Supreme Court to hear case on second district with majority Black population in Louisiana redistricting
SCOTUS NEWS
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in the first part of a long-running dispute in Louisiana over redistricting and race. In a list from Friday’s private conference, the court announced that it would review two appeals from the decision of a three judge district court that had struck down a district map that created a majority-Black district in the state. Alabama asked the justices for a reversal of an appeals court’s decision that lifted Smith’s death sentence. The justices had considered Smith’s case at 24 consecutive conferences, from Jan. 5 until Nov. 1, before finally issuing a four-paragraph opinion on Monday.
Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais began as challenges to the congressional map, known as S.B. Louisiana’s legislature adopted S.B. 8 earlier this year. The Louisiana legislature drew this map after a federal court ruled that a prior plan created in 2022 likely violated Section 2 (which prohibits election practices which result in a denial of or abridgement to the right of vote based upon race) by diluting votes of Black residents of the state The 2024 map created a new majority-Black congressional district. It starts in the northwest corner near Shreveport, and stretches southward for 250 miles to Baton Rouge. A federal district court of three judges agreed with the group and banned the state from using the map in future elections. The state compared itself to a ball in a “never-ending game of ping-pong”: It will be sued for racial gerrymandering if it adopts another map with two majority-Black districts, but it will also be sued for violating the Voting Rights Act if The state described itself as the ball in “an endless game of ping-pong”: It will be sued for racial gerrymandering, it contended, if it adopts another map with two majority-Black districts, but it will also be sued for violating the Voting Rights Act if it adopts a map with only one such district.
Stressing that “this redistricting saga must end,” the state argued that the solution is for the Supreme Court to enforce its “promise that a State need only have a strong basis in evidence for concluding that the Voting Rights Act required its action.”
The voters echoed that argument, telling the justices that if the district court’s decision is allowed to stand, it will “further inject the federal courts into the redistricting process and deprive states of the necessary flexibility to take account of other legislative priorities when they act to” fix violations of Section 2.
In holding that S.B. The voters echoed this argument, telling the justices that if the district courts decision is allowed to stand, it will “further inject the federal courts into the redistricting process and deprive states of the necessary flexibility when they act to” fix violations of Section 2.
In holding that S.B. Both the legislature and the state’s attorney general, they wrote, conceded that “a racial quota of two Black-majority seats was Louisiana’s prime and uncompromisable criterion.”
The voters rejected any suggestion that this case presented a conflict between the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. The state and the voters challenging the 2022 map did not offer any evidence or experts to show that Louisiana had a good reason to believe that the Voting Rights Act required it to draw this majority-Black district.
And any political considerations only came into play after the legislature decided to create a second majority-Black district, they added, at the expense of one of the five Republican-held seats in Congress – even though the state’s Republican-controlled legislature opposed losing that seat.
The court will hear the two cases together in one hour of arguments sometime early next year, with a decision to follow by late June or early July.
The court also granted a third case, Riley v. Garland, in which it will weigh in on questions relating to the 30-day deadline to seek review of a ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals denying withholding of deportation. John Elwood discussed Riley in depth in last week’s Relist Watch.
In Hamm V. Smith, Alabama asked the justices for a reversal of a decision made by a federal appellate court that lifted Joseph Smith’s death sentence. Smith was found guilty of murdering Durk Van The U.S. Court of Appeals of the 11th Circuit upheld this decision.
The State then went to the Supreme Court of the United States in August 2023 and asked the justices to review the case. The state then asked the Supreme Court to take up the case in August 2023. The state argued that Smith was not intellectually impaired: his scores on five different IQ test ranged from 72 to 78.1001010The state argued that the court of appeals erred by focusing only on Smith’s lowest IQ when he had four other higher scores. And then it compounded that mistake when it considered the bottom of that score’s margin of error as Smith’s “true IQ.” In so doing, the state wrote, the court of appeals put “a thumb on the scale in favor of capital offenders.”
The state urged the justices to clarify or reconsider the Supreme Court’s 2014 and 2017 decisions on the use of IQ test scores in determining whether an inmate has an intellectual disability.
Smith countered that his case was “simply not what the” state had described in its petition for review. He insisted that the lower courts did not base their determination of his intellectual disability solely on his 72 IQ. Instead, he contended, as the Supreme Court’s cases require, those courts also considered other evidence of intellectual disability – for example, evidence that reflects how he actually functioned.
Observing that the Supreme Court had not “specified how courts should evaluate multiple IQ scores,” the justices concluded that it was “unclear” how the court of appeals reached its conclusion that Smith is intellectually disabled. Because the Supreme Court’s “ultimate assessment of any petition” for review by the state “may depend on the basis for the Eleventh Circuit’s decision,” the justices sent the case back to the court of appeals, presumably for it to clarify its ruling.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch indicated that they would have gone ahead and heard oral arguments in the case now, rather than sending it back to the lower court.
The justices will meet for another private conference on Friday, Nov. 8.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
