A court in Virginia ruled that current Virginia law banning felons from voting after they are released from jail violates Reconstruction laws. According to the Court House News service
RICHMOND, Va. (CN) — A federal judge ruled in favor of two disenfranchised Virginia voters Thursday, concluding the state’s broad felon disenfranchisement policy violates a 150-year-old federal statute.
“For well over a century, the Commonwealth of Virginia has disobeyed a federal law designed to protect the right of former enslaved people to vote,” U.S. District Judge John Gibney wrote. “Nearly one hundred and twenty-five years after Senator Glass pleaded to ’emancipate Virginia’ from Black voters, a class of would-be voters appears before this court asking for true emancipation at the commonwealth’s ballot boxes.”
Gibney, a Barack Obama appointee, granted an injunction barring Virginia from disenfranchising anyone whose convictions stem from felonies created after 1870, when Congress passed the Virginia Readmission Act.
Not long after passing the Reconstruction Era law, Virginia lawmakers widened the net of felons they could disenfranchise. Gibney ruled that the act trumps any subsequent constitutions the commonwealth adopted.
“If its amended constitution disenfranchises someone for any other reason, the commonwealth violates the act,” Gibney wrote. “Any other reading ignores ordinary meaning and contravenes statutory structure.”
The commonwealth, under the leadership of now-former Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares, argued that the act gives Virginia the authority to disenfranchise anyone who commits offenses punishable by death or by imprisonment in state prison, including newly created felonies.
Gibney said this reading of the act fails to account for context, including that the act followed the Military Readmission Act, which detailed the conditions that former Confederate states needed to satisfy before Congress would admit them through a Readmission Act.
“The MRA told Virginia not to disenfranchise anyone besides rebels and common-law felons,” Gibney wrote. “The Virginia Readmission Act confirmed that Virginia listened.”
The Readmission Act only allows southern states to disenfranchise as a punishment for participating in a rebellion or for committing what, at the time, was a common law felony. The common law felonies in 1870 were limited to arson, burglary, escaping from prison, larceny, manslaughter, mayhem, murder, rape, robbery, sodomy and suicide. The injunctive ruling refranchises those with convictions for drug offenses, which weren’t in consideration in the 1870 law.
“Congress sought to assure that the South would honor the hard-won rights of Black Americans,” Gibney wrote. “Guaranteeing them the right to vote, and limiting the state’s ability to deprive them of that right, became a central congressional purpose of the Virginia Readmission Act.”
Attorney Jared Davidson of Protect Democracy, representing the disenfranchised voters, said the ruling opens the door for disenfranchised voters in other southern states with readmission acts.
“While this decision applies only to Virginia, it provides a pathway for individuals in other former Confederate states across the South to have their voting rights protected,” Davidson said.
Note: The feature illustration was made with AI.
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