A FELONY IS A CRIME THAT STEALS VOTES

SEFFNER - Nathaniel Clemmer raced ahead of his friend Destiny as he
rounded the park slide, a blur of blue and orange in the morning sun.

As his mother, Melissa, watched the 23-month-old from a nearby bench,
she recalled a scene that could not seem more distant: the jail cell
she shared with a crack-addicted prostitute.

"They don't take showers when they come in," she said quietly. "After
those first few days, maybe they will. But when they're going through
that hard withdrawal, they just lay there and stink."

That was nine years ago. But come election season, the reminders return.

Every campaign sign reminds her she's a felon, and Florida felons
don't vote. Clemmer wants that right, she said, because she wants
more than ever to change a political system she feels is broken.

She is outraged the system won't let her try.

Clemmer lost her right to vote by landing in adult jail at age 17.
She had gotten drunk at a party, tried to steal a few liquor bottles,
then hit someone with one when she got caught.

Now 26, Clemmer regrets it all. But given the time passed and her
otherwise clean record, she thinks her dues are long paid.

'Lifelong Sentence'

Clemmer is hardly the first person to rue mistakes made as a teenager
- - especially in Florida, one of only three states that deny civil
rights to felons permanently and completely.

Her situation mirrors thousands of others, said Muslima Lewis,
director of voting rights and racial justice projects at the American
Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

"A person commits a felony in their youth, and they pay for it for
the rest of their lives," she said. "It becomes a lifelong sentence."

The state's clemency process is a Florida felon's only means of
reclaiming rights such as holding certain occupational licenses,
carrying a firearm and, of course, voting. The state parole
commission oversees applications for clemency, which may require
hearings before the governor and state Cabinet.

The clemency process is more than fair, said Roger Clegg, president
and general council of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a
conservative think tank in Virginia.

"If you're not willing to follow the law, you shouldn't be able to
assert the right to make the law for everyone else," Clegg said.
"When you vote, that's what you're doing - either directly, through
ballot initiative or indirectly by electing officials."

Clemmer applied for clemency last fall when she learned she could not
enter nursing school without it. The decision even to apply was an
emotional one, said her mother, Laura Harris of Thonotosassa.

"She was so afraid they would say no," said Harris, who volunteers in
prison ministry. "She had a hard time even talking about it. I
finally forced the issue with her. She was crying; I told her, 'You
have to get this behind you.'"

Clemmer did apply. But when she called two months later to confirm
the status of her application, the parole commission staff said there
was no record of it.

"Then they told me that if I resubmit an application, they're so
backlogged that it would be 18 to 24 months before someone contacted
me," she said. "I was taken aback."

In February, state auditors found 13,329 clemency cases were
backlogged at the state parole commission. A decision in each case,
they found, took an average of 22 months.

Clemmer said she is going to try again - reluctantly, because she
thinks the clemency system is misguided. Every citizen, she said,
should have the right to vote.

In 1998, Clemmer included copies of Robert Frost's "The Road Not
Taken" in the high-school graduation announcements she mailed out to
family and friends.

Six months earlier, while classmates were finishing college
applications, Armwood High School teachers were pulling strings to
pass Shakespeare plays and calculus assignments to Clemmer at Orient Road Jail.

Clemmer, who then was Melissa Miller, had been making A's in advanced
placement classes. She was an editor for the school yearbook,
treasurer for the student government and an officer in the National
Honor Society.

"That's what I did; I did school," she said. "I was going to go to
UF; I wanted to be a neurobiologist."

Her home life had become harder. Clemmer's family lived from paycheck
to paycheck, and her stepfather had died in a hit-and-run motorcycle
accident. Though years had passed, her mother could not cope with the loss.

School was an outlet back then, Clemmer said. But she also started drinking.

On the night of May 20, 1997, Clemmer left a party, drunk, with two
boys to steal several bottles of liquor from a family's unlocked
garage. The property owner caught her as she tried to leave.

Clemmer said she hit the man with one of the bottles when he grabbed
her around the neck and began choking her. Police eventually arrived,
and she spent the next 21 days on house arrest before she was charged
as an adult with burglary and assault with a deadly weapon.

On Nov. 20, Judge Cynthia Holloway sentenced her to 20 days in
Hillsborough County Jail, three years' probation and 100 hours of
community service.

The court could have sentenced her to life, said Robert Focht, who
now works for the Pasco County public defender's office. Given the
assault charge and Clemmer's clean record, he said, the 20 days in
jail was an appropriate, even "creative" sentence.

While she was in jail, Clemmer was able to pare down her time to 14
days by working in the prison laundry. With help from her teachers at
Armwood, she kept up with her schoolwork and managed to graduate on
time, eighth in her class, with a 4.8 grade-point average.

But her felony conviction cost her a Bright Futures college
scholarship, derailing her plan to attend the University of Florida.
Feeling disillusioned and lost, she enrolled part-time at the
University of South Florida.

"I was trying to figure out why my life was the way it was. I wanted
to explore reason; things weren't making sense. I was looking for
explanations."

Two years later she dropped out. "I wasn't sure anymore that anything
I was ever going to do would amount to a hill of beans."

Looking Forward

After nearly a decade of checking the "convicted felon" box on
applications for uninspiring jobs, Clemmer has returned to studying,
this time at Hillsborough Community College.

Her plan to enter the nursing program failed, but she expects to
graduate with a liberal arts degree in May. Married for three years,
she is raising her son as well as her 10-year-old stepdaughter, Taylor.

She also has become more politically outspoken, now that felons'
civil rights have become a prime topic in the gubernatorial campaign.

Both Republican Charlie Crist and Democrat Jim Davis say they favor
restoring those rights automatically. The position is a long-standing
one for Davis, but Crist came out in favor of automatically restoring
rights only this month. Clemmer has called both campaigns to grill
staff on the policy details.

The ACLU is still waiting for Crist to explain what, if any, action
he would take to change the rules, said Lewis, director of ACLU
Florida's voting rights and racial justice projects. Davis has said
he would take executive action to begin restoring rights automatically.

"The devil is in the details," Lewis said. "Without an executive
order, change could take years."

The Crist campaign did not respond to a request for clarification of
his position.

That's too much uncertainty for Clemmer, who has just submitted a
volunteer application to the Davis campaign.

"Davis has been for automatic restoration all along," she said. "I
know he is very much for civil rights."