On Thursday, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld, on a 13-6 vote, the constitutionality of a provision in Mississippi’s Constitution that bars those convicted of certain felonies from voting for life, writes Chris Geidner in his blog, Law Dork. The ruling rejected a holding by a three-judge panel last year, that the ban violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments. On the contrary, wrote Judge Edith Jones, “[F]elon disenfranchisement is not a punishment, much less cruel or unusual.”
Judge James Dennis, a Clinton appointee, penned the dissent to Thursday’s ruling on behalf of 6 members of the court. “Voting is the lifeblood of our democracy and the deprivation of the right to vote saps citizens of the ability to have a say in how and by whom they are governed,” he wrote. “Permanent denial of the franchise, then, is an exceptionally severe penalty, constituting nothing short of the denial of the democratic core of American citizenship.” Mississippi is one of 15 states with some sort of lifetime ban — although four of those states only have permanent bans for election-related offenses. In Mississippi, convictions for “murder, rape, bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy” all lead to lifetime disenfranchisement under Section 241 of the state’s Constitution.
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