Mississippi Today

Few options remain for Mississippians convicted of certain felonies to regain voting rights

Published

2 years ago

July 12, 2023

Mississippians convicted of certain felonies have few options to regain their voting rights — a standard practice in most other states — after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up a case attempting to end the lifetime ban on voting.

The nation’s highest court, by a 7-2 vote in late June, refused to hear a Mississippi lawsuit arguing that the state’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of certain felonies was unconstitutional. Racist white lawmakers in 1890 who wrote the provision into the current Mississippi Constitution said plainly that they adopted it to keep African Americans from voting.

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Mississippi case, the state remains in the minority as one of fewer than 10 to impose a lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of felonies.

It also appears efforts to remove the ban through the courts have been exhausted. Legal advocates who have long been fighting the Jim Crow provision are now turning their focus to the only viable solution left: the legislative process.

“At a time when most states have repealed their disfranchisement laws, we need to remove from Mississippi’s Constitution this backward provision that was enacted for racist reasons,” said Vangela M. Wade, the president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, which helped craft the lawsuit that was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Here in the 21st Century, just and reasonable minded people must not allow this outdated relic of the 19th Century to stand or define a new Mississippi. The Legislature now has the duty to begin the repeal process.”

The most obvious way to repeal the lifetime ban is to amend the Mississippi Constitution. There is currently one way to amend the Mississippi Constitution: the Legislature, by a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate, must pass a resolution proposing a change. Then, voters on a statewide ballot must approve that change.

Florida voters recently approved a repeal of that state’s lifetime ban on people convicted of felonies being able to vote. But in Florida, the proposal to repeal the lifetime ban was done through a voter ballot initiative instead of through the Legislature.

Mississippi, though, no longer has an initiative process, which allows voters to gather enough signatures to bypass the Legislature and place an issue directly on the ballot. Mississippi’s voter initiative was struck down by the state Supreme Court in 2021, and the Legislature, despite repeated promises from its leaders, has refused to pass a resolution to restore the process.

There is a way for disenfranchised voters to have their voting rights restored under the current Mississippi Constitution. But that process is rarely used and incredibly cumbersome. The Legislature, by a two-thirds vote, can restore voting rights. Historically, the Legislature has restored the rights one person at a time by passing individual resolutions. But there appears to be a consensus that legislators could pass one bill enacting rights for a large group of people. In the 1940s, for example, legislators passed a bill restoring voting rights for people convicted of felonies who served in World War II.

Additionally, the governor can restore voting rights. But both current Gov. Tate Reeves and his predecessor, Phil Bryant, have refused to grant any pardons.

In other states, governors have restored voting rights to large groups of people in a single order. It is not clear whether a Mississippi governor could do the same, and such a gubernatorial effort might face a court challenge.

All said, there is no indication that the current Republican leadership is interested in restoring voting rights on a large basis to people convicted of felonies. Since they took control of both chambers of the Legislature and the Governor’s Mansion in 2012, Republicans have been reluctant to restore voting rights.

Lawmakers did not restore anyone’s voting rights during the 2023 legislative session.

In 2022, the Legislature did pass a bill to clarify that people who had certain primarily non-violent convictions expunged would regain the right to vote. But Reeves vetoed the bill, and legislators made no effort to override the veto.

Years ago, efforts were made to reach a compromise. Under the current legal system, people convicted of certain serious crimes, such as selling drugs or sexual assault of minors, do not lose the right to vote and can even continue to vote while incarcerated. On the other hand, people convicted of what many would consider lesser crimes, such as writing a bad check, lose their right to vote forever.

To address that disparity, some lawmakers over the years proposed banning all people from voting while they were in state custody, but allow them to vote once they finished their sentences. None of those bills, however, have been adopted.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a blistering dissent arguing the Supreme Court should take up the case challenging the constitutionality of the Mississippi provision.

In response, Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens said he would take steps when possible to ensure people did not lose their voting rights.

“My office will seek to protect the accused’s voting rights, where possible, when making charging decisions,” Owens said in a news release. “If a person is accused of a disenfranchising crime, and a parallel charge is available that does not affect his or her voting rights, my office will proceed on the parallel charge. I challenge other district attorneys across the state to join me in taking up Justice Jackson’s charge and adopt similar policies to protect our citizens from discriminatory disenfranchisement.”

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. The framers of the constitution did not include murder and rape as disenfranchising crimes, though they were added years later. More recently, the list has been expanded through opinions of the state Attorney General to include modern day crimes that matched those included in the 1890 Constitution.

The framers of the Mississippi Constitution said plainly in 1890 that they included those crimes because they believed African Americans were more likely to commit them. The framers also included other racist provisions to keep Black Mississippians from voting, such as poll taxes and so-called literacy tests.

Those provisions, unlike felony suffrage, were all struck down by the federal courts — not by state legislative action.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

‘Will you trust us?’: JPS plan for stricter cellphone policy makes some parents anxious

Published

1 day ago

July 11, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @mintamolly – 2025-07-11 15:25:00

by Molly Minta, Mississippi Today
July 11, 2025

Superintendent Errick Greene wanted to be very clear with the roughly 50 parents who attended Thursday night’s community listening session: Jackson Public Schools already has a policy banning students from using cellphones at school.

Aaliyah McIntyre, left, and her mother Ashley McIntyre attend a Jackson Public Schools listening session on July 10, 2025, about the district’s new policy on cellphone use. They raised concerns about how parents would be notified in the event of an emergency.

But the leadership of Mississippi’s third-largest school district has decided that a new approach is in order, citing a series of incidents in recent years involving students using their cellphones to bully others, organize fights or text their parents inaccurate information about violence happening at or near their school.

“To be clear, it’s not the majority of our scholars, but I can’t look at a class and know who’s gonna be bullying today, who’s gonna be scheduling a meetup to cut up today,” Greene said toward the end of the hour-long meeting held at the JPS board room. “I can’t look at a group of scholars and say, ‘OK, yeah, you’re the one, let me take your phone, the rest of you can keep it.’”

Under the rewritten policy, students who take their phone out of their backpacks during the instructional day will lose it for five days for the first infraction, 10 days for the second and 45 days for the third. Currently, the longest the school will hold a phone is 10 days.

The Jackson school board is expected to consider the new policy at its meeting next week and the district hopes to implement the change when the new school year starts later this month, said Sherwin Johnson, the district’s communications director.

Students also currently have the option to pay up to a $25 fine to get their phone back, but the district wants to rescind that aspect of the policy.

“We’ve discovered that’s not equitable,” said Larrisa Harris, the JPS general counsel. “Not everybody has the resources to come and pay the fine.”

Support for the new policy among the parents who spoke at the listening session varied, but all had questions. How will students access the internet on their laptops if the WiFi is spotty at their school and they need to use their cellphone hotspot? If students are required to keep their phones in their backpacks during lunch, how will teachers prevent stealing? How will JPS enforce the ban on using cellphones on the bus?

One mother said she watches her daughter’s location while she rides the bus to Jim Hill High School so she knows her daughter made it safely.

“If they can’t have it on the bus, who’s gonna enforce that?” she said. “I’m just gonna be real, the bus driver got to drive.”

A common theme among parents was anxiety at the prospect of losing direct contact with their kids in the event of an emergency. A Pew Research survey found that most adults, regardless of political affiliation, support cellphone bans in middle and high school classes. But those who don’t say it’s because their child can use their phone during emergencies.

“If something happened, will we get an automatic alert to notify us? Because a lot of the time we see things on social media first,” said Ashley McIntyre, a mother of three JPS students. She attended the meeting with her eldest daughter, Aaliyah, who recently graduated from Powell Middle School.

Though JPS does have an alert system for parents, McIntyre said she didn’t know if it existed. She cited a bomb threat at Powell last year that she found out about because Aaliyah texted her, not through a school alert.

“We didn’t know what was going on, and she texted me, ‘Mom, I’m scared,’ so I went up there,” McIntyre said. “So that puts us on edge.”

Aaliyah said she uses her phone to text her mom and watch TikTok, but she feels like her classmates use their phones to be popular or to fit in. When a fight happens, she said many students pull out their phones to record instead of trying to get an adult who can stop it. Then the videos end up on Instagram pages dedicated to posting fights in JPS.

“Once the principal found out about the fight pages, they came around looking inside our videos and camera rolls,” she said. “It happened to me last year. They thought I had a fight on my phone.”

Toward the end of the meeting, Laketia Marshall-Thomas, the assistant superintendent for high schools, took the mic to respond to one parent who said she was concerned that older students would not come to school if they knew their phone could be taken.

“What we have seen is, it’s the older students—” Marshall-Thomas began.

“They are the problem,” someone from the audience chimed in.

“We’re not saying they cannot have them,” she continued. “We know that they have after school activities and they need to communicate with their moms … but we have had major, major issues with cellphones and issues that have even resulted in criminal outcomes for our scholars, but most importantly, our students … have experienced a lot of learning loss.”

While the district leadership did not go into detail about the criminal incidents, several pointed to instances where students have texted their parents inaccurate information, such as an unsubstantiated rumor there was a gun during a fight at Callaway High School or that a shooting outside Whitten Middle School occurred on school property.

“Having phones actually creates far more chaos than they help anyone,” Greene said.

While cellphones have been banned to varying degrees in U.S. schools for decades, youth mental health concerns have renewed interest in more widespread bans across the country. Cellphone and social media usage among school-aged kids is linked to negative mental health outcomes and instances of cyberbullying, research shows.

At least 11 states restrict or ban cellphone use in schools. After Mississippi’s youth mental health task force recommended that all school districts implement policies that limited cellphone and social media usage in classrooms, a bill that would’ve required school boards to create cellphone policies died during the legislative session. Still, several Mississippi school districts have passed their own policies, including Marshall County and Madison County.

Another concern about the ban was a belief among a couple of speakers at the meeting that cellphones can help parents hold the district accountable for misdeeds it may want to hide.

“I just saw a video today. It was not in JPS, but it was a child being yelled at by the teacher and had he not recorded it, his momma would have never known that this sweet lady that they go to church with is degrading her child like that,” one mother said.

Statements like these prompted responses from teachers and other parents who urged the skeptical attendees to be more trusting or to make sure the district has updated contact information for them in case school officials need to reach parents during an emergency.

“I think we have to trust the people watching over our children,” said one of the few fathers who spoke. “When I grew up, what the teacher said was gold.”

One teacher asked the audience, “Will you trust us?”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post ‘Will you trust us?’: JPS plan for stricter cellphone policy makes some parents anxious appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

The article presents a balanced report on Jackson Public Schools’ proposed stricter cellphone policy without taking a clear ideological stance. It fairly conveys the perspectives of school officials emphasizing discipline and safety, alongside parental concerns about communication and emergency access. The tone remains neutral, focusing on factual details such as policy changes, reasons behind them, and community reactions. While it includes some skepticism from parents and responses from district staff, the language does not endorse or oppose either side. Overall, the coverage adheres to neutral, factual reporting by presenting multiple viewpoints without editorializing.

Mississippi Today

Hospitals see danger in Medicaid spending cuts

Published

2 days ago

July 10, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-07-10 15:30:00

by Sophia Paffenroth, Mississippi Today
July 10, 2025

Mississippi hospitals could lose up to $1 billion over the next decade under the sweeping, multitrillion-dollar tax and policy bill President Donald Trump signed into law last week, according to leaders at the Mississippi Hospital Association.

The leaders say the cuts could force some already-struggling rural hospitals to reduce services or close their doors.

The law includes the largest reduction in federal health and social safety net programs in history. It passed 218-214, with all Democrats voting against the measure and all but five Republicans voting for it.

In the short term, these cuts will make health care less accessible to poor Mississippians by making the eligibility requirements for Medicaid insurance stiffer, likely increasing people’s medical debt.

In the long run, the cuts could lead to worsening chronic health conditions such as diabetes and obesity for which Mississippi already leads the nation, and making private insurance more expensive for many people, experts say.

“We’ve got about a billion dollars that are potentially hanging in the balance over the next 10 years,” Mississippi Hospital Association President Richard Roberson said Wednesday during a panel discussion at his organization’s headquarters.

Richard Roberson, Mississippi Hospital Association president and CEO, discusses the impact of what the White House calls “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Wednesday, July 9, 2025, at the Mississippi Hospital Association Conference Center in Madison.

“If folks were being honest, the entire system depends on those rural hospitals,” he said.

Mississippi’s uninsured population could increase by 160,000 people as a combined result of the new law and the expiration of Biden-era enhanced subsidies that made marketplace insurance affordable – and which Trump is not expected to renew – according to KFF, a health policy research group.

That could make things even worse for those who are left on the marketplace plans.

“Younger, healthier people are going to leave the risk pool, and that’s going to mean it’s more expensive to insure the patients that remain,” said Lucy Dagneau, senior director of state and local campaigns at the American Cancer Society.

Among the biggest changes facing Medicaid-eligible patients are stiffer eligibility requirements, including proof of work. The new law requires able-bodied adults ages 19 to 64 to work, do community service or attend an educational program at least 80 hours a month to qualify for, or keep, Medicaid coverage and federal food aid.

Opponents say qualified recipients could be stripped of benefits if they lose a job or fail to complete paperwork attesting to their time commitment.

Georgia became the case study for work requirements with a program called Pathways to Coverage, which was touted as a conservative alternative to Medicaid expansion.

Ironically, the 54-year-old mechanic chosen by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to be the face of the program got so fed up with the work requirements he went from praising the program on television to saying “I’m done with it” after his benefits were allegedly cancelled twice due to red tape.

Roberson sent several letters to Mississippi’s congressional members in weeks leading up to the final vote on the sweeping federal legislation, sounding the alarm on what it would mean for hospitals and patients.

Among Roberson’s chief concerns is a change in the mechanism called state directed payments, which allows states to beef up Medicaid reimbursement rates – typically the lowest among insurance payors. The new law will reduce those enhanced rates to nearly as low as the Medicare rate, costing the state at least $500 million and putting rural hospitals in a bind, Roberson told Mississippi Today.

That change will happen over 10 years starting in 2028. That, in conjunction with the new law’s one-time payment program called the Rural Health Care Fund, means if the next few years look normal, it doesn’t mean Mississippi is safe, stakeholders warn.

“We’re going to have a sort of deceiving situation in Mississippi where we look a little flush with cash with the rural fund and the state directed payments in 2027 and 2028, and then all of a sudden our state directed payments start going down and that fund ends and then we’re going to start dipping,” said Leah Rupp Smith, vice president for policy and advocacy at the Mississippi Hospital Association.

Leah Rupp Smith, Mississippi Hospital Association general counsel and vice president for policy and advocacy, breaks down a timeline for what the White House calls “One Big Beautiful Bill,” during an event to discuss the impact of the law on health care in the state, Wednesday, July 9, 2025, at the Mississippi Hospital Association Conference Center in Madison.

Even with that buffer time, immediate changes are on the horizon for health care in Mississippi because of fear and uncertainty around ever-changing rules.

“Hospitals can’t budget when we have these one-off programs that start and stop and the rules change – and there’s a cost to administering a program like this,” Smith said.

Since hospitals are major employers – and they also provide a sense of safety for incoming businesses – their closure, especially in rural areas, affects not just patients but local economies and communities.

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson is the only Democrat in Mississippi’s congressional delegation. He voted against the bill, while the state’s two Republican senators and three Republican House members voted for it. Thompson said in a statement that the new law does not bode well for the Delta, one of the poorest regions in the U.S.

“For my district, this means closed hospitals, nursing homes, families struggling to afford groceries, and educational opportunities deferred,” Thompson said. “Republicans’ priorities are very simple: tax cuts for (the) wealthy and nothing for the people who make this country work.”

While still colloquially referred to as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the name was changed by Democrats invoking a maneuver that has been used by lawmakers in both chambers to oppose a bill on principle.

“Democrats are forcing Republicans to delete their farcical bill name,” Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer of New York said in a statement. “Nothing about this bill is beautiful — it’s a betrayal to American families and it’s undeserving of such a stupid name.”

The law is expected to add at least $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next 10 years, according to the most recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Hospitals see danger in Medicaid spending cuts appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This article reports on the negative impacts of a major federal tax and policy bill on Medicaid funding and rural hospitals in Mississippi. While it presents factual details and statements from stakeholders, the tone and framing emphasize the harmful consequences for vulnerable populations and health care access, aligning with concerns typically raised by center-left perspectives. The article highlights opposition by Democrats and critiques the bill’s priorities, particularly its effect on poor and rural communities, suggesting sympathy toward social safety net preservation. However, it maintains mostly factual reporting without overt partisan language, resulting in a moderate center-left bias.