Mississippi is home to one of the strictest felon disenfranchisement schemes in the nation. The Mississippi Constitution permanently disenfranchises citizens upon a single felony conviction for certain crimes, including minor offenses like writing a bad check. As a result, the loss of rights under Mississippi’s scheme is mandatory, permanent, and effectively irrevocable. In Hopkins, plaintiffs, a class of formerly incarcerated individuals who lost their right to vote despite completing their sentences, argued that their disenfranchisement violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor and struck down Mississippi’s disenfranchisement scheme as cruel and unusual punishment. But the Fifth Circuit decided to rehear the case en banc, a rare occurrence in which a case is reconsidered by the entire panel of the circuit’s active judges.

Whether Mississippi’s 1890 felony disenfranchisement law, adopted for the express purpose of disenfranchising Black voters, violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal. Protection Clause.

Whether the Eighth Amendment requires a judge or jury to make a finding that a juvenile is “permanently incorrigible” before imposing a sentence of life without parole.

Horn Lake officials unlawfully denied zoning approval for a proposed mosque due to anti-Muslim bias, according to a federal lawsuit filed in November 2021 by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Mississippi, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP. Just before holding a vote on the mosque’s site plan, one Horn Lake Alderman ominously warned, “if you let them build it, they will come” and encouraged his fellow board members to “stop it before it gets here.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Mississippi, and Mississippi Center for Justice filed a lawsuit on August 11, 2020, seeking to ensure that absentee voting is more accessible to Mississippians during the COVID-19 pandemic.