Our first runners-up this week are lawyers at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and the Southern Poverty Law Center who secured a ground-breaking ruling from the Fifth Circuit holding that a Mississippi law permanently disenfranchising people previously convicted of certain crimes amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment.” Not only does the ruling change the landscape for tens of thousands of Mississippians previously barred from voting, but it potentially paves a path for those who have served out their prison sentences but still face lifetime voting bans in 14 other states that have similar laws on the books. The successful Eighth Amendment challenge to the law—Section 241 of the Constitution of Mississippi of 1890—follows a separate lawsuit raising equal protection clause claims on behalf of the disenfranchised that was rejected by the Fifth Circuit and denied cert by the U.S. Supreme Court. But in a 2-1 decision on Aug. 3, Circuit Judge James Dennis wrote the following for the court’s majority: “By severing former offenders from the body politic forever, Section 241 ensures that they will never be fully rehabilitated, continues to punish them beyond the term their culpability requires, and serves no protective function to society. It is thus a cruel and unusual punishment.” The Simpson Thacher team was led by Jonathan Youngwood, global co-chair of the firm’s litigation department, and included senior counsel Janet Gochman, pro bono attorney Nihara Choudhri and former counsel Isaac Rethy, who died unexpectedly while the case was pending.
Peter Karanjia, chair of the administrative law appellate practice at DLA Piper, and Melanie Walker, co-chair of the firm’s corporate & securities litigation practice, get a runner-up spot for securing a federal preemption win for T-Mobile subsidiary MetroPCS. After a bench trial in May, U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco on Aug. 4 found that resolutions adopted by the California Public Utilities Commission were preempted by federal law and issued an injunction permanently barring their enforcement against MetroPCS. The CPUC had been seeking to collect more than $220 million from the company in state surcharges, penalties, and interest under the challenged resolutions. The decision was also the first to address “reasonable” methods for telecommunications carriers to allocate their revenues—an issue with multimillion consequences in a variety of regulatory settings.
