LOCAL STORY RESTORING VOTING RIGHTS TO EX-FELONS IN FLORIDA : AN INTERVIEW WITH SARAH PARADY BY GILES CLASEN SARAH PARADY IS A FORMER LAWYER and current partner of Parady Lebsack Law Firm, which specializes in employment law and civil liberties. Parady was the president of the Colorado Women’s Bar Association in 2019-2020 and was recognized as the 2017 New Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association. But when she first became a mother a couple of years ago, Parady found it difficult to balance her professional responsibilities with mothering responsibilities. She said the weight she felt for her clients was almost overwhelming. She often served individuals with mental health issues in employment cases and fought for their rights. When she first started having panic attacks, she didn’t recognize that she was the one who needed mental health care. Parady went to her partners in early 2020 to let them know she was struggling. The next day, the firm reassigned her cases to help her recover. Parady has been taking a break from the law since then but has not stopped living her values. She began working as a volunteer with Resistance Labs and has sent more than 8,000 texts to individuals in support of community outreach on progressive campaigns. Parady said she recognizes that not all individuals are as fortunate as she has been. Not all are able to take leave of their careers when it interferes with their health. She also believes this needs to change so all people can meet their needs and their families’ needs no matter the circumstances. She believes employees’ rights and the American Safety Net program need to be strengthened. The following interview with her has been edited for length and clarity. “LEADING UP TO THE ELECTION, I tried to test drive different ways to help with different get-out-the-vote campaigns. I wanted to do anything to bolster our democracy into the run-up to this election. I eventually signed up for an organization called Resistance Labs that CREDIT: GILES CLASEN voting access. The goal is to return to felons the rights that the voters intended. There’s a court decision upholding the law that the legislature passed; it’s just that the courts have punted on and essentially have refused to consider it on an emergency basis, all the way up to the Supreme Court. And so, getting involved in as far of the opposite end as runs text campaigns for all kinds of mostly smaller, progressive nonprofits and campaigns around the country. They do local elections, they do different kinds of get-outthe-vote programs, and a lot of stuff with the 2020 Census. One of the campaigns this year was for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC). What they had us do was to send out massive numbers of text messages to people in Florida asking if they or anyone they knew needed to pay off legal fines to be able to vote. Florida succeeded at the campaign [to give ex-felons back their voting rights], and then immediately after that, the state legislature turned around and passed a law that said that, essentially, in contravention of what the state’s residents had voted on, former felons could not vote unless they had paid off all of their fines and fees from the criminal justice system. These fines can be thousands and thousands of dollars. And that might include restitution to victims, but it can include other things, as well. So, the FRRC campaign involved raising money to help people pay off those fines so that they could get back their 10 DENVER VOICE November 2020 you imagine: sending texts to people and saying, ‘Hey, do you need help with your fines and fees so you can vote?’ was just satisfying on a level that I can’t even begin to explain. It was like, ‘Forget the Supreme Court, we can fix this sort of democratically,’ and I would get quite a few responses. Throughout the campaign, I texted thousands of people, and I’m sure I got at least 50 or 60 that said they needed fines or fees paid off or knew someone who did. One of the beautiful things about that is that it’s not just that you’re going to get your voting rights back. Any kind of debt is probably impacting people’s ability to get housing, lines of credit, all those things. Assisting people’s reentry to society is a fantastic anti-poverty measure, as well. The instructions we received were detailed. For example, we might be told ‘If you’re viewing [specific information] on your phone screen, you may need to shrink the window to see Question Four, and that may be why you’re getting that error.’ We walked people through the steps, helping them get their applications in. We made sure to follow up and help people get to the polls. That’s as direct a relationship to helping people access their constitutional rights as I’ve ever had, and it was a lot of fun.” In some ways Parady felt this campaign work was more impactful than the work she did to restore rights to individuals in the courtroom. “One thing that is a little bit frustrating for an attorney is the ratio, the limited number of clients we’re allowed to take on. There are two different outcomes that a case can have. Obviously, the number one concern is helping the client right the wrong that happened to them, but another possibility is that you might make a good case law for another case, and that happens from time to time. For example, I had a case once that was a wage theft class action. We got the first ruling in the District of Colorado saying that two different entities, whether employer or temp/ staffing agency, could be jointly liable for unpaid wages. This is important in this economy because you frequently have things like staffing agencies, temp agencies, franchising, or what people call fissuring of the workplace. The Colorado wage laws provide that if you are acting as someone’s employer, then you and whomever you shifted that job off to on paper should be jointly liable for the terminated employee’s wages. That case made it so you can’t contract away your obligations as an employer. A decision like that is helpful and important and is kind of motivating in a different way. But when it came to representing individual clients, I worried about them and tried to stick with them through the big slug of litigation to eventually get them a good outcome. It took a lot of their time, a lot of my time. It was very emotionally difficult to get there for a lot of my clients, to spend all this time in this very uncertain state where you’re waiting to see if you’re going to get compensated. You have financial worries, and you’re having to tell the story of what happened to you over and over again, the system is super complex. Those outcomes often, at the end of the day, were very, very good. We’re frequently able to recover a lot of money for some of our clients, but it’s not immediate. And it’s a whole lot of effort for both the attorney and the client to get there. So, it’s pretty different [from the volunteer work with the FRRC], I would say. In Colorado, we don’t have felon disenfranchisement, which is a wonderful thing. Several states still do. There’s been a movement for decades now to try to change that. The thought is that you’ve paid your debt to society and you’ve seen a part of society that a lot of us haven’t seen, frankly. Most Americans have never even been inside a prison or jail or had a relationship with someone who was. [Being inside a prison] really does change your view of what the government does and how the government should use its power. Those are people who I want to see voting because they’ve experienced both the criminal justice system, the courts, the legal system, maybe the public defender system, and then incarceration in a way that many people have not. They have a very relevant and important voice. More fundamentally than that, they’re citizens of this country, and once they’ve done their time and been released, I see no reason why we should continue to keep them out of our political processes.” ■
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