Mississippi Today

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

Published

1 year 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“At a time when most states have repealed their disfranchisement laws, we need to remove from Mississippi’s Constitution this backward provision that was enacted for racist reasons,” said Vangela M.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 “Here in the 21st Century, just and reasonable minded people must not allow this outdated relic of the 19th Century to stand or define a new Mississippi.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

Jearld Baylis, dead at 62, was a nightmare for USM opponents

Published

11 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Rick Cleveland – 2025-01-09 14:19:00

Jearld Baylis was a tackling machine at Southern Miss. He died recently at age 62. (Southern Miss Athletics)

They called him The Space Ghost. Jearld Baylis — Jearld, not Jerald or Gerald — was the best defensive football player I ever saw at Southern Miss, and I’ve seen them all since the early 1960s.

Baylis, who died recently at the age of 62, played nose tackle with the emphasis on “tackle.” He made about a jillion tackles, many behind the scrimmage line, in his four years (1980-83) as a starter at USM after three years as a starter and star at Jackson Callaway.

When Southern Miss ended Bear Bryant’s 59-game home winning streak at Alabama in 1982, Baylis led the defensive charge with 18 tackles. The remarkable Reggie Collier, the quarterback, got most of the headlines during those golden years of USM football, but Baylis was every bit as important to the Golden Eagles’ success.

The truth is, despite the lavish praise of opposing coaches such as Bryant at Alabama, Bobby Bowden at Florida State, Pat Dye at Auburn and Emory Bellard at Mississippi State, Baylis never got the credit he deserved.

There are so many stories. Here’s one from the late, great Kent Hull, the Mississippi State center who became one of the best NFL players at his position and helped the Buffalo Bills to four Super Bowls:

It was at one of those Super Bowls — the 1992 game in Minneapolis — when Hull and I talked about his three head-to-head battles with Baylis when they were both in college. Hull, you should know, was always brutally honest, which endeared him to sports writers and sportscasters everywhere.

Hull said Baylis was the best he ever went against. “Block him?” Hull said rhetorically at one point. “Hell, most times I couldn’t touch him. He was just so quick. You had to double-team him, and sometimes that didn’t work either.”

John Bond was the quarterback of those fantastic Mississippi State teams who won so many games but could never beat Southern Miss. He remembers Jearld Baylis the way most of us remember our worst nightmares.

“He was a stud,” Bond said upon learning of Baylis’s death. “He was their best dude on that side of the ball, a relentless badass.”

In many ways Baylis was a football unicorn. Most nose tackles are monsters, whose job it is to occupy the center and guards and keep them from blocking the linebackers. Not Baylis. He was undersized, 6-feet tall and 230 pounds tops, and he didn’t just clear the way for linebackers. He did it himself.

“Jearld was just so fast, so quick, so strong,” said Steve Carmody, USM’s center back then and a Jackson lawyer now. Carmody, son of then-USM head coach Jim Carmody, went against Baylis most days in practice and says he never faced a better player on game day.

“Jearld could run with the halfbacks and wide receivers. I don’t know what his 40-time was but he was really, really fast. His first step was as quick as anybody at any position,” Steve Carmody said.

No, Carmody said, he has no idea where Baylis got his nickname, The Space Ghost, but he said, “It could have been because trying to block him was like trying to block a ghost. Poof! He was gone, already past you.”

Reggie Collier, who now works as a banker in Hattiesburg, was a year ahead of Baylis at USM.

Jearld Baylis was often past the blocker before he was touched as was the case with the BC Lions in Canada.

“Jearld was the first of those really big name players that everybody wanted that came to Southern,” Collier said. “He wasn’t a project or a diamond in the rough like I was. He was the man. He was the best high school player in the state when we signed him. Everybody knew who he was when he got here, the No. 1 recruit in Mississippi.”

Collier remembers an early season practice when he was a sophomore and Baylis had just arrived on campus. “We’re scrimmaging, and I am running the option going to my right just turning up the field,” Collier said. “Then, somebody latches onto me from behind, and I am thinking who the hell is that. People didn’t usually get me from behind. Of course, it was Jearld. From day one, he was special.

“I tell people this all the time. We won a whole lot of games back then, beat a lot of really great teams that nobody but us thought we could beat. I always get a lot of credit for that, but Gearld deserves as much credit as anyone. He was as important as anyone. He was the anchor of that defense and, man, we played great defense.”

Because of his size, NFL teams passed on Baylis. He played first in the USFL, then went to Canada and became one of the great defensive players in the history of the Canadian Football League. He was All-Canadian Football League four times, the defensive player of the year on a championship team once.

For whatever reason, Baylis rarely returned to Mississippi, living in Canada, in Baltimore, in Washington state and Oregon in his later years. Details of his death are sketchy, but he had suffered from bouts with pneumonia preceding his death.

Said Don Horn, his teammate at both Callaway and Southern Miss, “Unfortunately, I had lost touch with Jearld, but I’ll never forget him. I promise you this, those of us who played with him — or against him — will never forget Jearld Baylis.”

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

Mississippi Today

Data center company plans to invest $10 billion in Meridian

Published

14 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Michael Goldberg – 2025-01-09 10:33:00

A Dallas-based data center developer will locate its next campus in Meridian, a $10 billion investment in the area, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Thursday.

The company, Compass Datacenters, will build eight data centers in the Meridian area over eight years, Reeves said. The governor said the data centers would support local businesses and jobs in a fast-growing industry that Mississippi has tried to attract.

“Through our pro-business policies and favorable business environment, we continue to establish our state as an ideal location for high-tech developments by providing the resources needed for innovation and growth,” Reeves said.

The Mississippi Development Authority will certify the company as a data center operator, allowing the company to benefit from several tax exemptions. Compass Datacenters will receive a 10-year state income and franchise tax exemption and a sales and use tax exemption on construction materials and other equipment.

In 2024, Amazon Web Services’ committed to spend $10 billion to construct two data centers in Madison County. Lawmakers agreed to put up $44 million in taxpayer dollars for the project, make a loan of $215 million, and provide numerous tax breaks.

Mississippi Power will supply approximately 500 megawatts of power to the Meridian facility, Reeves said. Data centers house computer servers that power numerous digital services, including online shopping, entertainment streaming and file storage.

Republican Sen. Jeff Tate, who represents Lauderdale County, said the investment was a long time coming for the east Mississippi city of Meridian.

“For far too long, Meridian has been the bride’s maid when it came to economic development,” Tate said. “I’m proud that our political, business, and community leaders were able to work together to help welcome this incredible investment.”

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

Mississippi Today

On this day in 1967

Published

18 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2025-01-09 07:00:00

Jan. 9, 1967

Julian Bond with John Lewis, congressman from Georgia, at the Civil Rights Summit at the LBJ Presidential Library in 2014. Credit: Photo by Lauren Gerson/Wikipedia

Civil rights leader Julian Bond was finally seated in the Georgia House.

He had helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while a student at Morehouse College along with future Congressman John Lewis. The pair helped institute nonviolence as a deep principle throughout all of the SNCC protests and actions.

Following Bond’s election in 1965, the Georgia House refused to seat him after he had criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House was required to seat him.

“The truth may hurt,” he said, “but it’s the truth.”

He went on to serve two decades in the Georgia Legislature and even hosted “Saturday Night Live.” In 1971, he became president of the just-formed Southern Poverty Law Center and later served a dozen years as chairman of the national NAACP.

“The civil rights movement didn’t begin in Montgomery, and it didn’t end in the 1960s,” he said. “It continues on to this very minute.”

Over two decades at the University of Virginia, he taught more than 5,000 students and led alumni on civil rights journeys to the South. In 2015, he died from complications of vascular disease.

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