by Mark Sherman, Associated Press

The 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.

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 who brought the case to the court argued that the state is an outlier and its bar on voting is a vestige of segregation.

Authors of the state’s 1890 constitution based disenfranchisement on a list of crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit, the lawyers argued. But the state responded that the Supreme Court has previously made clear that states may refuse to deny the right to vote to people convicted of felonies.

About 38% of Mississippi residents are Black. Nearly 50,000 people were disenfranchised under the state’s felony voting ban between 1994 and 2017. More than 29,000 of them have completed their sentences, and about 58% of that group are Black, according to an expert who analyzed data for plaintiffs challenging the voting ban.

To regain voting rights in Mississippi, a person convicted of a disenfranchising crime must receive a governor’s pardon or win permission from two-thirds of the state House and Senate. In recent years, legislators have restored voting rights for only a few people.

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

Jan. 27, 1847

More than 100 citizens of Marshall, Michigan, helped Adam Crosswhite, his wife, Sarah, and their children, who had escaped slavery, to flee to Canada rather than be captured by bounty hunters. 

Three years earlier, Crosswhite and his family had fled a Kentucky plantation after learning one of his four children was going to be sold. They traveled on the Underground Railroad through Indiana and Illinois before winding up in Michigan. 

At 4 a.m., bounty hunters broke into the home of Crosswhite and his family, telling them they were being taken back to Kentucky. Before that could happen, hordes of citizens intervened. When the bounty hunters offered to take the children only, the couple refused. The sheriff’s office then arrived and arrested the bounty hunters for trespassing, enabling the Crosswhite family to escape to Canada. 

Later, the slaveholder sued seven Black and white Marshall citizens who intervened and won $1,926, which with court costs totalled nearly $6,000 (more than $211,000 today). 

Citizens of the town rallied, raised the money and adopted a resolution that said, “We will never voluntarily separate ourselves from the slave population in the country, for they are our fathers and mothers, and sisters and our brothers, their interest is our interest, their wrongs and their sufferings are ours, the injuries inflicted on them are alike inflicted on us; therefore it is our duty to aid and assist them in their attempts to regain their liberty.” 

An abolitionist journal at the time, The Signal of Liberty, wrote, “If the slaveholder has the right to seize a fugitive from slavery in a free State, let him appeal to the proper tribunals to maintain that right, instead of midnight seizure, backed by a display of bowie knives and seven shooters.”

After the Civil War ended, Crosswhite and his family returned to Marshall. A monument now marks the place where they made their courageous stand.

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

House Education Chairman Rob Roberson, a Republican from Starkville, outlines for Mississippi Today’s Geoff Pender and Michael Goldberg some of the top issues his committee will tackle this legislative session.

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