By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear Virginia’s bid to scuttle a lawsuit challenging an 1869 state constitutional provision that imposes a lifetime voting ban on convicted felons, one of the toughest restrictions in the United States.
The justices turned away an appeal by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, of a lower court’s ruling that let the lawsuit led by two would-be voters in the state with felony records proceed.
Virginia is one of just three U.S. states that imposes a lifetime ban on voting for all people with felony convictions unless the government restores an individual’s ability to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice public policy institute.
In 2023, Virginians Tati King and Toni Johnson, who were disenfranchised due to past felony convictions, and an advocacy group filed a class action lawsuit aiming to block state officials from enforcing the ban.
King was convicted in 2018 of felony drug possession, according to court papers. Johnson was convicted in 2021 of multiple felonies including drug possession and child endangerment. The plaintiffs are backed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Their convictions triggered the disenfranchisement provision of Virginia’s constitution adopted in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War of 1861-1865 stating that no person who has been convicted of a felony “shall be qualified to vote unless his civil rights have been restored by the governor or other appropriate authority.”
The plaintiffs argued that their disenfranchisement violated an 1870 federal law known as the Virginia Readmission Act that restored the state’s congressional representation after the Civil War. Virginia, which had allowed slavery, was one of the states that had seceded during the Civil War.
While the 1870 federal law did allow Virginia to punish felons by stripping them of their vote, the statute said this penalty applied to “such crimes as are now felonies at common law.” The plaintiffs, backed by the ACLU, argued that only crimes that were felonies at the time of the law’s enactment can lead to disenfranchisement – which would exclude the convictions of the plaintiffs in the case.
“The act’s purpose was to prevent Virginia from manipulating statutory criminal law to disenfranchise Black voters – specifically, from convicting and disenfranchising newly freed Black residents based on statutory crimes that were not felonies at the time Virginia entered the Union,” the plaintiffs wrote in court papers.
Following the Civil War, policies of racial segregation and disenfranchisement of Black people were broadly enforced by white leaders in numerous U.S. states including Virginia using what were called Jim Crow laws.
Virginia’s attorney general sought to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it was barred by a legal doctrine called sovereign immunity that allows a government to be sued only if it has consented.
A federal judge in a March 2024 ruling held that the lawsuit satisfied an exception to sovereign immunity and could proceed against state officials. The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the suit could move forward, prompting state officials to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The justices in January declined to hear a challenge to Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting by people convicted of a wide range of felonies.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
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