the voting process and penalizing its misuse rather than outright disfranchisement of persons convicted of crimeis today the method of preventing election fraud which is the least burdensome on the right of suffrage, and therefore outright disenfranchisement was not a necessary restriction under Dunn 's rationale. Ramirez, 107 Cal.Rptr. 137, 507 P.2d at 1357. In Richardson, the Supreme Court reversed this judgment and, in doing so, looked primarily to Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court reasoned that Section 1's Equal Protection Clause could not be read to prohibit the disenfranchisement of felons because Section 2 approves of such disenfranchisement by removing any electoral penalty for it. Richardson, 418 U.S. at 54, 94 S.Ct. 2655 ([T]he exclusion of felons from the vote has an affirmative sanction in § 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment.). The Court concluded that § 1, in dealing with voting rights as it does, could not have been meant to bar outright a form of disenfranchisement which was expressly exempted from the less drastic sanction of reduced representation which § 2 imposed for other forms of disenfranchisement. Id. at 55. Today, a litigant bringing an equal protection challenge to a felon-disenfranchisement scheme must first face the formidable task of escaping Richardson 's long shadow. But see Hunter v. Underwood, 471 U.S. 222, 227, 231, 105 S.Ct. 1916, 85 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985) (invalidating provision in Alabama Constitution authorizing disenfranchisement for persons convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude, including misdemeanors not punishable by imprisonment, where discrimination against blacks, as well as against poor whites, was a motivating factor for the provision).
Plaintiffs' proposed route around Richardson is to argue that the affirmative sanction in Section 2 only extends to the disenfranchisement of persons convicted of common-law felonies, a category that they do not fit into. Plaintiffs identify the common-law felonies as those listed by the Supreme Court in Jerome v. United States, 318 U.S. 101, 108 n. 6, 63 S.Ct. 483, 87 L.Ed. 640 (1943): murder, manslaughter, arson, burglary, robbery, rape, sodomy, mayhem and larceny. Plaintiffs further posit, with no support, that treason was a common law felony of a special sort, Harvey Br. at 51, but that is inaccurate. 1 Wharton's Criminal Law § 17 (Torcia ed., 2009) (At common law, there were three kinds of offenses: treason, felony, and misdemeanor.). [1] So plaintiffs' proposed reading of Section 2 as meaning except for participation in rebellion, or other [common-law felony] is off to a bad start, because it appears participation in rebellion itself would qualify not as a common-law felony, but as treason. And plaintiffs' interpretation is certainly not a plain reading of Section 2's terms, which permit disenfranchisement for participation in rebellion, or other crime without regard to whether the crime was a felony at all, much less one recognized at common law. As noted in Richardson, this language was intended by Congress to mean what it says. 418 U.S. at 43, 94 S.Ct. 2655. Plaintiffs' proposed reading also seems to be in direct conflict with Richardson, which held that California may exclude from the franchise convicted felons who have completed their sentences, 418 U.S. at 56, 94 S.Ct. 2655 (emphasis added), evincing no concern with whether any particular felony was one recognized at common law. Indeed, at least one of the three ex-felons in Richardson was convicted of a crime that was clearly not a felony at common law. See Richardson, 418 U.S. at 32 n. 9, 94 S.Ct. 2655 (felony of heroin possession). Still, neither this court nor the Supreme Court has directly addressed this precise question, so we consider plaintiffs' reasons for looking beyond Section 2's plain language. Plaintiffs argue that the word crime at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment's drafting and ratification commonly meant felony at common law. Contra Kentucky v. Dennison, 65 U.S. 66, 99, 24 How. 66, 16 L.Ed. 717 (1860) (The word `crime' of itself includes every offence, from the highest to the lowest in the grade of offences, and includes what are called `misdemeanors,' as well as treason and felony.). In support of this argument, plaintiffs cite a dictionary definition and William Blackstone's Commentaries, which preceded the Fourteenth Amendment's ratification by a century. Harvey Br. at 43-44. Contemporaneousness aside, neither of these sources supports plaintiffs' position that crime was commonly understood as being restricted to common-law felonies. Webster's Dictionary defined the word crime in 1867 as An act which violates a law, divine or human; ... But in a more common or restricted sense, a crime denotes violation of public law, of a deeper and more atrocious nature. NOAH WEBSTER, AN AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 246 (Goodrich ed., 1867) (emphasis in original). And William Blackstone observed that in common usage the word `crimes' is made to denote such offenses as are of a deeper and more atrocious dye; while smaller faults and omissions of less consequence are comprised under the gentler name of `misdemeanors' only. 4 COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND  (1769). Noticeably absent from these definitions is any mention whatsoever of common-law felonies. While a litigant could use these definitions to support the proposition that the word crime in Section 2 refers only to serious crimes or felonies (such that misdemeanors would not fit within the definition), that is not plaintiffs' argument. They instead argue that in 1868 crimes meant felonies at common law, and nowhere in any of the definitions is it suggested that the word crimes was so confined. In fact, the cited definitions plainly undermine plaintiffs' argument by omitting any reference to the common law. Even if we were to assume arguendo that Section 2 is limited to serious crimes or felonies (as plaintiffs' definitions suggest), a far better reference point for determining whether a crime is serious is to look at how the crime is designated by the modern-day legislature that proscribed it, rather than indulging the anachronisms of the common law. Indeed, that is precisely the course the Supreme Court has charted in defining the contours of the right to a jury trial. The Sixth Amendment provides: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.... U.S. Const. amend. VI; see also U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 3 (The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury.). The Supreme Court has declined to extend this guarantee to petty offenses because such offenses were tried without a jury at common law. See Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 159, 88 S.Ct. 1444, 20 L.Ed.2d 491 (1968); Cheff v. Schnackenberg, 384 U.S. 373, 379, 86 S.Ct. 1523, 16 L.Ed.2d 629 (1966). But when determining what qualifies as a criminal prosecution that requires a jury trial, as opposed to the prosecution of a mere petty offense, the Supreme Court has rejected the rigid common-law categories and instead sought more `objective indications of the seriousness with which society regards the offense.' Blanton v. North Las Vegas, 489 U.S. 538, 541-42, 109 S.Ct. 1289, 103 L.Ed.2d 550 (1989) (quoting Frank v. United States, 395 U.S. 147, 148, 89 S.Ct. 1503, 23 L.Ed.2d 162 (1969)). In that context, the Supreme Court has explained: In fixing the maximum penalty for a crime, a legislature includes within the definition of the crime itself a judgment about the seriousness of the offense. The judiciary should not substitute its judgment as to seriousness for that of a legislature, which is far better equipped to perform the task, and is likewise more responsive to changes in attitude and more amenable to the recognition and correction of their misperceptions in this respect. Blanton, 489 U.S. at 541, 109 S.Ct. 1289 (citations, quotation marks, and brackets omitted). At bottom, plaintiffs provide absolutely no support for the proposition that the word crimes meant common-law felonies at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment's ratification. At most, they have some support for the argument that Section 2 should be limited to serious offenses, a proposition which does not help their cause because they have all been convicted of crimes currently classified as felonies.
With the plain meaning and contemporary usage of the word crime stacked against them, plaintiffs next turn to the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment. They find no support in the immediate drafting history or the debates surrounding the Fourteenth Amendment, which they argue should not count against them because the Supreme Court has noted that [t]he legislative history bearing on the meaning of the relevant language of § 2 is scant indeed. Richardson, 418 U.S. at 43, 94 S.Ct. 2655. But what little history there is regarding inclusion of the word crime in Section 2 undermines plaintiffs' argument. For instance, Representative Ephraim R. Eckley of Ohio made the following observation in support of Section 2: Under a Congressional act persons convicted of a crime against the laws of the United States, the penalty for which is imprisonment in the penitentiary, are now and always have been disfranchised. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 2535 (1866). Like the dictionaries plaintiffs cite, this statement supports the view that crimes might be limited to serious crimes, or crimes the penalty for which is imprisonment in the penitentiary, but both of those categories include the plaintiffs' offenses and conflict with their common-law felony theory. Beyond this drafting history, [f]urther light is shed on the understanding of those who framed and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, and thus on the meaning of § 2, by the fact that at the time of the adoption of the Amendment, 29 States had provisions in their constitutions which prohibited, or authorized the legislature to prohibit, exercise of the franchise by persons convicted of felonies or infamous crimes. Richardson, 418 U.S. at 48 & n. 14, 94 S.Ct. 2655 (citing state constitutions). Of the 29 State constitutions that Richardson referred to, it does not appear that any of them limited disenfranchisement to persons convicted of common-law felonies. See, e.g., Ala. Const. art. VI, § 5 (1819) (providing for disenfranchisement of persons convicted of bribery, perjury, forgery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors); Conn. Const. art. VI, § 3 (1818) (bribery, forgery, perjury, duelling, fraudulent bankruptcy, theft, or other offence for which an infamous punishment is inflicted); Del. Const. art. IV, § 1 (1831) (convicted of a crime deemed by law a felony); Ore. Const. art. II, § 3 (1857) (of any crime which is punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary); Va. Const. art. III, § 14 (1830) (convicted of any infamous offence). It would be remarkable if the many states ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment intended to nullify their own constitutional provisions, but that is exactly what plaintiffs' reading of Section 2 entails. Finding no help in the history of the Fourteenth Amendment's ratification, plaintiffs focus their argument on the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867. The Reconstruction Act was enacted by the 39th Congress in 1867nine months after the very same Congress submitted the Fourteenth Amendment to the States for ratification. Section 5 of the Act established conditions on which the former Confederate States would be readmitted to representation in Congress. Richardson, 418 U.S. at 49, 94 S.Ct. 2655. Section 5 of the Act provided, in part: That when the people of any one of said rebel States shall have formed a constitution of government in conformity with the Constitution of the United States in all respects, framed by a convention of delegates elected by the male citizens of said State, twenty-one years old and upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition, who have been resident in said State for one year previous to the day of such election, except such as may be disenfranchised for participation in the rebellion or for felony at common law .... said State shall be declared entitled to representation in Congress, and senators and representatives shall be admitted therefrom on their taking the oath prescribed by law, and then and thereafter the preceding sections of this act shall be inoperative in said State. 14 Stat. 428, § 5 (emphasis added). [2] Similarly, the various enabling acts used to readmit the Confederate States to representation in Congress provide, in nearly identical language, that a fundamental condition of readmission is that their state constitutions shall never be so amended or changed as to deprive any citizen or class of citizens of the United States of the right to vote in said State, who are entitled to vote by the constitution thereof herein recognized, except as a punishment for such crimes as are now felonies at common law.  15 Stat. 73 (1868) (emphasis added) (readmitting North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama and Florida); see also 15 Stat. 72 (1868) (readmitting Arkansas); 16 Stat. 62 (1870) (readmitting Virginia); 16 Stat. 67 (1870) (readmitting Mississippi). Plaintiffs conclude that because the Reconstruction and Enabling Acts only permitted disenfranchisement for felonies at common law, so too must Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment be read to only permit disenfranchisement for felonies at common law. But the opposite is true. The Reconstruction Act's reference to felonies at common law only shows that when the 39th Congress meant to specify felonies at common law, it was quite capable of using that phrase. That Congress used the phrase other crime in Section 2, while specifying felony at common law in a later act, clearly indicates that the two phrases have different meanings and Congress was capable of using each when it intended to do so. Plaintiffs' responsewhich is really the driving force of their entire argumentis that we must read Section 2 and the Reconstruction and Enabling Acts harmoniously and interpret them identically because to do otherwise would mean that the Fourteenth Amendment is in direct and absolute conflict with the Reconstruction and Enabling Acts. Harvey Br. at 31. That is, if we reject plaintiffs' argument, the Fourteenth Amendment would permit what the Reconstruction Act explicitly prohibits: disenfranchisement for statutory felonies. See Harvey Br. at 32 ([Section 2], as construed by the District Court, affirmatively authorizes disenfranchisement for statutory felonies. The Acts prohibit disenfranchisement for statutory felonies. It is hard to imagine a more self-evident conflict.). The most glaring flaw with this argument is that the absence of a constitutional prohibition does not somehow bar a statutory one. Simply because the Fourteenth Amendment does not itself prohibit States from enacting a broad array of felon disenfranchisement schemes does not mean that Congress cannot do so through legislationprovided, of course, that Congress has the authority to enact such a prohibition. Plaintiffs' confusion on this point seems to stem from language in Richardson, in which the Supreme Court noted that felon disenfranchisement is given an affirmative sanction in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. 418 U.S. at 54, 94 S.Ct. 2655. But the affirmative sanction language in Richardson only means that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit felon disenfranchisement because Section 2 brings it outside of Section 1's prohibition. It certainly does not mean that a certain felon disenfranchisement scheme is constitutionally mandated by Section 2, as plaintiffs would read it. Plaintiffs' reliance on the Eleventh Circuit's opinion in Johnson v. Governor of Florida, 405 F.3d 1214 (11th Cir.2005), is also misguided. Johnson held that felon-disenfranchisement claims are not cognizable under the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which proscribes States from enacting voter qualifications or standards that discriminate based on race. Id. at 1234; 42 U.S.C. § 1973. As support for this conclusion, it reasoned that if section 2 of the VRA extended to such claims, the VRA would prohibit a practice that the Fourteenth Amendment permits Florida to maintain. Johnson, 405 F.3d at 1234. The Eleventh Circuit's point was not that the VRA would somehow conflict with Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment if it were interpreted to bar felon disenfranchisement, but that it would be beyond Congress's Section 5 enforcement power. See U.S. Const. amend XIV, § 5 (The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of [the Fourteenth Amendment].); see also Baker v. Pataki, 85 F.3d 919, 930 (2d Cir.1996) (opinion of Mahoney, J.) ([A]ny attempt by Congress to subject felon disenfranchisement provisions to the `results' methodology of [the VRA] would pose a serious constitutional question concerning the scope of Congress' power to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.); Farrakhan v. Washington, 359 F.3d 1116, 1121-25 (9th Cir.2004) (Kozinski, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc) (arguing that felon disenfranchisement claims are not cognizable under the VRA). The argument in Johnson was that a congressional Act prohibiting felon disenfranchisement could not be authorized under Congress's Section 5 powers because such an Act would not be enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment, which plainly permits felon disenfranchisement. But see Farrakhan v. Washington, 338 F.3d 1009, 1016 (9th Cir.2003). But the Reconstruction Act was most assuredly not enacted under the Section 5 power, as it preceded the Fourteenth Amendment's ratification by more than a year. Cf. Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112, 192, 91 S.Ct. 260, 27 L.Ed.2d 272 (1970) (Harlan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (discussing the Reconstruction Congress's power to interfere with state voter qualifications, positing that this power was said to exist in a variety of constitutional provisions, including Art. I, § 2, Art. I, § 4, the war power, the power over territories, the guarantee of a republican form of government, and § 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment.). Johnson, therefore, is inapposite. Finally, even if we could discern some conflict between Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction and Enabling Acts, plaintiffs' suggestion that this requires reading the Amendment to comport with the Acts has it exactly backward. See Harvey Br. at 35 (The Fourteenth Amendment should be construed so that it is consistent with the Acts.). The canon of constitutional avoidanceproviding that a court will not pass upon a constitutional question if there is some other ground upon which the case may be disposedis not a two-way street. There is no canon of statutory avoidance. Courts construe statutes to avoid constitutional problems, not the other way around. At bottom, plaintiffs urge an interpretation of Section 2's other crime provision that is in extreme tension with Richardson, contrary to the phrase's plain meaning and its past and contemporary usage, and belied by the Fourteenth Amendment's history. In response to these failings, they offer only an imaginary constitutional dilemma accompanied by an invitation to insert language into the Fourteenth Amendment's text because of a newly conceived canon of statutory avoidance that contradicts basic principles of constitutional interpretation. We decline their invitation and reject their equal protection claim.