This piece first appeared on MaineBeacon.com

As one of his last acts in office, Gov. Paul LePage pardoned a former Maine legislator and political ally for a 35-year-old drug trafficking conviction, against the recommendations of the state clemency board. 

We agree with Gov. LePage that Jeffrey Pierce should no longer face repercussions from a non-violent drug conviction over three decades ago. But we don’t think decisions about who gets a second chance and who doesn’t should depend on connections and political loyalty.

A governor’s pardon is essentially an act of official forgiveness. Article IV, section 11 of the Maine Constitution provides that “The Governor shall have power to remit after conviction all forfeitures and penalties, and to grant reprieves, commutations and pardons.”If a person is still serving a criminal sentence they will be released. If they are still facing penalties or restrictions based on their past conviction, those punishments will no longer apply. LePage granted 115 pardons during his two-term tenure, which puts him somewhere between Govs. Angus King and John Baldacci. But unlike King and Baldacci, we may never know who else made the cut under LePage because the Maine legislature voted last year to make pardon decisions confidential. 

One person who definitely did not receive a pardon is Lexius Saint Martin, a 35-year-old Waterville resident who sought a pardon for a 10-year-old cocaine trafficking conviction. In the decade following his conviction, Saint Martin kept a clean record, built a successful business, married and started a family. In seeking a pardon, he was desperately seeking to avoid being deported to his native Haiti – and separated from his pregnant wife and two sons – during President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration. But LePage rejected Saint Martin’s request, and Saint Martin was deported last February, before his baby daughter was born.  

If LePage believed that Pierce, who has had several misdemeanor offenses since his trafficking arrest and is currently being investigated for the unlawful use of firearms, deserved another chance, then why not Saint Martin, who worked hard to get his life back on track? 

While we can’t know LePage’s reasons for making these decisions, we do know that whether a person gets pardoned for a non-violent drug offense should never come down to their political affiliation, their clout, the color of the skin, or where they were born. That is why drug law reform is needed now: to make sure that people don’t get caught in the system for non-violent drug charges in the first place.

For every Jeffrey Pierce, there are thousands of people stuck in the system who don’t have political connections. Thousands of people who have been taken from their families, sentenced to spend their lives in prison, or sent back to dangerous countries where they have no home, because of our broken drug laws. They are disproportionately people of color, poor people, and people with mental illness. They are the people who are least likely to get the benefit of clemency or a pardon.

It shouldn’t take connections to get a second chance. It’s time to fix our drug laws to make sure our justice system treats all people fairly.

Rep. Jeffrey K. Pierce, center, pictured with Gov. Paul LePage and Sen. Susan Collins in a photo from his campaign.

It’s been a very big year. Here is just some of what we’ve accomplished together:

• Put a stop to the automatic suspension of driver’s licenses over missed fine payments.
• ​Filed a lawsuit on behalf of an 11-year-old boy with mental illness who was beaten by guards at the Long Creek youth prison.
• Launched a website and held a series of DA candidate forums to help voters better understand the power of DAs before they went to the polls.
• Filed two lawsuits aimed at forcing Customs and Border Protection to operate more transparently in Maine.
• Defended the right of Black people to live freely without having the police called on them for no good reason.
• Fought back against government censorship, in our lawsuit to stop Gov. LePage from blocking constituents on his official Facebook page.
• Pushed forward with two lawsuits to make sure all Maine women can access abortion care, regardless of where they live or how much money they make.

And that’s only a fraction of everything we accomplished together!

It is our honor to defend the rights of our fellow Mainers. We promise to keep it up, side by side with you, through the new year and every year after that.

On Tuesday, the Federal Commission on School Safety issued recommendations that it claims will help makes schools safer following the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. But at the center of the report is a proposal that will endanger millions of public school students, especially students of color and students with disabilities, by reversing federal guidance intended to address racial disparities in school discipline. Doing away with the guidance will weaken federal civil rights protections at a time when the Government Accountability Office reports that Black K-12 students receive punishments that are overly severe and frequent in schools across the country.

Following Parkland, the Trump administration faced massive protests from student activists calling for gun control measures. The administration established the Federal Commission on School Safety in response to the demands for action from across the country and appointed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to chair it. But rather than grapple with students’ demands, the commission has pushed the false narrative that schools can be protected from mass shootings by rolling back civil rights protections for Black and brown students and students with disabilities.

The commission has placed blame on the school discipline guidance issued by the Departments of Justice and Education under the Obama administration in 2014 to address the nationwide problem of students of color receiving harsher punishments than their white peers for the same infractions. The commission claims that this guidance “endangers student safety,” despite the lack of any evidence linking civil rights protections for students of color to school shootings.

Rather than “overreaching,” as the administration claims, the school discipline guidance simply provides educators and students with clarification of long-standing civil rights laws and reminds schools of the need to avoid and repair discrimination in the application of school discipline. The guidance was developed in light of a substantial body of academic research detailing the disparate discipline of youth of color as well as the government’s own investigations, which included findings of “cases where African-American students were disciplined more harshly and more frequently because of their race than similarly situated white students.”

The final analysis from the Departments of Justice and Education: “Racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem.”

The school discipline guidance is also part and parcel of a comprehensive, bipartisan movement to reform the ways in which schools address discipline to reflect what we’ve learned from decades of research. Research and statistics show that the “zero-tolerance” approaches to student conduct that flourished in the 1990s and early 2000s were counterproductive. Increasing punishments, removing kids from school, and referring them to the juvenile justice system led to higher rates of recidivism and an increased chance of involvement with the criminal justice system as an adult — all at a huge cost to the state, children, and their families. 

New scientific research about adolescent brain development provides an understanding of why zero-tolerance doesn’t work. As any parent knows, children are prone to make mistakes and to challenge rules set by grown-ups. This is actually part of the process of learning good decision-making skills. But unlike adults, adolescents’ brains respond best to immediate and positive inputs and do a poor job of comprehending far-off or negative consequences — like punishment.

LISTEN: CRIMINALIZING SCHOOLKIDS (PODCAST)

Education researchers and dedicated teachers and administrators have developed many approaches to school discipline that rely on positive support and intervention techniques, rather than escalating punishments, to improve outcomes for students, teachers, and schools. The Department of Education has invested in assisting school districts across the country to implement best practices in school discipline. The school discipline guidance is part of a range of resources on Rethinking School Discipline, including information about evidence-based programs and free technical assistance, provided by the Department of Education. The commission’s recommendations are an about-face on these years of work by career professionals within the Department of Education.

We’ve known these recommendations were coming, even before the commission began its work. When it was created, it was tasked with a starkly worded objective: “Repeal of the Obama Administration’s ‘Rethink School Discipline’ policies.” We’ve also been well aware of the hostility towards civil rights protections exhibited by the commission’s chair, Education Secretary DeVos, who has demonstrated an aversion to enforcing the Education Department’s civil rights policies or even acknowledging that systemic racism exists.

The call to rescind the federal school discipline guidance is not grounded in a sincere effort to protect student safety. Fair, evidence-based approaches to school discipline promote safe and healthy schools, and there is no evidence linking school discipline reform to school shootings. Schools should continue their legal obligation to administer discipline in a nondiscriminatory way and develop the right alternatives to exclusionary discipline.  

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