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The U.S. Supreme Court, more than six months after receiving the case, ruled on Friday it will not hear a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a Mississippi provision that places a lifetime voting ban on many people with felony convictions.

The nine-member court had set the Mississippi case for conference, where the justices decide whether to hear a case, 17 times this year. But each time the justices had postponed rendering a decision on whether it would consider the constitutionality of Mississippi’s lifetime felony voting ban, the only one like it in the nation.

The Supreme Court on Friday denied the petition for a writ of certiorari by a vote of 7-2, ending the chances they would take up the appeal.

The case is an appeal of a decision last year by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding the provision imposing a lifetime ban on voting for many people convicted of felonies. The lifetime ban was imposed on certain crimes that the framers of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution believed at the time Black people were more likely to commit, the 5th Circuit conceded in upholding the provision.

The Mississippi Center for Justice and others filed the lawsuit currently pending before the Supreme Court on behalf of Mississippians who lost their voting rights after being convicted of felonies.

Mississippi is among a handful of states — fewer than 10 — where people do not regain their voting rights at some point after completing their sentence. Mississippi is the only state where people who lose the right to vote must garner a two-thirds vote of each chamber of the Legislature to regain their suffrage. The Legislature has been reluctant to restore voting rights. No voting rights were restored during the 2023 legislative session. Governors also can restore voting rights, but also have been reluctant to do so on a large scale.

In a dissenting opinion issued on Friday, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that “constitutional wrongs do not right themselves.”

“With its failure to take action, the Court has missed yet another opportunity to learn from its mistakes,” Jackson wrote. “… the majority’s decision not to take up this matter is doubly unfortunate. We were asked to address this problem 125 years ago in Williams, and declined to do so. And this Court blinks again today … Mississippians can only hope that they will not have to wait another century for a judicial knight-errant.”

Those challenging the lawsuit say the 1890 provision is unconstitutional because it was enacted for a discriminatory purpose, thus having a “racial taint.” State Attorney General Lynn Fitch argued the “racial taint” had been removed because of action in more recent times, and a majority of the 5th Circuit agreed.

In 1950 the Legislature passed a proposal that was approved by voters to remove burglary as one of the disfranchising crimes. And in the 1960s, the Legislature and ultimately the voters approved a provision making murder and rape disenfranchising crimes.

Those changes, the 5th Circuit majority found, removed the “racial taint” from the original 1890 language. But Rob McDuff, an attorney with the Center for Justice, pointed out that those changes were made during an era of intense racial conflict and discrimination in the state. Perhaps more importantly, the changes did not allow Mississippians to vote on whether to remove lifetime bans from voting on people convicted of other felonies.

Or as Court of Appeals Judge James Graves wrote in his dissent, “Mississippians have simply not been given the chance to right the wrongs of its racist origins. And this court … deprives Mississippians of this opportunity by upholding an unconstitutional law enacted for the purpose of discriminating against Black Mississippians on the basis of race.”

Fitch’s office also argued that state commissions pondered changing the felony suffrage provision in the 1980s and opted not to do so, thus removing the racial taint.

Those crimes placed in the constitution where conviction costs a person the right to vote are bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, bigamy and burglary.

Under the original language of the constitution, a person could be convicted of cattle rustling and lose the right to vote, but those convicted of murder or rape would still be able to vote — even while incarcerated.

In a statement, McDuff of the Center for Justice said, ““We are extremely disappointed in the Supreme Court’s failure to review the case and eliminate this post-Reconstruction vestige of white supremacy from Mississippi’s constitution and Mississippi’s elections. Now that the federal courts have declined to step it, the Mississippi legislature must step up and launch the process of amending the state constitution to repeal it.”

 Former U.S. Solicitor General Don Verrilli joined the Center for Justice on the felony suffrage case. Other attorneys working with the Center for Justice on the case included former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Fred Banks and civil rights lawyers David Lipman and Armand Derfner.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 11:30 a.m. on June 30 to reflect breaking news that the Supreme Court issued an order refusing to hear the Mississippi case.

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U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves has dismissed a gun possession case against a man convicted of a felony, citing a Supreme Court precedent he criticized last year and ruling convicted felons have a Second Amendment right to own a weapon.

His ruling appears to take shots at the high court’s expansion of gun rights over the last couple of decades, and Reeves said he hopes the U.S. Supreme Court starts to apply such expansive interpretations to the rights to vote, to a speedy trial and others.

READ MORE: Judge Carlton Reeves’ full ruling

Jessie Bullock served about 15 years on a manslaughter conviction in Mississippi after killing someone in a bar fight in 1992. In 2018, he was indicted for possessing a firearm in his home.

When Reeves was assigned the case last year, he made national news with his criticism of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in a New York case that overturned some of that state’s restrictions on carrying guns. That Supreme Court decision held that because of the Second Amendment, any gun law must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Last year, Reeves criticized the high court, saying, “This court is not a trained historian. The Justices of the Supreme Court are not trained historians. And we are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791. Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”

Reeves in his Wednesday order of dismissal noted that “no historian has expressed an opinion regarding the history of felon disarmament” and that neither the government nor Bullock had submitted any historical evidence or reports.

“This court did not want to be guilty of itself cherry-picking the history,” Reeves wrote in the order, adding that he asked the parties if he should appoint a professional historian as an independent expert. He said both sides declined.

He said federal prosecutors cited 120 federal court decisions upholding band on felons owning firearms, but “the government conceded that none of these courts has appointed an expert to help the sift through the historical record.”

Reeves said that under the high court’s historical test, state bans on firearms possession might fare better because they would be based on the principles of federalism.

Reeves also wrote: “This Court then discovered that an overwhelming majority of historians reject the Supreme Court’s most fundamental Second Amendment holding — its 2008 conclusion that the Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms, rather than a collective, Militia-based right.”

Reeves said: “In breathing new life into the Second Amendment, though, the Court has unintentionally revealed how it has suffocated other fundamental Constitutional rights,” Reeves wrote. “Americans are waiting for Heller and Bruen’s reasoning to reach the rest of the Constitution.”

The post Judge Reeves rules man convicted of felony has right to firearm, criticizes U.S. Supreme Court appeared first on Mississippi Today.

JUNE 29, 1941

Stokely Carmichael, also known as Kwame Ture, was born. Inspired by the sit-ins in the South, he joined the civil rights movement and became a Freedom Rider. Arrested in Jackson,

He became a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, replacing John Lewis, and popularized the term “black power.” The phrase became a movement, and he became known as “honorary prime minister” of the Black Panther Party. He died of prostate cancer in 1998.

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The mother of a man allegedly tortured and shot in the mouth by a Rankin County sheriff’s deputy earlier this year and another mother of a man beaten, tased and killed by deputies in 2021 said the recent firing of deputies accused of misconduct is not enough.

They want to see criminal charges. 

“It’s not enough to fire those deputies because all they will do is go on to another police department and do the same thing,” said Mary Jenkins, whose son Michael almost died when a deputy placed a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. 

“They treated our children as if they weren’t even human,” she said during a Wednesday press conference.  

Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey announced Tuesday that deputies accused of beating and torturing Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker have been fired. Bailey did not name the deputies or specify how many were let go, but did say some remedial measures have been put in place, such as the hiring of a compliance officer and review of the department’s policies and training. 

Malik Shabazz, an attorney representing the men, said it is now up to Attorney General Lynn Fitch to secure a criminal indictment for the deputies. 

The U.S. Department of Justice and FBI opened an investigation in February into the incident.

On Jan. 24, six deputies conducting a drug investigation raided the home of Jenkins and Parker and, over the course of 90 minutes, allegedly subjected them to torture in the form of waterboarding, attempted sexual assault and threats of death by having guns pointed at them. The men’s attorneys say the deputies entered the home without a warrant and that their clients have been wrongly charged.

Attorneys have said they were charged with possession of a controlled substance and possession of paraphernalia, but drugs weren’t found. Deputies also said Jenkins pointed a gun at a deputy, but a firewarm wasn’t recovered.

A $400 million lawsuit against the sheriff, county and department detailing the men’s experience named three of six deputies allegedly involved in the incident: Hunter Elward, Brett McAlpin and Christian Dedmon. 

Bailey didn’t specify how many deputies he fired. Attorneys for the men said the sheriff fired five deputies, but their clients have been clear that there were six. The attorneys asked who the remaining person is and why they have been allowed to keep their job. 

Jenkins and Parker appeared on camera during the press conference, but they did not comment because of the ongoing civil lawsuit. 

For Monica Lee, termination isn’t enough because deputies have not been held accountable for the death of her son, Damien Cameron,  two years ago, nor has the family received sufficient answers from the sheriff’s office. 

On July 26, 2021, deputies responded to a vandalism call reported by a neighbor who accused Cameron of the damage, according to an incident report obtained by Insider. Elward was one of the deputies at the scene who punched, tased and chased Cameron. 

Lee believes that if the sheriff had taken action against the deputies involved in her son’s death, maybe what happened to Jenkins and Parker could have been prevented. 

“Had (the sheriff) got rid of them when he killed my son, it would have never happened to Michael,” Lee said Wednesday while seated next to Mary Jenkins. 

The post Firing Rankin deputies accused of brutality not enough, mom says: They need to be charged appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Labor Secretary Marty Walsh vowed a year ago to fight the racist wage and hiring practices alleged by Black farm workers regarding workplace abuse and exploitation in the Delta. 

That promise resulted in a Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division investigation called Operation Delta Force, which released findings Wednesday into those allegations of wage theft and illegal displacement of local workers in favor of white workers from South Africa, a practice detailed by Mississippi Today. 

Forty-four employers were found to have violated federal labor laws and were fined nearly $350,000 in civil penalties, according to the investigation. Additionally, about $505,000 in back wages has been recovered for 161 Delta workers. 

The Black farm workers “were elated that finally their voices were heard, that finally they were getting the wages and they could go to work and see that they were valued as an employee,” said Audrey Hall, the division’s district director in Jackson. 

Mississippi Today’s “Exploited” investigation found that at least five Delta farms paid their local workforce less than workers who came to Mississippi on foreign farm work permits called H-2A visas over the past few years. 

Most of the farms recruited young, white South African workers, which farm owners said is in response to an aging local workforce population and a shortage of people to take those jobs. 

The H-2A program mandates a premium hourly wage, which was $12.45 last year. Labor regulations order farms hiring the visa workers to offer jobs to local workers at that rate and not to pay current workers below it. 

The workers’ experiences were detailed in a lawsuit against two Delta farms that was filed in 2021 and settled earlier this year. 

The Wage and Hour Division took a look at the H-2A program and found employers violated requirements for multiple reasons, including when they showed preferential treatment, failed to pay the same rate of pay to local workers and failed to provide local workers bonus opportunities. 

Juan Coria, the division’s Southeast regional administrator based in Atlanta, said the purpose of the H-2A program was to bring people if help was needed – not to replace local workers. 

As a result of the investigation, some workers received raises that brought them up to the same rate that the H-2A workers are paid, Hall said, and more farms have come into compliance. 

She said that extra money means a lot to Delta workers living in one of the poorest areas of the state. They no longer have to make choices between whether to buy groceries, medicine or pay for housing, Hall said. 

The Wage and Hour Division plans to launch more investigations and increase outreach in the Delta. 

Hall said the division’s role is to help vulnerable workers through education about issues such as contracts and wages. The division has a toll-free help line at 866-4US-WAGE (487-9243.)

Coria said an immediate result of Operation Delta Force is that the division now has an investigator assigned to the Delta who is based in Greenwood. 

One of his goals is for these efforts to improve working conditions for future Black farm workers in the Delta and inform farms about their responsibilities in following federal labor laws. 

“This will have a positive impact,” Coria said.

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My grandmother, who grew up in Greenville, Tennessee, remembered when they strung power lines in her hometown. Electricity changed her world. The pandemic confirmed that the lack of high-speed internet is a serious disadvantage. That, thankfully, has found a solution.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Wired appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The board that governs the massive Public Employees Retirement System is working to develop recommendations for the Legislature to consider in 2024 in an effort to ensure the long-term financial viability of the pension plan.

PERS will provide or already is providing a pension to about 10% of the state’s population — people who worked or are working for local or state government entities.

For new hires, those legislative recommendations could include:

• No longer guaranteeing the annual 3% cost of living increase. Under a new system, the increase could be contingent on whether the system can afford to pay the cost of living increase any particular year and tied to the consumer price index, meaning it might be lower some years than the 3% increase.
• Creating a hybrid system where some of the benefits — a lower amount than under the current system — would be guaranteed while others would be provided through some type of investment portfolio.
• Lowering the amount of the benefits.

Such recommendations, which would have to be approved by the Legislature to be enacted, would not impact current employees. Instead, the changes would be for future employees. The Legislature would establish when the changes would go into effect for new hires.

Another recommendation could be a change to the payout method for the cost of living increase for both current and future employees.

Under the current system, many people take the annual 3% cost of living increase as one lump sum payment at the end of the year. PERS could recommend the increase be provided to retirees as part of their monthly retirement checks. Another option would be to make the “default” choice for retirees to receive the cost of living increase divvied up as part of their retirement checks. The employees would have to request specifically for the cost of living increase to be paid as a 13^th check instead of monthly.

Changing the payout method from a lump sum to monthly one for the annual 3% cost of living increases would not result in less money for retirees. But it would give more flexibility since the system would not be taxed with paying the entire total at one time at the end of the year.

“These are recommendations and still a work in progress,” Ray Higgins, PERS executive director, said during a recent interview with Mississippi Today. “PERS is such a great system. It is important we work together to find solutions for generations to come.”

During an at times contentious 2023 session between legislative leaders and PERS, Higgins committed to providing recommendations to lawmakers on steps they could take to improve the financial viability of the system.

The contentiousness surfaced because before the 2023 session began, the PERS governing board voted by a 7-3 margin in December 2022 to increase the rate paid by state agencies, school districts and local governments from 17.4% of employees’ paycheck to 22.4%. The decision caused consternation with legislators and local governmental entities because of the additional cost of the rate increase.

The decision to increase the amount paid by governmental entities to support the pension program rests solely with the board and not with the Legislature or any other entity. But in the 2023 session, House leaders introduced a bill to strip some of the authority of the board that oversees the Mississippi Public Employees Retirement System.

After that bill was introduced, the board through Higgins committed to postponing the increase in the employer contribution rate and to introduce a long-term PERS fix for the Legislature to consider.

The PERS Board is working on those recommendations now and Higgins said he believes they will be finalized later this year before the 2024 session begins in January.

The effect of those recommendations, though, would be “long term in nature” and “does not alleviate the need for the increase in the employee contribution rate.”

As it stands now, that increase from 17.4% to 22.4% of an employee’s retirement check paid by the governmental entity is set to go into effect July 2024. The board’s original plan was to enact the increase in October of this year, meaning local government entities would be hit with an additional major expense during the midst of an election year.

The action of the board to increase the rate by 5% will cost state and local governmental entities, including school districts and public colleges and universities, $345 million annually, including $265 million for state agencies and education entities.

Higgins said the PERS Board of Directors could opt to phase in the that increase instead of enacting it all in July 2024.

The system’s current funding ratio is about 61%, meaning it has the assets to pay the benefits of 61% of all the people in the system, ranging from the newest hires to those already retired. Of course, all of the people in the system will not retire at once. Theoretically, though, it is recommended that retirement systems have a funding ratio of 80% or more.

The system has $30 billion in assets and is underfunded by about $20 billion.

Most state, city and county employees and public educators are in the system that currently has about 325,000 members, including current employees, retirees and others who used to work in the public sector but no longer do.

Employees in the system pay 9% of their salary toward their retirement. It was increased from 7.25% in the late 2000s. The average yearly benefit from the plan is $26,258.

Part of the issue causing the system financial woes is a decline in the number of governmental workers.

A study by the Mississippi Legislative Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Committee pointed out that between 2010 and 2020, the ratio of active employees to retired employees decreased about 33%, from 2.02 active to 1 retiree, to 1.35 to 1.

“As a result of the decrease, the payroll of fewer active members must fund future pension obligations, a factor made more important because contributions from active members and their employers comprise approximately 46% of PERS revenues” as of 2020, the report pointed out.

The post PERS Board pondering changes to cost of living increases, other recommendations for Legislature appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame executive director Bill Blackwell joins us to talk about a huge month of July at the shrine, the Watermelon Classic, a big induction weekend, and since Bill is a baseball guy, the College World Series that was.

Stream all episodes here.

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