FORT WORTH, Texas — In August 1999, Erik Richerson said he was along for the ride when two friends robbed a drug dealer at gunpoint in Washington state. He was 17 years old and, according to court records, went to the dealer’s apartment to buy marijuana. He was convicted of a felony and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison.
After serving 91 months, he overcame the staggering statistical odds of Black men who are caught in the system. He said he cleaned up his act and even ran for City Council in Everett, Wash., the city in Snohomish County where he was convicted.
Richerson moved to Fort Worth three-and-a-half years ago. He has roots in the area. He’s fond of saying on the campaign trail that his grandmother picked cotton in North Texas. Earlier this year, he decided to once again try his hand at politics. This time he would seek to replace Ann Zadeh — a current mayoral candidate — as District 9’s City Council rep.
More than a week ago, Richerson was disqualified from running for office. At the time, City Secretary Mary J. Kayser said because his disqualification came so late in the race, his name would still appear on the ballot. She added that there was still a chance he’d be reinstated, though that would mean he would once again have to overcome serious odds. Being reinstated once you’ve been disqualified for an election almost never happens in Texas, where municipalities run their own elections, as opposed to most states, which use standardized election rules.
On Tuesday, Richerson once again overcome seemingly insurmountable odds when he was reinstated by Kayser.
"Because I was presented with a public record on April 27, 2021 that states your civil rights have been restored," Kayser said in a letter to Richerson, "I hereby declare you eligible to run as a candidate for the office of Council Member for District 9 in the City of Fort Worth."
In the earlier letter the city secretary sent to Richerson disqualifying him, Kayser added that if he provided a document showing that his full rights had been restored, then she and the city’s attorneys would consider reinstating him. Richerson had been trying for days to obtain a certificate of discharge from his home state of Washington. It finally arrived in his inbox on Monday.
“I'm an African American man, and I'm not a part of the establishment,” he said in an interview conducted last week. “I'm not in anybody's pockets in this city, and I'm running to do the right thing and bring transparency to the city of Fort Worth. In the last 22 years, the most I’ve had is a parking ticket.” The city, he said, is “showing every other young African American boy that if you make a mistake in your life and you move on, you're still not qualified to lead. When does the sentence end?”
This election cycle has been historic for several reasons, mainly because of the sheer number of candidates vying for office — 59, according to Kayser, the most she’s ever seen in 30 years on the job. The May vote is also significant because it could be the first time in Fort Worth’s history that there are more newly elected candidates than incumbents manning the local levers of power.
Richerson was one of nine candidates vying to replace Zadeh. That number now stands at eight after another candidate, Darien George, dropped out after publicly unleashing a profanity-laden outburst toward opponents, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Richerson’s reinstatement case was aided by Washington state’s “rights restoration” laws. In the Evergreen state, once someone has served their time — even for a felony — their full civil rights are automatically restored.
The events that led to Richerson’s disqualification — and subsequent reinstatement — started on the Friday before early voting began. Secretary Kayser received a packet of documents from another candidate that cast doubts on Richerson’s eligibility. The local election code has a provision that says if public documents exist that may show a candidate to be ineligible, the city secretary is compelled to look at them if they are presented to her.
Initially, Kayser said the packet did not have enough information to declare him ineligible — the documents showed that he had been convicted of a felony, but did not show that his rights had or hadn’t been restored. Then a second document arrived at her desk, this one from Snohomish County Superior Court that said the court had looked at the criminal case, and the defendant had not filed a motion to vacate his conviction, nor had he been exonerated or pardoned or the case been dismissed.
Based on that information, Kayser said, she disqualified Richerson.
“I consulted with the city attorney's office,” she said. “This is not something that we take lightly at all. I have to act on the material once it's presented to me one way or another. The election code rules my world at this point in time.”
The election code also does not allow Kayser or anyone else who works for the city or county to research a candidate’s background. Each would-be office seeker has to swear to the information they are giving — including whether they are eligible to run.
Kayser said her decision was based on the information she was given at the time and on the advice of the city attorney, and did not, as Richerson has asserted, have anything to do with his skin color or politics. (Richerson’s church pastor has publicly stated that because the candidate is Black and conservative, he is being persecuted.)
“I often tell people we’re Switzerland,” she said. “We are absolutely nonpartisan. We treat every candidate exactly the same. We would have done exactly the same thing for any other candidate on the ballot. None of that came into play. All that came into play were the documents that were in front of me.”
Richerson never argued the fact that he had never filed a motion to dismiss or vacate his case — because under Washington state law, he didn’t have to. His rights were automatically restored once his sentence was over, and, he said, Kayser knew that.
“I'm not trying to get pardoned,” he said. “I've never tried to get pardoned. I have friends back in Washington that are lieutenants in the police department, and I said, ‘Hey, should I get this part off my record?’ They go, ‘No, this is your story. Don't run from it, run on your story.’
“The city secretary should have stuck to her guns,” he said, referring to the fact she initially refused to disqualify him, “but she made a judgment call. And this is after I have run for office in the very city that I was convicted in. I've been requested for jury duty, and I have my voting rights restored there. The City Secretary of Fort Worth has all of that paperwork. If the city that I was convicted in has deemed my civil rights restored, and I ran for office on my record, why is that not sufficient enough for Fort Worth?”
In Texas, there have been several examples of people running for office after being convicted of a felony and then having their candidacy disqualified — such as a recent case in Killeen where a woman who committed a felony in Ohio was disqualified after claiming, but failing to prove, her rights had been restored.
Richerson's re-entering the election is a rare feat. A spokesman for the Texas Secretary of State’s office said candidates who have been disqualified are almost never reinstated, and disqualifications “happen all of the time.” Because election rules vary from municipality to municipality with only vague guidance from the state, the decision whether to reinstate a candidate almost always lands in the lap of the filing entity — usually the same entity that disqualified the candidate in the first place.
In Texas, the secretary of state's office serves only as an advisory agency and cannot make rulings on who is or isn’t eligible for an election, but former Secretary of State David Whitely did offer this opinion:
“An individual may be able to restore their right to run for public elective office through a pardon, a writ of habeas corpus, a restoration of rights under Article 48.05, or judicial clemency under Article 42A.701,” the option says. “However, unless the right to run for public office is specifically restored, an individual with a felony conviction is ineligible to exercise that right in Texas.”
Under state law, if a candidate believes they have been disqualified illegally, they can sue for relief. Any lawsuit would likely have taken months to come before a judge.
Even though he's been reinstated, Richerson said the damage to his campaign has been significant.
"It's put a cloud over my whole campaign,” he said. “Even though I'm on the ballot and I'm telling people to vote, the question is, ‘Well, is he eligible? Is he not eligible? Is my vote going to be wasted?’ It is just a big black eye and stain on the city of Fort Worth in my opinion — that they would handle this this way and do me like that.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: The original story was updated to reflect that Richerson has been formally reinstated in the race. (April 27, 2021)