WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left in place Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era practice of removing voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, including nonviolent crimes such as forgery and timber theft.
The justices, without comment, turned away an appeal from Mississippi residents who have completed their sentences, but who have been unable to regain their right to vote.
The court’s action let stand a ruling by the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that rejected the claim that permanent loss of voting rights amounted to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Constitution. Mississippi legislators, not the courts, must decide whether to change the laws, the 5th Circuit said.
Using different legal arguments, lawyers failed to get the Supreme Court to take up the felon disenfranchisement issue in 2023, over a dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Mississippi’s list of disqualifying crimes was “adopted for an illicit discriminatory purpose,” Jackson wrote.
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After the state adopted that law as part of its 1890 constitution, along with other provisions like poll taxes and literacy tests, James K. Vardaman, one of its drafters, explained the goal: “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.”
No justice noted a dissent from Monday’s order.
Most of the people affected are disenfranchised for life because the state provides few options for restoring ballot access. Lawyers
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