AP:

Mississippi legislators, not the courts, must decide whether to change the state’s practice of stripping voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, including nonviolent crimes such as forgery and timber theft, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The state’s original list of disenfranchising crimes springs from the Jim Crow era, and attorneys who sued to challenge the list say authors of the Mississippi Constitution removed voting rights for crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit.

A majority of judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Supreme Court in 1974 reaffirmed constitutional law allowing states to disenfranchise felons….

In the ruling Thursday, dissenting judges wrote that the majority stretched the previous Supreme Court ruling “beyond all recognition.” The dissenting judges wrote that Mississippi’s practice of disenfranchising people who have completed their sentences is cruel and unusual.

You can find the opinion in Hopkins v. Watson here. Citing Richardson v. Ramirez, the majority advises plaintiffs to “[d]o the hard work of persuading your fellow citizens that the law should change” and go to the Mississippi legislature with their complaints.

Good luck on that.