Attorneys from the Southern Poverty Law Center [advocacy website] and New York City-based firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP [firm website] filed a federal lawsuit [complaint, pdf] Tuesday arguing that Mississippi’s disenfranchisement laws for people convicted of particular felonies, and the extensive process for restoring voting rights, is unconstitutional.

The suit alleges the Mississippi’s lifetime voting ban for certain crimes was a disenfranchisement scheme carefully created to disproportionately disenfranchise black voters, and that the law violates the Eighth Amendment [text] prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment as well as Section 2 of the said [press release]

Mississippi’s disenfranchisement statute is an extension of slavery and suppression of human rights[.] Our clients are citizens who made a mistake, paid their debt to society long ago, and now live and work alongside us, pay taxes, worship with us, fight in our wars, send their children to school with ours, and are equal members of our society in every way save one – they have no say in our representation in Mississippi and in Washington.

SPLC contends that Mississippi is one of only four states to impose lifelong voting bans on its citizens for convictions of all disenfranchising offenses. Banned voters in Mississippi, the lawsuit argues, are also more likely to be African-American.

“The right to vote is the cornerstone of citizenship in a democratic society. This lawsuit challenges the arcane criminal disenfranchisement scheme crafted more than 125 years ago by delegates to the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention. The scheme, created in the wake of Reconstruction, was harsh punitive, and unforgiving,” the suit contends.