SCOTUS Declines To Review Mississippi’s Jim Crow-Era Felony Disenfranchisement Law
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a case challenging Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting for individuals with certain felony convictions, which the state enshrined in its 1890 constitution with the express purpose of denying Black men the right to vote.
Last November, voting rights advocates filed a petition asking the nation’s highest court to consider the question of whether Mississippi’s strict felony disenfranchisement provision — known as Section 241 — violates the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Under the Jim Crow-Era Provision, Mississippians who were convicted of a crime on the state’s list of disenfranchising offenses — and who haven’t completed the voting restoration process — are ineligible to vote. The provision disproportionately affects Black Mississippians, who represent nearly 60% of individuals convicted of disenfranchising felony offenses, but make up approximately 37% of the state’s population.
In a groundbreaking August 2023 ruling, a panel of majority-Democratic appointed 5th Circuit judges sided with a group of permanently disenfranchised Mississippi residents and struck down Section 241 for imposing cruel and unusual punishment on individuals who are barred from voting even after sentence completion.
“Permanent denial of the franchise…is an exceptionally severe penalty, constituting nothing short of the denial of the democratic core of American citizenship. It is an especially cruel penalty as applied to those whom the justice system has already deemed to have completed all terms of their sentences,” the panel’s decision stated.
But in a subsequent ruling, the full majority-conservative 5th Circuit — which agreed to rehear the case en banc at the state’s request — concluded that Section 241 passes constitutional muster.
The majority reasoned that holding the provision unconstitutional “would thwart the ability of the State’s legislature and citizens to determine their voting qualifications, and would require federal courts overtly to make legislative choices that, in our federal system, belong at the State level.”
In their petition seeking U.S. Supreme Court review of the 5th Circuit’s en banc ruling, disenfranchised Mississippians emphasized the uniquely punitive nature of Section 241: “Mississippi is one of only two states that continues to punish first-time offenders who commit non-violent and non-voting-related felonies with lifetime disenfranchisement.”
The petitioners — who were represented in part by the Southern Poverty Law Center — highlighted the onerous and arbitrary nature of rights restoration in the state. Although the Mississippi Legislature may restore voting rights by a two-thirds vote of both chambers, it only re-enfranchised 79 individuals between 2022 and 2024 according to the Sentencing Project.
Last year, lawmakers introduced a reform bill that would have created a path to rights restoration for those convicted of some nonviolent felony offenses, but the proposal died in the state Senate.
In addition to seeking the justices’ review of their 8th Amendment claim, the disenfranchised individuals asked the Court to reconsider its past precedent that exempts lifetime felony disenfranchisement laws from strict scrutiny — the highest standard of judicial review — under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
For his part, Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson (R) urged the Court to deny the cert petition and contended that Section 241 does not impose a punishment, but rather amounts to a “nonpenal regulation of the franchise.”
Today’s order from the high court is not the first time that the justices have refused to consider the issue of felony disenfranchisement in the Magnolia State. In June 2023, the Court declined to review a different case challenging Section 241 exclusively under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
The justices’ inaction in that case spurred a scathing dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who noted that the Court “missed yet another opportunity to learn from its mistakes” nearly 125 years after declining to review an 1898 legal challenge to Section 241.