preview

Supreme Court Case Study

Better Essays

Procedural History. Alabama redrew its districts in 2012, and the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus as well as the Alabama Democratic Conference challenged the map. The cases were consolidated and brought before a three judge federal district panel for trial. The District Court ruled in favor of the State with four critical determinations listed below. The case was appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Facts.. Alabama redrew its districts in 2012 following the 2010 census, and had two very important goals besides traditional redistricting principles. First, it sought to minimize the deviation from equal population to 1%, and second, avoiding retrogression under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act by keeping similar percentages of blacks in …show more content…

The decision of the District Court was vacated and remanded. Analysis. In his analysis of the first issue, Justice Breyer began by noting that the Court has always viewed racial gerrymandering as district by district claim. The harm of being selected on the basis of race is personal which justifies the district by district analysis. Furthermore, the plaintiffs did not waive any right to scrutiny of individual districts. While they did present evidence that looked at statewide motivations, these only serve to strengthen their claim for each district, not altering the lawsuit to only be one on the statewide level. The District Court cannot look at the state as an undifferentiated whole. On the second issue, the Court found that there was enough evidence to establish standing. Testimony by officials that they had members in many counties and districts supported a reasonable inference that they would have plaintiffs or members harmed. If the District Court wanted more evidence, it should not have improperly decided that they lacked standing. Instead, it should have requested more evidence or permit the plaintiffs to file member lists if needed and give them an opportunity to demonstrate standing. As to the issue of predomination, Alabama argued that equal population was the overriding factor in all their decisions. If that was the main cause for what they did, then there is no possibility that race predominated. The Court corrected

Get Access