Mississippi

Attorneys want the US Supreme Court to say Mississippi's felony voting ban is cruel and unusual

Published

1 year ago

November 21, 2024

Attorneys want the US Supreme Court to say Mississippi's felony voting ban is cruel and unusual

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court should overturn 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, attorneys say in new court papers.

Most of the people affected are disenfranchised for life because the state provides few options for restoring ballot access.

“Mississippi’s harsh and unforgiving felony disenfranchisement scheme is a national outlier,” attorneys representing some who lost voting rights said in an appeal filed Wednesday. They wrote that states “have consistently moved away from lifetime felony disenfranchisement over the past few decades.”

This case is the second in recent years — and the third since the late 19th century — that asks the Supreme Court to overturn Mississippi’s disenfranchisement for some felonies. The cases use different legal arguments, and the court rejected the most recent attempt in 2023.

The new appeal asks justices to reverse a July ruling from the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said Mississippi legislators, not the courts, must decide whether to change the laws.

Stripping away voting rights for some crimes is unconstitutional because it is cruel and unusual punishment, the appeal argues. A majority of justices rejected arguments over cruel and unusual punishment in June when they cleared the way for cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outside in public places.

Attorneys who sued Mississippi over voting rights say the authors of the state’s 1890 constitution based disenfranchisement on a list of crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit. A majority of the appeals judges wrote that the Supreme Court in 1974 reaffirmed constitutional law allowing states to disenfranchise felons.

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.

The other recent case that went to the Supreme Court argued that authors of Mississippi’s constitution showed racist intent when they chose which felonies would cause people to lose the right to vote.

In that ruling, justices declined to reconsider a 2022 appeals court decision that said Mississippi remedied the discriminatory intent of the original provisions in the state constitution by later altering the list of disenfranchising crimes.

In 1950, Mississippi dropped burglary from the list. Murder and rape were added in 1968. The Mississippi attorney general issued an opinion in 2009 that expanded the list to 22 crimes, including timber larceny, carjacking, felony-level shoplifting and felony-level writing bad checks.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a 2023 dissent that Mississippi’s list of disenfranchising crimes was “adopted for an illicit discriminatory purpose.”

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Mississippi

Mississippi barn where Emmett Till was killed to open as memorial site

Published

14 hours ago

November 27, 2025

Press Room

Mississippi barn where Emmett Till was killed to open as memorial site

The Mississippi Delta barn where 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally beaten and killed will be open to the public as a “sacred” memorial site by 2030, the Emmett Till Interpretive Center announced.

The barn, located in a rural area outside the city of Drew, was purchased Nov. 18. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center announced the purchase Sunday, Nov. 23 — the birthday of Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.

The acquisition was aided by a $1.5 million donation from television producer and writer Shonda Rhimes.

The center will reportedly have the barn under 24-hour surveillance, and the property will be equipped with floodlights and security cameras for precautionary measures.

The center plans to open the barn as a memorial by the 75th anniversary of Till’s lynching.

“(The barn) will be preserved not merely as a structure, but as sacred ground — a place where truth can live without fear of being forgotten,” the center wrote in news release. “We did not save this place to dwell in grief. We saved it so that truth could keep shaping us.”

What happened to Emmett Till

Till was 14 when he traveled from his hometown of Chicago to Mississippi to visit relatives in 1955. Till was accused of flirting or whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working at a grocery store in rural Mississippi. In the overnight hours of Aug. 28, 1955, Till was taken from his uncle’s home at gunpoint and beaten by two vengeful white men, one of whom was the husband of Bryant.

Three days later, a fisherman on the Tallahatchie River discovered the teenager’s bloated and disfigured corpse. Till’s mother, Mamie, demanded that her son’s mutilated remains be taken back to Chicago for a public, open casket funeral that was attended by tens of thousands of people.

Graphic images taken of Till’s remains, sanctioned by his mother, were published by Jet magazine. Since then, Till’s name has become synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement and how the United States has dealt with race relations.

Till’s mother was a civil rights activist in the aftermath of her son’s death and died in 2003.

“To walk through the barn’s doors, one might think of Emmett’s voice calling for his mother in the dark — and of Mamie, hundreds of miles away in Chicago, transforming that cry into a call the world could hear. Her decision to open her son’s casket was not an act of despair but of fierce faith — faith that seeing would lead to understanding, and understanding to change,” the center said.

“That faith still calls to us. The barn carries her same charge: to help the world see.”

Pam Dankins is the breaking news reporter for the Clarion Ledger. Have a tip? Email her at pdankins@gannett.com.

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Mississippi

Ole Miss Football vs. Mississippi State Betting Lines Shift Amid Lane Kiffin Buzz

Published

2 days ago

November 25, 2025

Press Room

Ole Miss Football vs. Mississippi State Betting Lines Shift Amid Lane Kiffin Buzz

Ole Miss Rebels Football: Trinidad Chambliss. — Courtesy of Ole Miss Rebels Football.

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Mississippi

Mississippi High School Football 2025 Playoff Brackets, Schedule (MHSAA) – November 24, 2025

Published

3 days ago

November 24, 2025

Press Room

The 2025 1A-4A Mississippi high school football playoffs began on Friday, November 7. The semi-finals will be on Friday, November 28.

High School On SI has brackets for every classification in the Mississippi high school football playoffs.

The MHSAA playoffs culminate with the state championships December 4-6 at Mississippi State’s Davis Wade Stadium in Starkville.