JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi legislators, not the courts, must decide whether to change the state’s practice of stripping voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, including nonviolent crimes such as forgery and timber theft, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
The state’s original list of disenfranchising crimes springs from the Jim Crow era, and attorneys who sued to challenge the list say authors of the Mississippi Constitution removed voting rights for crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit.
James K. Vardaman, one of the drafters of Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution, explained the goal afterward: “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter … Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n–ger from politics. Not the ‘ignorant and vicious’, as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the n–ger.”
A majority of judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote on Thursday that the Supreme Court in 1974 reaffirmed constitutional law allowing states to disenfranchise felons.
“Do the hard work of persuading your fellow citizens that the law should change,” the majority wrote.
Nineteen judges of the appeals court heard arguments in January, months after vacating a ruling issued last August by a three-judge panel of the same court. The panel had said Mississippi’s ban on voting after certain crimes violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
In the ruling Thursday, dissenting judges wrote that the majority stretched the previous Supreme Court ruling “beyond all recognition.” The dissenting judges wrote that Mississippi’s practice of disenfranchising people who have completed their sentences is cruel and unusual.
Tens of thousands of Mississippi residents are disenfranchised under a part of the state constitution that says those convicted of 10 specific felonies, including bribery, theft, arson and bigamy, lose the right to vote.
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