From The Texas Observer:
Last spring, Lewis Conway Jr., a 47-year-old community organizer, began planning a campaign for Austin City Council like most candidates do. He gathered friends and asked for their support. He considered his fundraising prospects. No stranger to City Council, Conway had fought for Austin’s 2016 Fair Chance Hiring ordinance, which prohibits many employers from considering criminal backgrounds before making a job offer. Conway, who calls himself a democratic socialist, drafted a platform of aggressively building out public housing, giving tax breaks to poor folks in gentrifying East Austin and expanding indigent healthcare and public transportation.
But as he began informally campaigning, Conway ran into a snag: In 1993, he was convicted of felony voluntary manslaughter for fatally stabbing a man during a dispute at an East Austin apartment, a crime for which he served around eight years in Texas state prisons and 12 years on parole. Finishing his parole restored his voting rights, which he thought also cleared his path to run — until a city memo revealed in December that Texas law may not be so forgiving. Continue Reading >>>
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