SALT LAKE CITY—The story of a man who, as a young adult, served time for a first-degree felony, has motivated Utah Sen. Derrin Owens, R-Fountain Green, to sponsor a bill in the Utah Legislature to remove certain barriers to employment for ex-felons.
On Feb. 10, 16 individuals who have succeeded despite criminal records appeared with Owens on the Senate floor.
“I believe in redemption and second chances,” Owens said at the time. “These people were bold enough to own their past mistakes and offer hope to those still incarcerated.”
Subsequently, the bill passed unanimously in the Utah Senate and is now pending in the Utah House of Representatives.
Owens says he was moved by a KSL documentary that aired between the morning and afternoon sessions of a general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in October 2021.
The documentary told the story of Sioni Havili, who got in trouble as a young man yet went on to finish a master’s degree. But because of his record, he had difficulty even getting an interview for a job.
One reason companies are reluctant to hire people with criminal records, Owens says, is because if an ex-convict gets in further trouble and ends up harming someone, the person harmed can file a civil suit against the company that hired him or her. Litigants go after the companies, he says, because they are the parties with means to pay a settlement.
“The potential of liability makes it so companies won’t hire people with felony records,” Owens says.
Owens’ bill simply states that a company can’t be held liable for hiring a given employee unless the party filing suit can prove the company was negligent in its hiring decision.
“What this bill does is put up a little barrier. The companies cannot be sued simply for hiring a felon. There has to be cause.”
Rep. Derrin Owens
The KSL documentary tells about Havili being a star football player and outstanding student at East High School in 1998. But shortly after high school, he joined other gang members in his Glendale neighborhood in Salt Lake City in firebombing a rival gang member’s house. The house burned to the ground.
By the time Havili was connected to the crime, the documentary explains, he was on an LDS mission in New York City. He was sent home and ended up spending a year in the Salt Lake County Jail.
“Words can’t express how regretful I am for the decision I made,” Havili says in the documentary.
After his release from jail, the documentary explains, neither BYU nor the U. of U. would accept him on their football teams because he was a convicted felon.
Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas did permit him to play. He spent two seasons there and graduated with his bachelor’s degree.
With a year of eligibility left, the documentary says, he returned to Utah and was getting ready to play at Weber State University and to pursue a master’s degree. He was outside running as part of his training regimen when he felt something in his left eye. It turned out he’d had a stroke. He ended up losing 50 percent of his vision in the eye.
His dreams of playing professional football were gone. As he puts it in the documentary, “That was the end of my football career at 25 years old.”
He had to find a new career path. “You can imagine being a first-degree felon,” he says in the KSL program. “It was very, very difficult to get an interview.”
After a few years in sales, Havili applied to Adobe. The company has 800 to 900 applicants for a typical job.
“He came in, and he interviewed, and it was an awesome interview,” Jason Coop, the hiring manager at Adobe, says in the documentary.
Because of Havili’s felony record, the hiring team had to get approval from corporate headquarters in San Jose to hire him. But Coop says, “He is easily the greatest hire I’ve made in my career.”
At the time of the documentary, Havili had moved to Domo, a software company in American Fork, and was handling some of the company’s biggest accounts.
Owens says his bill does not exempt companies from exercising good judgment. “Obviously, you can’t hire someone with a sexual record to work in a child-care center, but what about driving a concrete truck?”
As currently written, the bill sets limits on liability in the construction, mining, petroleum, transportation and culinary industries.
“I think you’re going to see more industries come to me and ask me to add them in,” Owens says.
