JACKSON, Miss. — Legal representatives are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to abolish Mississippi’s longstanding practice that strips voting rights from individuals convicted of specific felonies, including nonviolent offenses such as forgery and timber theft. According to court documents submitted recently, the majority of individuals impacted face permanent disenfranchisement, as the state offers very few pathways to restore their voting rights.
In an appeal filed on Wednesday, attorneys for those whose voting rights have been revoked pointed out that “Mississippi’s rigid and stark felony disenfranchisement measures are out of sync with national trends.” They highlighted that states across the country have progressively moved away from imposing lifetime disenfranchisement on felons over the past several decades.
This case marks the second such effort in recent times, and the third since the late 1800s, seeking to challenge Mississippi’s disenfranchisement practices concerning certain felonies. Although previous cases presented different legal rationale, the Supreme Court denied the most recent petition in 2023.
The current appeal is asking the justices to overturn a ruling from the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued in July, which stated that it is the responsibility of state legislators, rather than the judiciary, to determine amendments to the laws.
The appeal contends that revoking voting rights for particular crimes constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, which they argue is unconstitutional. In a previous ruling, the majority of justices dismissed claims surrounding cruel and unusual punishment when they permitted cities to enforce prohibitions against individuals experiencing homelessness from sleeping in public areas.
Attorneys contesting Mississippi’s voting restrictions assert that the authors of the state’s 1890 constitution designed the disenfranchisement laws based on a presumption that Black individuals would be more prone to commit certain crimes. While a majority of the appeals judges referenced a 1974 Supreme Court decision that affirmed the constitutionality of allowing states to disenfranchise felons, advocates argue that Mississippi’s laws are rooted in racial discrimination.
In Mississippi, approximately 38% of the population identifies as Black. Between 1994 and 2017, nearly 50,000 people lost their voting rights due to the state’s felony voting ban. Out of this number, more than 29,000 individuals have completed their sentences, with about 58% belonging to the Black community, according to a data analysis done for the plaintiffs challenging the law.
To restore voting rights in Mississippi, individuals convicted of disenfranchising offenses must either obtain a pardon from the governor or gain approval from two-thirds of the members of both the state House and Senate. In recent years, only a select few individuals have had their voting rights reinstated by legislators.
A separate Supreme Court case previously contended that the framers of Mississippi’s constitution exhibited racist motivations in determining which felonies would lead to the loss of voting rights. In that instance, justices opted not to revisit a 2022 appeals court ruling which concluded that Mississippi had addressed the discriminatory intentions behind the original constitutional provisions by subsequently modifying the list of disenfranchising offenses.
Over time, Mississippi has revised its list of crimes that result in disenfranchisement; it removed burglary from the list in 1950 and added murder and rape in 1968. In 2009, the state attorney general expanded this list to encompass 22 offenses, including timber larceny, carjacking, felony shoplifting, and writing bad checks at the felony level.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson expressed in a dissenting opinion in 2023 that the list of crimes leading to disenfranchisement in Mississippi was “established for a discriminatory purpose.”