The Dauphin County District Attorney's office recently asked a newly-elected Harrisburg School Board member to step down because of a criminal conviction in her past.

But Carrie Fowler does not plan to give up her hard-fought seat, according to her spokesman, Brandon Flood.

The request from the DA's office in recent days resurrects a debate about a controversial state law that forbids people with convictions for felonies or "infamous" crimes from holding office.

The law cropped up during the race for Harrisburg School Board seats earlier this year because three candidates had felony convictions in their past. All three defiantly stayed in the race, saying they had a right to run if they have turned their lives around.

As it turned out, none of them won enough votes in the Democratic primary, avoiding a potential showdown with the prosecutor's office.

But now the same issue has cropped up against Fowler, who won the Democratic primary for a seat in May and won in the recent general election. She is expecting to be seated on the nine-member board next month.

Fowler does not have a felony conviction, but instead has several misdemeanor convictions, including one from 16 years ago that the district attorney's office said might disqualify her from serving.

Fowler vehemently disagrees and told First Assistant District Attorney Fran Chardo she won't step down voluntarily.

Fowler does not believe her 2001 conviction in Dauphin County for receiving stolen property qualifies as an "infamous" crime. The conviction stemmed from a traffic stop where she had someone else's license plate on her car.

According to the criminal complaint filed at the time, Fowler either "knew such property was stolen or believed that it probably had been stolen."

Chardo told Fowler the state Supreme Court previously has defined the term "infamous crimes" to include all "crimen falsi" offenses, which includes all thefts and theft by receiving stolen property.

Her spokesman, Brandon Flood, said they believe "it's a little bit of a stretch," to consider a license plate on a vehicle a crime of falsification.

Muddying up the situation is the fact that the city council president and mayor-elect in the nearby city of York has two drug felonies in his past, but a judge previously ruled that he could serve on city council, despite precedents set in other cases that determined "felonies" are a disqualifying offense.

Some of Michael Helfrich's opponents are seeking to get him disqualified, but he told the York Dispatch this month he wasn't worried. He said his attorney advised him that any new court challenge would constitute "res judicata" -- a matter that has been adjudicated by a competent court and may not be pursued further by the same parties, according to the York Dispatch.

Flood said if the York mayor elect can serve with felony convictions from 1991, then Fowler could fight for her right to serve as well.

"She thinks it a bit of an overreach," Flood said of the attempt to get her to step down. "She received the license plate from a friend of hers and they put it on her car. She didn't think she would have any problems with it."

Chardo said he is not currently taking any action against Fowler, but that he simply gave her the courtesy of a phone call after his office received a complaint about her eligibility.

Chardo said he would take no action until the election results are certified in a few weeks. At that point, he said he would investigate her situation more closely and decide whether to file a lawsuit to remove her from office.

Interestingly, the term "infamous crime" does not necessarily mean a violent, or even serious, offense, according to the Associated Press, which reported on the topic in 2010. Pennsylvania courts have ruled, for example, that it did not apply to a borough councilman who pleaded guilty to various offenses after he held his girlfriend at gunpoint in a car for three hours, according to the AP report.