By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a challenge to Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting by people convicted of a wide range of felonies, a policy adopted in 1890 during the Jim Crow era that stands as one of the toughest such restrictions in the nation.
The justices turned away an appeal of a lower court’s decision rejecting a lawsuit that claimed that the ban – a provision of the Mississippi constitution that applies even after a sentence has been completed – violates the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment promise of equal protection and Eighth Amendment bar on cruel and unusual punishments.
The class action suit was brought in 2018 by six Mississippi men – including white and Black plaintiffs – who lost the right to vote even though they have completed their sentences for various felonies, including grand larceny and receiving stolen property.
The case centers on Section 241 of the Mississippi Constitution, which denies people who have been convicted of a range of felonies the right to vote for life. The range of crimes include murder, rape, bribery, theft, forgery and arson, but lawyers for the plaintiffs have said it applies regardless of the seriousness of the felony, even “writing a bad check for $100 or stealing $250 worth of timber.”
Section 241 was adopted by a state constitutional convention with the racist intent to undermine the electoral power of Black people after they gained the right to vote following the 1861-1865 U.S. Civil War that ended slavery in states including Mississippi. The provision removed crimes thought to be “white crimes” and added those thought to be “black crimes,” according to court papers.
Following the end of the post-Civil War reconstruction period, policies of racial segregation and disenfranchisement of Black people were broadly enforced by white leaders in numerous U.S. states including Mississippi using what were called Jim Crow laws.
More than 58% of currently disenfranchised Mississippi residents who have completed their sentences are Black, according to lawyers for the plaintiffs, adding that Mississippi and Virginia are the only two states that continue to “permanently disenfranchise first-time offenders who were convicted of non-violent and non-voting-related felonies.” Black people make up 38% of the state’s population, according to U.S. census statistics.
A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Mississippi, in 2023 ruled 2-1 in favor of the claim by the plaintiffs that the ban violates the Eighth Amendment.
“Mississippi stands as an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear and consistent trend in our nation against permanent disenfranchisement,” Judge James Dennis wrote in the opinion.
In 2024, however, the full 5th Circuit reconsidered the case and voted 13-6 to uphold the ban.
The Supreme Court in 2023 declined to hear a separate constitutional challenge to Section 241, prompting a dissent by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote that the remaining crimes from the provision’s “pernicious origin still work the very harm the 1890 convention intended – denying Black Mississippians the vote.”
A convicted felon’s voting rights can be restored in Mississippi only by a two-thirds vote of the state legislature – something that happened just 18 times between 2013 and 2018, according to the plaintiffs, or a pardon by the governor.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
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