Mississippi is violating the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment by permanently stripping voting rights from people convicted of some felonies, a federal appeals court panel ruled in a split decision Friday.
Two judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ordered the Mississippi secretary of state to stop enforcing a provision in the state constitution that disenfranchises people convicted of specific crimes, including murder, forgery and bigamy.
If the ruling stands, thousands of people could regain voting rights, possibly in time for the Nov. 7 general election for governor and other statewide offices.
Mississippi Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch expects to ask the full appeals court to reconsider the panel's 2-1 ruling, her spokesperson, Debbee Hancock, said Friday.
The 5th Circuit is one of the most conservative appeals courts in the U.S., and in 2022 it declined to overturn Mississippi's felony disenfranchisement provisions — a ruling that came in a separate lawsuit. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court said it would not consider that case, allowing the 2022 appeals court ruling to stand.
The two lawsuits use different arguments.
The suit that the Supreme Court declined to hear was based on arguments about equal protection. Plaintiffs said that the Jim Crow-era authors of the Mississippi Constitution stripped voting rights for crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit, including forgery, larceny and bigamy.
The lawsuit that the appeals court panel ruled on Friday is based on arguments that Mississippi is imposing cruel and unusual punishment with a lifetime ban on voting after some felony convictions.
"Mississippi stands as an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear and consistent trend in our Nation against permanent disenfranchisement," wrote Judges Carolyn Dineen King and James L. Dennis.
Under the Mississippi Constitution, people convicted of 10 specific felonies — including murder, forgery and bigamy — lose the right to vote. The state's attorney general expanded the list to 22 crimes, including timber larceny and carjacking.
I want everybody including people still serving their sentence to be able to vote, mainly because I don't want it to be possible for disenfranchisement to be an ulterior motive for criminalizing things the political opposition does. (For example, marijuana prohibition.)
willingly and knowingly breaking the law is a crime, regardless of if you agree with the law.
but I agree with you on naturally occurring plants - cannabis and poppy should be perfectly legal, but thc concentrate and opiate derivatives should be illegal. even hard alcohol should be regulated.
even our founding fathers said that unjust laws shouldn’t be followed… and here you are, commenting all over this post about how much you disagree with this legal ruling… it seems you’re only happy when it’s laws you happen to like.
why? because you personally don’t like them?
it has been for over a century. you know what has, consistently, decreased the consumption of alcohol (and opiates, btw), specially in minors? Legalizing cannabis… in all forms. It’s even caused a drop in use of cannabis in minors due to regulation and education in places where it’s been legalized.
when you make something illegal, it doesn’t stop people from using it. it just pushes it onto the black market where impure versions are distributed without care or concern for who buys it. and that’s dangerous.