Lawyers successfully argued that a Jim Crow-era law banning felons from voting is cruel and unusual punishment

• Mississippi lawyers successfully argued against a lifetime voting ban for felons.
• The lawyers relied on the Eighth Amendment to make their case.
• They took a different approach than previous challenges to the same law.

Mississippi lawmakers in 1890 drafted a new state constitution designed to strip Black Americans of their voting rights by implementing a poll tax and literacy tests. These Jim Crow-era laws included a lifetime voting ban on any Mississippi resident convicted of certain felonies.

That lifetime ban is still in effect in the state today, more than 130 years later.