Felons convicted of specific crimes, including some nonviolent offenses, in Mississippi remain permanently unable to vote unless new state legislation decides to make a change, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.
A majority of the 19 judges on the appeals court, which oversees cases in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, upheld Mississippi’s permanent voting ban for individuals with felony convictions outlined in the Mississippi’s Constitution.
The State’s Constitution was adopted on November 1,1890, marking the beginning of the racial segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as “Jim Crow” that disadvantaged Black people. Since then, the list of felonies has expanded.
In the decision, the court cited a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court case, Richardson v. Ramirez, which the 5th Circuit Court said “reaffirmed a body of constitutional law expressly permitting States to enact felon disenfranchisement.”
AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
Ari Savitzky, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, told Newsweek in an email, “Mississippi’s felon disenfranchisement scheme is draconian—the harshest in the nation—and it was explicitly adopted in 1890 to take the vote away from Black citizens.”
Savitzky called the court’s ruling “a missed opportunity for justice.”
The ruling emphasized that state legislators, not the judiciary, can change the state’s criteria of stripping voting rights from individuals convicted of felonies, writing: “In other words: go and convince the State legislatures. Do the hard work of persuading your fellow citizens that the law should change. The paramount lesson of the Constitution and Richardson is that the changes sought by Plaintiffs here can and must be achieved through public consensus effectuated in the legislative process, not by judicial fiat.”
Section 241 of the Mississippi State Constitution specifies the crimes that result in lifelong disenfranchisement, including “murder, rape, bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy.”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “timber larceny” and “carjacking” are among some of felonies added in the past two decades.
The court’s recent ruling overturns a previous decision by a three-judge panel from the same court, which had found in August that Mississippi’s voting ban for certain crimes violated the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.”
The dissenting judges in Thursday’s ruling argued similarly, saying that denying voting rights to individuals who have completed their sentences constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
In Judge James Dennis’ dissent, he wrote: “Voting is the lifeblood of our democracy and the deprivation of the right to vote saps citizens of the ability to have a say in how and by whom they are governed. Permanent denial of the franchise, then, is an exceptionally severe penalty, constituting nothing short of the denial of the democratic core of American citizenship.”
Jon Youngwood, co-chair of the litigation department at Simpson, Thacher, & Bartlett, who was the pro bono counsel to the plaintiffs, told Newsweek in an email, “We are heartened by the opinion of the six dissenting judges, which encapsulates the importance of this case.”
Youngwood continued that, “Denying broad groups of our citizens, for life, the ability to have a role in determining who governs them diminishes our society and deprives individuals of the full rights of representative government.”
Newsweek filed out a media contact form with Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office and sent an email to the Southern Poverty Law Center on Thursday.
As of now, Mississippi felons can try to have their voting rights restored in the state by receiving a pardon from the governor or encourage lawmakers to pass an individual bill for them, which must be approved by two-thirds. According to the Associated Press, none of these bills passed in 2023 and 17 have passed in 2024.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.