An Evening with Daniel Rivero

***Please note: This event will take place at the Books & Books in Coral Gables at 265 Aragon Ave. Tickets are FREE and books will be available for purchase at the event. Can't make the event or want your copy early?

The story of an extraordinary expansion of voting rights and the obstacles holding back its implementation

When Florida citizens voted in 2018 to pass Amendment 4 to the state constitution, which promised to restore voting rights to people with past felony convictions, the decision was celebrated as a civil rights victory and the nation’s largest expansion of voting rights in almost 50 years. In Just Freedom, Daniel Rivero details the advocacy and action that led to this moment—and shows what went wrong in the years after the amendment’s passing.

The story begins in the Reconstruction era with Florida’s 1868 lifetime voting ban for people with past felony convictions. The infamous 2000 Bush/Gore election brought the ban to national attention, sparking a wave of activism against it. Rivero follows the 18-year path to Amendment 4 through the grassroots work of people including Howard Simon of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and Desmond Meade, a formerly incarcerated man and president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.

A journalist who has covered this story for many years, Rivero uses court documents, meeting transcripts, archival videos, interviews, and eyewitness courtroom scenes and street marches to peel back the layers and reveal the motives that supported and opposed this human rights initiative. He shows how political polarization, implementation challenges, and monetary interests have stalled the amendment from becoming fully realized to this day.

At once a contemporary legal tale and a series of interwoven stories of people at the center of the fight, this is the account of how 1.4 million Floridians gained the right to vote—and the obstacles still preventing them from doing so. Just Freedom will raise questions and provoke conversations about the lasting hold of Jim Crow–era policies, the power of money, and the nature of the American criminal justice system.

Daniel Rivero is part of WLRN's investigative reporting team. Before joining WLRN, he was an investigative reporter and producer on the television series "The Naked Truth," and a digital reporter for Fusion. The Florida Bar has twice awarded him with the Parker Thompson Award for Outstanding Legal Journalism in Florida. His work has also won honors of the Murrow Awards, Sunshine State Awards, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Esserman-Knight Awards, Green Eyeshade Awards and the Livingston Awards. In 2024 he was honored with the Holly Skolnik Human Rights Award by Americans for Immigrant Justice for his podcast Detention By Design, highlighting the legal and social origins of the immigration detention system in the US.