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Professor Sherrilyn Ifill

September 5, 2012
Ohio Official Standing by Voter Suppression Effort
by Jeremy Leaming

In a burst of action, federal courts have provided setbacks to the right’s desperate and disgraceful efforts to suppress the vote, as noted here last week. Hardly surprising is that some of the rightwing lawmakers pushing ridiculous voter ID laws, limits on early voting periods and voter registration drives, are going to fight the federal courts to protect their ignoble campaign.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a loud proponent of Ohio’s efforts to limit early voting opportunities of urban voters, has proclaimed that voting in his state will be “uniform and accessible for hard-working Ohioans.” It’s a statement as laughable as it is disingenuous. Ohio, like Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, has sought to make voting much more difficult for a lot of hard-working residents, primarily those living in urban areas. In Ohio no efforts were made to curtail early-voting for suburban residents.

So when a federal judge recently ruled in favor of the Obama campaign’s legal challenge to Ohio’s restrictions, issuing an injunction against limits on early voting, it was widely received as a much-needed victory against the ongoing campaign to suppress the votes of minorities, low-income people, college students and the elderly.

U.S. District Court Judge Peter Economus held that curtailment of early voting opportunities would close the door to thousands of voters. He added, “Plaintiffs submit statistical studies to support their assertion that low-income and minority voters are disproportionately affected by the elimination of those voting days.” See Ryan J. Reilly’s reporting for TPM on the decision.

Reilly today noted that the Obama administration has lodged a motion with the federal court urging it to ensure that Ohio follow the court order, after Husted said he “wouldn’t set early voting hours until an appeals court” took action. As Reilly reported, the Obama campaign officials argued in their motion that Husted cannot ignore or stay a federal court opinion, a federal appeals court gets to make that call.

University of Maryland law school professor Sherrilyn A. Ifill in a piece for The Root blasted the Republican Party’s “war on voting,” likening it to the efforts employed by pre-civil rights-era Southern states “to manipulate the voting strength of the electorate.”

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Tags:
Election law, Other courts, Voting rights, Democracy and Voting, early voting, Obama, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, Professor Justin Levitt, Professor Sherrilyn Ifill, Ryan J. Reilly, U.S. District Court Judge Peter Economus, voter ID laws, voter suppression laws
July 16, 2012
The Tired, Offensive States’ Rights Argument Against Health Care Reform
by Jeremy Leaming

Although it can be argued that the state governors threatening to forgo implementing the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid have a skewed idea of state sovereignty, likely closer to the truth is that most of the governors are carrying on a tawdry tradition of denying help to the most vulnerable.

S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley, Fla. Gov. Rick Scott, La. Gov. Bobby Jindal and Texas Gov. Rick Perry have all vowed that their states will not expand their Medicaid programs to millions of uninsured, even though pursuant to the ACA the federal government will cover most of the costs of implementing the expansion. The New York Times reports that the expansion of Medicaid would add “17 million people to the rolls, accounting for half of all uninsured people expected to gain coverage nationwide.”

All those governors have offered typical, but disingenuous complaints that the federal government is forcing the states to spend money they don’t have. They also predictably paint the federal government as pushing wasteful domestic programs or offering more free things to people.

It is the same tired, offensive and often racially tinged complaint that conservative politicians have been peddling for decades in their nonstop attack on government.

Gov. Scott called the ACA’s Medicaid provision “a massive entitlement expansion,” and Gov. Rick Perry (pictured) who presides over a state with the largest number of uninsured said the Affordable Care Act “would make Texas “a mere appendage of the federal government.”

University of Maryland School of Law professor Sherrilyn Ifill in an opinion piece for CNN said the governors are carrying on a long tradition of not doing a terribly good job of governing.

“These elected leaders are following a longstanding tradition in American politics of Southern states acting against the best interest of their residents,” she writes.

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Tags:
Economic inequality, Racial justice, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, ACA, Affordable Care Act, Gov. Rick Perry, Gov. Rick Scott, Medicaid expansion, Professor Sherrilyn Ifill, superrich, wealth gap
March 5, 2012
Federal Judge’s Racist E-Mail Should Not be Easily Dropped, Law Prof. Writes
by Jeremy Leaming

The federal judge in Montana who sent a ridiculous, highly offensive e-mail degrading President Obama to a few of his “buddies” using his work email, should not be let off the hook so easily, regardless of his apology or self-initiation of an ethics review, writes Maryland law professor Sherrilyn Ifill for The Root.

Appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull drew plenty of media attention last week when he shot off an e-mail filled with racially charged invective. TPM’s Ryan J. Reilly said the e-mail implied that Obama “might have been the product of a sexual encounter between his mother and a dog." The e-mail contained more garbage, which can be read about from Reilly’s reporting.

Ifill writes that our president should not feel compelled to accept Cebull’s apology.

The decision, Ifill writes, by “Cebull, the chief judge of the federal district court in Montana, to send the email to several of his ‘buddies,’ using his federal email account, bespeaks a certain recklessness reflected among those who have lost all sense of respect and decorum in their opposition to our president.”

Noting other high-profile politicos' disgraceful actions toward Obama, think Ariz. Gov. Jan Brewer’s shrill, disrespectful greeting of the president on a tarmac near Phoenix, Ifill says this “alarming rash of intemperate, racially driven expressions of incivility by prominent white leaders is dangerous because it gives license to others to regard open disrespect of the president as sanctioned and approved. Their actions not only endanger Obama but also endanger future presidents by diminishing the respect due to the office of the presidency, whoever sits in the Oval Office.”

Tags:
Civil rights, Separation of Powers and Federalism, email, Judge Richard Cebull, president, President Obama, Professor Sherrilyn Ifill, racism
October 11, 2011
Professor Ifill on ‘Tremendous Resonance’ of Strip-Search Case
by Jeremy Leaming

Albert W. Florence had paid a fine for a New Jersey traffic violation and kept the document proving payment in his car, but that evidence was not enough to dissuade a state trooper from arresting him in 2005 and hauling him off to jail where he was kept for a week and subjected to two strip-searches during that time.

Florence, as recounted in this interview with the National Constitution Center and ACS, was humiliated by his pointless arrest and the treatment that followed. As The New York Times’ Adam Liptak notes in this article, a “failure to pay a fine is not a crime. It is, rather, what New Jersey law calls a nonindictable crime.”

Florence and his family were not set on letting New Jersey have the last word, and lodged a lawsuit against the county arguing that its sweeping policy of mandating strip searches of people arrested for minor offense violates the Fourth Amendment.

“I felt like my rights were violated,” he said in the National Constitution Center/ACS podcast. “I felt belittled; I just felt like I needed some type of justification.”

The Supreme Court may provide some answers in this matter. It will hear oral argument in the case, Florence v. Board of Freeholders, tomorrow morning.

University of Maryland School of Law Professor Sherrilyn Ifill, during the ACS Supreme Court Preview, highlighted the case, saying it is likely to have “tremendous resonance for many people,” for several reasons, including New Jersey’s suspect history of state troopers pulling over a wildly large percentage of black drivers.

Ifill also noted that more than 14 million Americans are arrested every year, and “very often they are arrested and ultimately not charged.”

In Florence’s case, he was clearly wrongfully arrested.

“He had in fact paid the fine,” Ifill said. “And in fact, so nervous was he about the possibility of being pulled over on this outstanding warrant, that he carried with him the copy with the seal on it – the raised seal – indicating that he in fact already paid the fine, and he showed this to the officer, but the officer” opted for what the computer showed.

After he was finally brought before a judge – Ifill noted that the authorities failed to bring Florence before a magistrate within 24 hours of his arrest, a requirement – he was cleared. The judge determined “he had in fact paid the outstanding” fine, and “therefore he should not have been arrested,” Ifill said.

In part, the justices will be asking, Ifill said, “Can a jail have a policy of blanket strip searching everyone who comes in or whether each individual is entitled to the individualized determination of whether there is a reasonable suspicion that the individual might be carrying contraband or might otherwise be concealing a weapon of some sort.”

But there is additional context to the case, Ifill noted.

“Obviously race plays a key role here,” Ifill said. “Mr. Florence is African American. New Jersey of course is the place with the famous driving while black I-95 case, in which 75 percent of people stopped and arrested on I-95 by troopers were black, although blacks constituted only 30 percent of the motorists, and all of the evidence was that blacks and whites committed driving infractions at the same level; so you’ve got the race context, but you’ve also got the context of 14 million people being arrested; that the police do make mistakes.”

Ifill’s entire remarks on the Florence case are below or here.

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Tags:
Supreme Court, Search and seizure/Fourth amendment, Criminal Justice, Albert W. Florence, Florence v. Board of Freeholders, Professor Sherrilyn Ifill, strip search

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