Pardon the Troublemaker: An Appeal for an Old Friend

My friend John Kennedy O'Hara, of Brooklyn, NY, has been called a "political street-fighter," a "mad dog," a "dissident." Among the incumbents who he tried to unseat in Brooklyn he was considered a troublemaker and a fool. He was also, it was said, a felon. When the district attorney called for his arrest as a "criminal voter" in 1996, O'Hara dismissed the charges as a joke. When he surrendered to the DA's detectives, they cuffed him and hauled him into central booking in his suit and tie - O'Hara was a lawyer at the time running for a seat in the New York State legislature - and walked him into a room of peeling plaster. They listed for him seven felony counts: O'Hara had allegedly voted from a sham address seven times in the early '90s, and only now, years after the fact, the cops were fingerprinting him with an old worn-out ink pad. Then they flashbulbed him for the mug-shot, and took him to a holding cell where the black kids who are central booking's main customers laughed when O'Hara told them the charge. "Lookit," the kids marveled, "they're lockin' everybody up."

If voting was the crime, O'Hara, 36 years old at the time, was a true recidivist. He was a "prime voter," in the electoral parlance, one of those citizens who votes not just in the big races for mayor and president but in primary elections and special elections and in obscure local elections for school boards and the like. He'd probably voted 50 times since he came of voting age, he was proud of the fact, and he was sure he'd never done it illegally. The courts concluded otherwise: He would end up with the honor of being only the second person in New York State history to have been convicted on criminal charges for the act of voting. To my knowledge, the only other New Yorker to achieve this status was Susan B. Anthony, in 1872.

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