SCOTUS NEWS

Supreme Court will hear case on second majority-Black district in Louisiana redistricting

The Supreme Court will hear arguments early next year in the latest chapter in a protracted dispute over race and redistricting in Louisiana. In a list of orders from the justices’ private conference on Friday, the court announced on Monday morning that it will review a pair of appeals from a decision by a three-judge district court, which had struck down a map that created a second majority-Black congressional district in the state.

The court also sent Joseph Smith’s case from Alabama’s death row back to the court of appeals for more clarification of the basis for the lower court’s decision. Alabama had asked the justices to reverse an appeals court 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. 8, that the Louisiana legislature adopted earlier this year. The legislature drew the map after a federal district court ruled that the prior plan, created in 2022, likely violated Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election practices that result in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote based on race, by diluting the votes of the state’s Black residents. Under the 2022 plan, only one of the state’s six congressional districts was a majority-Black district while, based on 2020 census, a third of the population is Black.

The 2024 map created a second majority-Black district. It begins in the northwest corner of the state near Shreveport and stretches 250 miles southeast toward Baton Rouge.

A group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” went to federal court, where they argued that the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander – that is, it sorted voters based primarily on their race. A three-judge federal district court agreed with them and barred the state from using it in future elections.

In May, a divided Supreme Court put the district court’s decision on hold, clearing the way for the state to use S.B. 8 in the 2024 election.

The state and the voters who had challenged the 2022 map appealed to the Supreme Court this summer. 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. 8 was unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, they said, the district court never tried “to disentangle the effect of the Legislature’s political objectives” – for example, protecting incumbents such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and Rep. Julia Letlow – “on the specific lines in the challenged plan.” 

The voters challenging the 2024 plan urged the justices either to dismiss the appeal or affirm the district court’s ruling without additional briefing or oral argument, emphasizing that the district court’s ruling was correct. 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 covered Riley in detail in last week’s Relist Watch.

In Hamm v. Smith, Alabama had asked the justices to reverse a decision by a federal appeals court that lifted the death sentence of Joseph Smith, who was found guilty of the murder of Durk Van Dam.

When Smith sought federal post-conviction relief, a federal district court concluded that executing Smith would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld that decision.

The state then came to the Supreme Court in Aug. 2023, asking the justices to take up the case. The district court’s ruling, it said, hinged on a 1998 IQ test on which Smith had scored a 72 – which, the court concluded, with the margin of error, could be “actually as low as 69,” one point below what Alabama considers to be “significantly subaverage intellectually functioning.” Under the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia, executing people with intellectual disabilities is unconstitutional. But Smith is not intellectually disabled, the state argued: His scores on five different IQ tests range from 72 to 78.

The court of appeals, the state contended, was wrong to look only at Smith’s lowest IQ score, when he had four others that were higher. 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. The lower courts’ determination that he is intellectually disabled did not rest only on his 72 IQ score, he insisted. 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.