Mississippi Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To "Personhood" Initiative On Ripeness Grounds

In Hughes v. Hosemann, (MI Sup. Ct., Sept. 8, 2011), the Mississippi Supreme Court rejected on ripeness grounds an attempt to remove from November's ballot an initiative measure that would define "person" in the state constitution as including "every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof." The court held that: "Pre-election challenges of voter initiative proposals are subject only to the review of the sufficiency of the petition itself (i.e., its form) and not its constitutionality (i.e., its substance)."

A dissent by Justice Kitchens, joined by Justice King, argued that:

Measure 26 is defective ... because the text of the measure purports to add a new section to this state’s Bill of Rights and to modify the meaning of two words which appear some twenty times in our Bill of Rights. This is in direct contravention of Section 273(5)(a) of our state constitution, which reads: “The initiative process shall not be used [f]or the proposal, modification or repeal of any portion of the Bill of Rights to this Constitution.”

Responding to this argument, the majority writes:

The dissent worries that Measure 26 “seeks to modify the definition” of “person or persons” as they appear in the Mississippi Constitution. But those terms have never been defined. Therefore, Measure 26 cannot modify a definition that does not now exist.