Mississippi’s Jim Crow-Era lifetime felony voting ban is no more, a three-judge panel of the United States 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decided Friday, claiming that the prohibition constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, violating the Eighth Amendment.

“This is a tremendous victory for the state of Mississippi,” Southern Poverty Law Center Mississippi State Office Director Waikinya Clanton said in a news release about the decision.

“People have paid their debt to society and have been oppressed from exercising their voting rights for far too long.”

Under the law, which was part of the Mississippi Constitution of 1890, individuals who had felony convictions for murder, rape, bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy were no longer able to vote across the state.

The right to vote will now be restored to people with felony convictions in Mississippi, though it’s not clear when that would take effect.

State officials could still decide to appeal the decision to the entire 5th Circuit.

The judges, who passed the decision in a 2-1 ruling, argued that the law also violated the 14th and First Amendments, which guarantee rights to equal protection and freedom of speech, respectively.

The judges noted that 35 states and the District of Columbia do not have laws similar to the one in Mississippi. Some of those states overturned similar bans, but Mississippi remained an outlier “bucking a clear and consistent trend in our Nation against permanent disenfranchisement,” the ruling states.

“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.”

Section 241 was established in reaction to Black suffrage during the Reconstruction Era when state officials moved to create a new state Constitution, the ruling states.

As part of the ruling, the judges sent the case to the district court with instructions that it grant relief and find the law unconstitutional.

The decision comes almost two months after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a case tied to the law.

It stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Simpson Thacher and Bartlett, LLP in 2018, claiming that the state’s voting ban was intended to discriminate on the basis of race.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, eight other states have laws prohibiting some people convicted of felonies from voting. They are: Arizona, Wyoming, Iowa, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia and Connecticut.

“The right to vote is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy,” Co-Chair of Simpson Thacher’s Litigation Department stated in a news release. “This is a major victory for Mississippians who have completed their sentences and deserve to participate fully in our political process.”