Can a Convicted Felon Run for Office in Texas? Lewis Conway Jr. Intends to Find Out.
Last spring, Lewis Conway Jr., a 47-year-old community organizer, began planning a campaign for Austin City Council like most candidates do. He gathered friends and asked for their support. He considered his fundraising prospects. No stranger to City Council, Conway had fought for Austin’s 2016 Fair Chance Hiring ordinance, which prohibits many employers from considering criminal backgrounds before making a job offer. Conway, who calls himself a democratic socialist, drafted a platform of aggressively building out public housing, giving tax breaks to poor folks in gentrifying East Austin and expanding indigent healthcare and public transportation.
But as he began informally campaigning, Conway ran into a snag: In 1993, he was convicted of felony voluntary manslaughter for fatally stabbing a man during a dispute at an East Austin apartment, a crime for which he served around eight years in Texas state prisons and 12 years on parole. Finishing his parole restored his voting rights, which he thought also cleared his path to run — until a city memo revealed in December that Texas law may not be so forgiving.
Convicted felons can generally hold federal office, but state laws form what a federal report called “a national crazy-quilt of disqualifications and restoration procedures.” Conway’s candidacy is in limbo because local and state officials say they’ve never dealt with the issue: As far as they know, no convicted felon has ever tried to run for state or local office in Texas. Officials seem sure that the right to vote does not automatically restore the right to candidacy and Conway needs either a pardon from the governor (unlikely) or some kind of ruling from a state judge. But they don’t know what sort of judicial order would suffice, and an opponent might still successfully challenge whatever he does get from the court.
“We don’t have any concrete examples to go off of,” said Sam Taylor, spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office. Taylor said a ruling called a “declaration of actual innocence” might work, but he couldn’t be sure.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/convicted-felon-run-office-texas-lewis-conway-jr/
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