Dennis Hopkins is, by his own admission, a towing business owner, a registered foster parent, a children’s football coach, a former fire chief — and a branded man.
That’s what he told state legislators at a hearing Friday morning concerning the history and impact of Mississippi’s lifetime voting ban for people convicted of felonies. Hopkins, who was convicted of grand larceny in 1998 and completed a prison term in 2001, still cannot vote due to that conviction.
“I am concerned that my children are growing up without a strong sense of civic duty because their father has to sit out every single election,” Hopkins, who was accompanied by his wife and six of his nine children, said.
The hearing spotlighted two lawsuits currently pending in federal court filed by the Mississippi Center for Justice and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Both suits challenge how the state disqualifies people from voting following a felony conviction; Hopkins is a lead plaintiff in the SPLC class action suit.
Held by the Senate Judiciary B committee, the hearing opened up a conversation about whether Mississippi may to restore voting rights to thousands of its citizens through a legislative solution, as opposed to responding to litigation. Only a pardon by the governor or an act by the legislature can restore a person’s right to vote.
Mississippi is only one of four states, alongside Florida, Kentucky and Iowa, that permanently bans people with felony convictions from voting. National attention is currently turned to the state of Florida, where a referendum this November could restore voting rights to people who have completed sentences for felony convictions, re-enfranchising some 1.5 million Floridians.
Three other witnesses — Roy Harness, Herman Parker and Wayne Kuhn — each spoke to having completed prison and probation sentences and having lived productive lives in the decades thereafter, only to be relegated to a kind of second-class citizenship. Their voices, as SPLC managing attorney Jody Owens noted, depicted the legacy of the ban across the lives of black and white Mississippians alike.
Robert Luckett, a historian and director of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, connected the ban to the state’s 1890 constitutional convention, which “undermined black power through disenfranchisement,” he said.
Accompanying measures like poll taxes, residency requirements and literacy exams, the set of crimes which disqualified people to vote — including perjury, forgery, arson and burglary — were established at that point because those crime were seen as “specifically black crimes,” Luckett added.
But that same constitution also gives state legislators the power to re-enfranchise people by a two-thirds vote, witnesses pointed out.
Judiciary B chairman Hob Bryan wondered as to whether such a move may be overturned in a later legislative session, and whether the constitution itself could be amended.
Opponents of the state’s voting restrictions often highlight the extent to which even seemingly minor crimes — such as writing a bad check for as little as $100 — can lead to losing the right to vote.
A Mississippi Today analysis earlier this year found that between 1994 and 2017, over 56,000 Mississippians lost the right to vote due to felony convictions. Sixty-one percent of those banned from voting are African-American, though African Americans make up only 36 percent of the state’s voting-age population.
Racial disparity conspicuous among Mississippians banned from voting
Bryan said the committee found the issue “clearly worth pursuing,” asking witnesses to provide further information on both the legal feasibility of the state legislature restoring voting rights, and statistics on how the majority of other states handle the voting rights of people with criminal convictions.
Last legislative session, a bill to form a study committee on voter disenfranchisement passed the state House but died in the Senate.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.