The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a challenge to Mississippi's lifetime ban on voting by people convicted of a wide range of felonies, a policy adopted in 1890 during the Jim Crow era that stands as one of the toughest such restrictions in the nation.

The Supreme Court has left in place Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era practice of removing voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, including nonviolent crimes such as forgery and timber theft.