Bill: sex predators would vote in home counties

A recently introduced bill would bar sexually violent predators in state custody from voting in the area where they are incarcerated.

AB 2839 by Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula, D-Fresno, goes to the heart of a pending lawsuit, Vosburg v. County of Fresno, 17CECG04294 (Fresno Super. Ct., filed Dec. 14, 2017).

The Coalinga City Council sued to block the November general election votes of up to 304 sex crime offenders housed at the California State Hospital, located within the city limits. Votes from those inmates defeated Measure C, a local 1 cent sales tax measure designed to bail out the city, in a previous election.

AB 2839 states, “The domicile of a person who has been adjudicated a sexually violent predator and who is committed for an indeterminate term to the custody of the department shall be the last known address of the person before his or her commitment.” Introduced in February, it has not been scheduled for a legislative hearing.

According to the complaint filed by the city council’s lawyers, Robert M. Dowd and Mario U. Zamara of Griswold, LaSalle, Dowd & Gin LLP in Hanford, these voters are not legally domiciled in Coalinga according to California elections law.

“Pursuant to Section 349 of the California Elections Code, a person’s domicile is defined as where: (1) his habitation is fixed; (2) intends to remain; and (3) intends to return after an absence … a person does not gain or lose their domicile by being incarcerated in a prison or asylum. Therefore, the residents held in Coalinga State Hospital are domiciled in their prior county of residence.”

The complaint notes “the vast majority” of voters registered within the state hospital “voted in opposition” to the sales tax measure.

Measure C lost by 37 votes out of 1,127 votes cast. The city has said it would lay off about two dozen employees due to a budget shortfall.

According to election results published in The Fresno Bee, the inmates rejected Measure C by a 77-vote margin, spelling the difference between victory and defeat. The paper also reported on objections raised by the inmates before the election that they would pay the sales tax but receive no benefits.

The state hospital grounds are part of Coalinga, even though it is several miles away from the rest of the city.

In January, Sacramento attorney Janice M. Bellucci filed a motion to intervene on behalf of a group called Detainee-Americans for Civic Equality, which represents the inmates. That motion is pending.

In her filing, Bellucci argued that Coalinga itself made the inmates into city voters by annexing the facility in 2006 in a bid to raise the city’s population. It then allowed patients there to vote in subsequent elections.

It was not until the defeat of the sales tax measure that city officials decided to challenge the patient right to vote, she said. She added that the city officials knew the patients provided the votes to defeat Measure C because the hospital has its own precinct.

“The City of Coalinga has benefited for more than 10 years due to its annexation of Coalinga State Hospital,” Bellucci said by email. “It is now trying to disenfranchise hundreds of voters solely because they disagreed with the city. Many of the patients at Coalinga State Hospital have been incarcerated or hospitalized for more than 30 years and will die there. If they are not allowed to vote in the Coalinga elections they will be unable to vote anywhere.”

The patients at issue represent an unusual concentration of people who are held in state custody but who are currently eligible to vote. Just a subset of nearly 1,000 people housed at the hospital, they have served their criminal sentences but continue to be detained because they are still considered too dangerous to be released.

Their right to vote was clarified in 2016 with the passage of AB 2466. The law defines “imprisoned,” for purposes of voting eligibility, as applying only to “a prisoner currently serving a state or federal prison sentence.” Arambula voted no on the bill, which passed the Assembly by a single vote.

AB 2466 was a response to Scott v. Bowen, RG14712570 (Alameda Super. Ct., filed Feb. 4, 2014). That case challenged a directive from then California Secretary of State Debra Bowen that people held in county-based detention were ineligible to vote. Bowen lost in the Superior Court. Her successor, Alex Padilla, dropped an appeal in 2015.

Attempts to reach Arambula were unsuccessful. The city council and its attorneys did not return calls seeking comment.

In a December interview with the local ABC News affiliate, Coalinga Mayor Nathan Vosburg said of the patients, “A lot of those people, in my opinion, are not mentally capable of voting.”