Dennis Hopkins, et al. v. Michael Watson, Mississippi Secretary of State

Mississippi’s harsh and unforg iv ing felony disenfranchisement scheme is a national outlier. Section 241 of the Mississippi Constitution punishes citizens convicted of a wide range of felonies by forever depriving them of the right to vote even after sentence completion, no matter how minor the underlying crime, the age of the citizen at the time of the offense, or the amount of time that has passed since the conviction. A national consensus has formed against this unconscionable form of punishment. Today, Mississippi is one of only two states that continues to punish first-time offenders who commit non-violent and non-voting-related felonies with lifetime disenfranchisement. The first question presented is: Does Section 241’s lifetime disenfranchisement of individuals who have completed their sentences for past felony convictions violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments”?

In Richardson v. Ramirez, this Court held that lifetime felony disenfranchisement laws are exempt from strict scrutiny review under the Equal Protection Clause because Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides an “affirmative sanction” for such laws. 418 U.S. 24, 54 (1974). Section 2 provides that a State’s representatives in Congress are reduced when the right to vote “is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” Under the last antecedent rule, the phrase “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime” in Section 2