LOS ANGELES (AP) — California voters could decide whether to reinstate voting rights to people in prison on felony convictions under a newly proposed constitutional amendment.

It would be a major expansion of suffrage for incarcerated people if passed. California would join Maine and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia, as the only states where felons never lose their right to vote, even while they are in prison, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The California bill, introduced Monday by Assembly Member Isaac Bryan, proposes an amendment to the state constitution. Bryan’s proposal doesn’t include any exemptions based on the crime committed. After decades of disenfranchisement, he said it’s time to open up voting for everyone.

“I think we’re having a deep discussion on what it means to have voting as a right for every citizen,” Bryan said Wednesday.

Two-thirds of each chamber of the state legislature must vote yes for the bill just for it to appear on the ballot as a proposition. Voters must then approve it by a simple majority for it to become a constitutional amendment.

California is currently among 21 states where felons only lose their right to vote while they are incarcerated, the conference says. The right is automatically reinstated upon release.

Some states’ laws require probation and parole to be completed for the restoration of voting rights. In other states, people incarcerated on certain crimes lose their rights indefinitely after release.

The California Constitution currently disqualifies people who are incarcerated in state or federal prison from voting and restores the right upon their release. The law previously required felons to complete their parole period before getting back their right to vote; Californians approved the change to get rid of that requirement in a 2020 constitutional amendment.

David Cruz, an organizer with nonprofit Initiate Justice who was released in September after 13 years in state prison, said he wanted to have his voice heard while he was incarcerated.

“Despite what many people assume, people in prison care about the same political issues that we outside do,” he said Wednesday during a news conference supporting the legislation.

Bryan, a Los Angeles Democrat and the chair of the Assembly’s Committee on Elections, faces a tough sell for the two-thirds vote. While the Legislature is controlled by Democrats, the party has conservative representatives from rural areas and major progressive policies aren’t guaranteed to pass.

The committee’s Republican vice chair, Assembly Member Tom Lackey, opposes the bill and said Wednesday it is a “betrayal” of crime victims.

“The perpetrator is automatically given a blanket of forgiveness,” under this legislation, said Lackey, who represents part of Southern California. “Criminal conduct deserves a price to be paid.”

Bryan disagreed that giving offenders the right to vote is an affront to victims.

“The voice of victims matters in the criminal legal system, but what we’re talking about right now is democracy as a whole,” he said.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post California proposal would reinstate prisoners’ voting rights appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

A judge has ruled Amazon must reinstate a former warehouse employee who was fired in the early days of the pandemic, saying the company “unlawfully” terminated the worker who led a protest calling for Amazon to do more to protect employees against COVID-19.

The dispute involving Gerald Bryson, who worked at an Amazon warehouse in the New York City borough of Staten Island, has stretched on since June 2020, when Bryson filed an unfair labor practice complaint with The National Labor Relations Board, claiming Amazon retaliated against him.

Later that year, the NLRB said it found merit in Bryson’s complaint that Amazon illegally fired him for workplace organizing. Amazon didn’t accept the findings, and the federal board filed a formal complaint against the company, triggering a lengthy administrative court process.

On Monday, administrative law judge Benjamin Green said Amazon must offer Bryson his job back, as well as lost wages and benefits resulting from his “discriminatory discharge.”

Amazon did not immediately reply to a request for comment sent.

Bryson first participated in a March 2020 protest over working conditions led by Chris Smalls, another warehouse employee who was fired by the online retail giant and is heading up the Amazon Labor Union, the nascent group which won a union election earlier this month at the Amazon facility where both men worked.

After Smalls was fired, Bryson led another protest in April 2020 in front of the warehouse. While off the job during the protest, Bryson got into a dispute with another worker. He was later fired for violating Amazon’s vulgar-language policy.

Court filings give an account of the altercation between Bryson and a female employee. A recording of their dispute detailed by the NLRB showed both Bryson and the woman using profanities during a heated exchange that lasted several minutes. The agency’s account shows the woman began the exchange, and twice tried to provoke Bryson into a physical altercation with her, which he did not do. The woman was given a “first warning.”

The woman also told Bryson, who is Black, to “go back to the Bronx,” which the judge said Bryson could construe as a “racial” since “since he is African-American and might question why, other than his race, someone would assume he is from the Bronx.”

Bryson testified that he informed an Amazon manager who spoke with him about the incident about that comment. The manager has denied Bryson made a reference to a racial comment. But the judge sided with Bryson’s account, saying it was unlikely that he would “fail to convey such a prominent remark to which he had a strong reaction.”

The judge said in his decision that Amazon rushed to judgment and pursued a “skewed investigation” into the argument designed to blame only Bryson for that incident, adding the company wanted discharge Bryson for his “protected concerted activity instead of fairly evaluating” what happened.

In its investigation into the altercation, Greene said Amazon “preferred not to obtain information from someone who was protesting with Bryson even though that person was likely in the best position to explain what happened.”

Instead, he said multiple witness accounts of the incident submitted by the company were coincidently “one-sided,” adding he found it implausible the statements were made “unless such accounts were solicited from them.”

The NLRB had also pushed for Bryson’s reinstatement in a federal lawsuit filed last month, using a provision of the National Labor Relations Act that allows it to seek temporary relief in federal court while a case goes through the administrative law process. Amazon has used the case as one of its objections over the Staten Island election results, accusing the agency of tainting the vote by pursuing Bryson’s reinstatement in the lead-up to the election.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Judge rules Amazon must reinstate fired warehouse worker appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.