Governor McAuliffe Restores Voting Rights to Violent Criminals in Prison

Under Governor McAuliffe’s illegal executive order restoring voting rights to 206,000 convicted criminals even some jailed felons are now able to vote.  (I suppose the prisoners would need to request an absentee ballot.)  Others the Governor has given voting rights includes violent murderers and felons still on active probation.  This would never have been discovered were it not for two Commonwealth attorneys who began checking.  They are Loudoun’s Commonwealth Attorney Jim Plowman and the Fauquier county Commonwealth Attorney Jim Fisher. Below are but a few of the felons who have had their voting rights reinstated.  Jim Plowman calls it only “the tip of the iceberg”. From NBC12:  

Daniel Harmon Wright, the former Culpeper deputy convicted of killing a woman in 2012 and is on active probation supervision, had his rights restored.

• Michael Quintana who has a lengthy criminal history but did serve his time.  However, Plowman says he is currently charged with felony firearm possession and brandishing and was, “…sitting in the Loudoun County Adult Detention Center…” when his rights were restored.

• Carlos Cerda Maquin, who got his rights back even though he was convicted of sexually abusing a little girl and is currently deported. “He is currently deported back to Peru and the governor’s website says he has been granted restoration,” says Plowman

• Michael Hargrave, who is a convicted sex offender and Plowman says does not meet the governor’s criteria because he is on active supervised probation until 2023.

More of these “clerical errors”, as the Governor calls them, from the Richmond Times Dispatch,

Three members of a Roanoke-area gang, the Goonz, were shown as having their rights restored, according to Botetourt County Commonwealth’s Attorney Joel Branscom, despite receiving lengthy federal prison sentences in 2011 for their involvement in a string of 40 violent home invasions.

 

The three Goonz members — George Theodore Fitzgerald, 38; Warren Edward Lemons, 44; and Kevin Wayne Ferguson, 39 — are still serving time out of state, federal prison records show.

 

Among the violent offenders wrongly included on the list is Ronald R. Cloud, 68, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to a cold-case murder in Fauquier while already serving a life sentence in West Virginia for a sexual assault, according to Fisher.

 

The list included two sex offenders: 77-year-old Virgil Dantic and 53-year-old Frank P. Ferrara, both of whom are still incarcerated in Virginia.

 

Carlos Cerda Maquin, 60, who was deported to Peru after pleading guilty in 2008 to aggravated sexual battery, was listed as having his rights restored on April 22.

 

“It’s incredibly reckless, this exceeds even our worse fears about the governor’s executive order.”

Overall, this is just a stunning level of incompetence and recklessness,”

Delegate Rob Bell, candidate for Attorney General, also responded to the Governor’s reckless actions,

“Who compiled this list? Was it the governor’s office or some high school intern?” “They take more care when they take an order at McDonald’s than he did when he put these felons on juries.”

Republican leaders have asked the Virginia Supreme Court to stop the Governor’s executive order allowing 206,000 felons to register to vote. The Court has agreed to hear the case in a special session on July 19th.