Petitions of the week
on Jan 25, 2025
at 8:34 am
The Petitions of the Week column highlights a number of the cert petitions lately filed within the Supreme Courtroom. A listing of all petitions we’re watching is obtainable right here.
In 1974, the Supreme Courtroom dominated that the Structure usually permits states to strip individuals convicted of felonies of their proper to vote. Widespread on the time, that follow has since fallen out of favor in lots of states, though a minority nonetheless disenfranchise individuals who commit severe, non-election-related crimes. This week, we spotlight petitions asking the court docket to contemplate, amongst different issues, whether or not a provision of Mississippi’s structure that completely bars anybody convicted of a laundry record of nonviolent felonies from voting violates the federal Structure.
Felony disenfranchisement has an extended, and infrequently racist, historical past. Part 241 of Mississippi’s structure is not any exception. The availability, which completely bars anybody convicted of a listed felony from voting, was amended in 1890 to take away crimes extra typically dedicated by white residents and add these extra generally dedicated by Black residents. Supporters of the modification acknowledged overtly that their objective was to maintain Black males away from the poll field.
Two years in the past, the court docket rejected an earlier problem to the availability. A bunch of Black state residents who had completely misplaced their proper to vote after being convicted of felonies listed within the provision argued that the 1890 modification’s intent to discriminate towards Black individuals, coupled with the availability’s continued emphasis at this time on crimes that disproportionately disenfranchise Black Mississippi residents, violated the 14th Modification’s assure of equal safety, which prohibits the federal government from treating individuals in another way with out a good cause.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in an opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, criticized the court docket for refusing to take up the case the day after it struck down affirmative motion in increased training.
In the meantime, a second group of Black Mississippi residents who completely misplaced their proper to vote introduced one other problem to the availability. Along with claiming that it violates the 14th Modification, in addition they argued that completely stripping individuals of their proper to vote violates the Eighth Modification’s bar on merciless and weird punishment.
A federal district court docket in Mississippi rejected the problem. However a three-judge panel of the U.S. Courtroom of Appeals for the fifth Circuit reversed that call, partly. Though it too rebuffed the 14th Modification declare, the court docket of appeals agreed that the availability violates the Eighth Modification, concluding it each disproportionately harms Black residents and defies society’s “evolving requirements of decency.”
The complete fifth Circuit, nevertheless, overruled that call. The Supreme Courtroom’s 1974 opinion green-lighting felony disenfranchisement had dominated that the textual content of the 14th Modification — which strips congressional seats from states the place the proper to vote is “denied … aside from participation in revolt, or different crime” — usually permits states to bar individuals convicted of crimes from voting. It could make little sense, the fifth Circuit concluded, for the 14th Modification to allow felony disenfranchisement just for the Eighth Modification to ban it. However in any occasion, the court docket of appeals dominated that Mississippi’s everlasting voting ban doesn’t meet the excessive threshold to violate the latter.
In Hopkins v. Watson, the challengers ask the justices to grant assessment and reverse the total fifth Circuit’s ruling. They argue that the textual content of the 14th Modification doesn’t allow states, like Mississippi, to completely bar individuals convicted of felonies from the poll field: It applies to states the place voting is “denied … or in any means abridged, aside from participation in revolt, or different crime,” they emphasize, and “abridged” means solely a short lived loss. The challengers subsequently ask the justices to “revisit” the court docket’s 1974 ruling, and make clear that everlasting felony disenfranchisement is just not solely inconsistent with the 14th Modification, however quantities to merciless and weird punishment proscribed by the Eighth Modification.
A listing of this week’s featured petitions is under:
United States Postal Service v. Konan
24-351
Difficulty: Whether or not a plaintiff’s declare that she and her tenants didn’t obtain mail as a result of U.S. Postal Service workers deliberately didn’t ship it to a delegated handle arises out of “the loss” or “miscarriage” of letters or postal matter beneath the Federal Tort Claims Act.
Hittle v. Metropolis of Stockton, California
24-427
Points: (1) Whether or not this court docket ought to overrule McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Inexperienced; and (2) whether or not step three of the McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting framework requires a plaintiff to disprove the employer’s proffered cause for the hostile employment motion, when the textual content of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Bostock v. Clayton County present that an motion might have multiple but-for trigger or motivating issue.
Berk v. Choy
24-440
Difficulty: Whether or not a state legislation offering {that a} grievance have to be dismissed until it’s accompanied by an professional affidavit could also be utilized in federal court docket.
Peterson v. Doe
24-449
Difficulty: Whether or not Arizona’s Save Girls’s Sports activities Act, which preserves the normal follow of excluding organic males from ladies’ and girls’s sports activities groups and competitions, violates the equal safety clause of the 14th Modification.
Konan v. United States Postal Service
24-495
Points: (1) Whether or not federal workers will be liable beneath the Ku Klux Klan Act; and (2) whether or not or beneath what circumstances the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine — which holds that workers of the identical entity can’t be answerable for conspiracy — applies to the act.
Hopkins v. Watson
24-560
Points: (1) Whether or not Part 241 of the Mississippi Structure’s lifetime disenfranchisement of people who’ve accomplished their sentences for previous felony convictions violates the Eighth Modification’s prohibition on merciless and weird punishment; and (2) whether or not Part 2 of the 14th Modification to the U.S. Structure’s “affirmative sanction” for and protected harbor from strict scrutiny assessment applies solely to legal guidelines that briefly abridge the proper to vote primarily based on “participation in revolt, or different crime,” and to not legal guidelines like Part 241 that completely deny the proper to vote to people who’ve accomplished their sentences for previous felony convictions.
