Supreme Court won’t hear challenge to Jim Crow-era Mississippi bans blocking some felons from voting

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court says it will not stop Mississippi from removing voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies — a practice that originated in the Jim Crow era with the intent of stopping Black men from influencing elections. A majority of justices on Friday declined to reconsider a 2022 decision by a conservative appeals court. That ruling said Mississippi had remedied the discriminatory intent of the original provisions in the state constitution by altering the list of disenfranchising crimes. In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to Mississippi’s felony disenfranchisement provisions 125 years ago, and “this Court blinks again today.”