Mississippi Supreme Court Overturns Voters on Medical Marijuana Initiative
Over 20 years ago, the State of Mississippi lost a Congressional seat, reducing its representation in Congress by one member. Now, the State Supreme Court has cited that lost seat as the reason to rule that a voter-approved medical marijuana initiative is unconstitutional.
In a 6-3 decision issued on May 14, the high court struck down Initiative 65, a program to legalize medical marijuana that was approved by voters last November. Associate Justice Josiah. D. Coleman, who admitted that the Initiative passed by a “strong, if not overwhelming majority” wrote the court’s opinion. He began by reciting the historical importance of the people’s power to “propose and enact constitutional amendments by initiative.” Then he quickly shifted gears by pointing out that the ballot petition that passed was “insufficient” because it violated the Mississippi constitution.
The mathematical reasoning for this conclusion is a bit tortured. Coleman explained that the state’s 1890 constitution required that no more than one-fifth of the signatures that placed the initiative on the ballot could come from a single congressional district. In 1890, there were five congressional districts. But just over a hundred years later, Mississippi lost a seat in the House of Representatives when its population decreased according to the 2000 census.
Therefore, four (the number of current districts) multiplied by 20 (one-fifth of 100%) equals only 80. Petitioners argued, and the Supreme Court agreed, “it would have been impossible to place Initiative 65 on the ballot” in the first place because the Mississippi Constitution was never amended to reflect the new, reduced congressional representation. “We must hold that (the constitution) fails to account for the possibility that has become reality in Mississippi,” he rationalized.
Originally designed to assure that “each congressional district would be equally a part of the process,” according to Coleman, it is strange to rule that a congressional district that no longer exists could meet this goal. Despite recognizing “the tension created by the decrease in representatives and the unchanged text of (the Constitution),” the court sided with petitioners.
Coleman then began a long explanation of how the constitution could have been amended to correct the problem. There could have been a ballot initiative or the legislature could have proposed amendments that were approved by the State’s qualified electors. Neither of these actions occurred. According to the law, the Supreme Court was powerless to approve the medical marijuana initiative. “Nowhere therein does the Constitution allow amendment by the Supreme Court,” he wrote. He stressed the court’s inability to “act proactively to address problems such as the one here.”
A quick review of the ballot initiative process shows that supporters received a green light from every reviewing government agency. The petition was correctly filed with the Secretary of State. The Attorney General acknowledged receipt and sent it to the Secretary of State with a 75-word summary. Supporters then submitted “sufficient signatures.” Despite doing everything they thought they needed, and despite the government’s acceptance of all its actions, on October 26, just weeks before the election, Mary Hawkins Butler, the Mayor of Madison, Mississippi, filed an Emergency Petition seeking review of the sufficiency of the petition. Now, the Supreme Court has ruled, it was not sufficient.
Coleman also pointed out that because Butler is a qualified elector, she had standing to file the petition.
Associate Justice James D. Maxwell wrote the initial dissent. Maxwell disagreed with the majority’s interpretation of Mississippi’s constitution, describing how he is “hard pressed to see how a federal court’s almost twenty-year-old injunction, has somehow unintentionally destroyed Mississippi’s constitutional citizen-based ballot-initiative process.” He stated that the majority opinion “judicially kills Mississippi’s citizen-initiative process.”
Maxwell’s dissent also points out that the legislature has failed to redraw the state’s legislative districts for two decades, thus the problem with accurately counting electors has persisted. He joined fellow dissenter Associate Justice Robert P. Chamberlin in believing that “the proper course is to interpret the words “any congressional district” to be consistent with the constitution’s one-fifth requirement,” which was met.
He defended the section of the constitution that gave people “a means to amend the constitution by initiative” and said it “should not be ignored” but rather given an expansive reading that “results in its continued validity rather than its demise.”
The court’s opinion is unpopular with many Mississippians. The Clarion reports those who would be in the marijuana supply chain were harmed, especially “People looking to grow and dispense marijuana for medical purposes…(They) were making plans, some spending millions on land and buildings.” Probably most important though was the lack of medical treatment for those who suffered any of the 22 “debilitating conditions” that would have permitted sufferers to purchase the drug beginning in August.
