Mississippi Today
5th Circuit panel strikes down Mississippi’s lifetime felony voting ban
A three-judge panel of the United States 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down Mississippi's lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of certain felonies, saying it is unconstitutional because it inflicts cruel and unusual punishment.
In a 2-1 ruling released Friday, the panel sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan III in the Southern District of Mississippi with instructions to find the state's lifetime ban on voting to be unconstitutional.
The majority said, “By severing former offenders from the body politic forever, Section 241 (the lifetime ban provision of the state Constitution) ensures that they will never be fully rehabilitated, continues to punish them beyond the terms their culpability requires and serves no protective function to society. It is thus a cruel and unusual punishment.”
The Court of Appeals decision comes on the heels of the United States Supreme Court refusing in June to hear another case seeking to find Mississippi's lifetime felony voting ban unconstitutional. That case sought to have the felony voting ban declared unconstitutional because it was originally adopted as part of the 1890 Constitution in an attempt to prevent Black Mississippians from voting.
The lawsuit that was addressed by the three-judge panel was filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Mississippi Center for Justice and others on behalf of Mississippians who have lost their voting rights. The office of Attorney General Lynn Fitch opposed the lawsuit on behalf of the state.
It is possible the state may appeal the decision of the three-judge panel to the entire 5th Circuit.
“We are overjoyed with the ruling obviously and with the prospects of tens of thousand Mississippians regaining the right to vote,' said Brad Heard, head of voting rights with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “We absolutely agree with the court that permanent disenfranchisement is cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
The opinion overturning the lifetime voting ban was written by Circuit Judge James Dennis and joined by Carolyn Dineen King, both of whom have senior status on the 5th Circuit. Judge Edith Jones dissented.
She argued that the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1974 decision already had ruled that such lifetime bans were allowed. The 1974 ruling said a lifetime ban did not violate equal protection clauses of the United States Constitution or in other words was not unconstitutional because it allowed a certain group of people to be treated differently.
But the Supreme Court did not rule on whether it was cruel and unusual punishment.
“The consequences of committing a felony rarely ends at the prison walls…,” Jones wrote. “Completing a prison sentence does not entitle felons to all the rights they previously possessed.”
The two judges pointed out that when the Supreme Court made its 1974 ruling that many more states imposed lifetime bans on voting. But now Mississippi is among a small minority of states to do so.
The 5th Circuit majority wrote, “In so excluding former offenders from a basic aspect of democratic life, often long after their sentences have been served, Mississippi inflicts a disproportionate punishment that has been rejected by a majority of the states and, in the independent judgment of this court informed by our precedents, is at odds with society's evolving standards of decency.”
The framers at the time admitted they placed the lifetime ban in the Mississippi Constitution as a tool to keep African Americans from voting. Those crimes placed in the constitution where conviction costs a person the right to vote are bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, bigamy and burglary.
Under the original language of the constitution, a person could be convicted of cattle rustling and lose the right to vote, but those convicted of murder or rape would still be able to vote — even while incarcerated. Murder and rape now also are exclusionary.
In the 5th Circuit ruling, the majority pointed out that the Constitution granted the Legislature the authority to restore voting rights, presumably, to ensure that white Mississippians were not permanently banned from voting. In modern times, the Legislature usually restores voting rights to a handful (usually no more than five people) each session.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1945
April 29, 1945
The memoir by Richard Wright about his upbringing in Roxie, Mississippi, “Black Boy,” became the top-selling book in the U.S.
Wrighyt described Roxie as “swarming with rats, cats, dogs, fortune tellers, cripples, blind men, whores, salesmen, rent collectors, and children.”
In his home, he looked to his mother: “My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life.”
When he was alone, he wrote, “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
Reading became his refuge.
“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books,” he wrote. “Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.”
In the end, he discovered that “if you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.” He was the first Black author to see his work sold through the Book-of-a-Month Club.
Wright's novel, “Native Son,” told the story of Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old Black man whose bleak life leads him to kill. Through the book, he sought to expose the racism he saw: “I was guided by but one criterion: to tell the truth as I saw it and felt it. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”
The novel, which sold more than 250,000 copies in its first three weeks, was turned into a play on Broadway, directed by Orson Welles. He became friends with other writers, including Ralph Ellison in Harlem and Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in Paris. His works played a role in changing white Americans' views on race.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Podcast: The contentious final days of the 2024 legislative session
Mississippi Today's Adam Ganucheau, Bobby Harrison and Geoff Pender break down the final negotiations of the 2024 legislative session's three major issues: Medicaid expansion, education funding, and retirement system reform.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Lawmakers negotiate Medicaid expansion behind closed doors, hit impasse on state budget
House and Senate Republicans continued to haggle over Medicaid expansion proposals Sunday, and the state budget process hit a snag after leaders couldn't reach final agreements by a Saturday night deadline on how to spend $7 billion.
House Speaker Jason White on Sunday told his chamber that Medicaid expansion negotiators from the House and Senate had been meeting and he expected a compromise “will be filed by Monday or Tuesday at the latest.”
House Medicaid Chairwoman Missy McGee said the Senate had delivered another counter proposal on expansion Sunday evening but declined to provide details. Her Senate counterpart, Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, declined comment on Sunday. The two leaders met in McGee's office on Sunday evening following a Saturday afternoon meeting.
READ MORE: House, Senate close in on Medicaid expansion agreement
Lawmakers have for the past couple of months been debating on how to expand Medicaid coverage for poor Mississippians and help the state's flagging hospitals. The House initially voted to expand coverage to an estimated 200,000 people, and accept more that $1 billion a year in federal dollars to cover the cost, as most other states have done. The Senate initially passed a far more austere plan, that would cover about 40,000 people, and would decline the extra federal money to cover costs.
Since those plans passed, each has offered counter proposals, but no deal has been reached.
A group of about 50 clergy, physicians and other citizens who support full expansion showed up at the Capitol on Sunday to sit in the Senate gallery and deliver letters to key leaders who are negotiating a final plan.
“When we stand before the Lord, he's not going to ask how much money did you save the state. He's going to ask you what you did for the least of these,” Monsignor Elvin Sounds, a retired Catholic priest, said outside the Senate gallery on Sunday.
READ MORE: A solution to the Republican impasse on Medicaid expansion
Lawmakers hit an impasse on setting a $7 billion state budget and missed Saturday night's deadline for filing appropriations bills. This will force the legislature into extra innings, and require lawmakers to vote to push back deadlines. Lawmakers had expected to end this year's session and leave Jackson by early this week. But House Speaker Jason White told his chamber on Sunday they should expect to continue working through Friday, “and possibly through Saturday or Sunday.
White later said of the budget impasse, “When you get to haggling over spending $7 billion, folks are going to have disagreements.”
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, said “things are fluid. But everybody is working.”
He looked at his watch and said “It is 5 o'clock. By 6 o'clock what I tell you will have changed.”
White said one reason for the session having to run extra innings is that when he became speaker he vowed to House members that he would not continue the practice of passing much of the state budget last-minute, late at night or in the wee hours of the morning with little or no time for lawmakers to read or vet what they are passing.
He said the House was prepared early Saturday night to file budget bills with agreed-upon numbers, but not to file “dummy bills” with zeros or blanks and continue haggling a budget late into the night.
“I made a promise that we are not going to keep them up here until midnight, then plow through all these budget bills,” White said. “We had had a gentleman's agreement (between the House and Senate) earlier in the session to negotiate a budget by April 15. That didn't happen … We are not going to do everything last minute with no time for our members to read things and ask questions. We are not going to do it in the middle of the night.”
READ MORE: Senate negotiators a no-show for second meeting with House on Medicaid expansion
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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