Court Opinion

ID: 9468255
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:09:28.893557+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:46.984541
License: Public Domain

RONEY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part:
I respectfully dissent from the Part III Remedy portion of the Court’s opinion. Nothing said therein can justify a federal court’s requiring the state legislature to implement a new system for selection of school board members. The statute has been upheld as constitutional. Only its application was improper. Although the court has broad remedial powers, its task is simply to correct the condition that offends the Constitution. See Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1, 15-16, 91 S.Ct. 1267, 1275-76, 28 L.Ed.2d 554 (1971).
In a similar challenge to Alabama’s jury selection statute, the Supreme Court upheld the statute but found its application to be discriminatory. Carter v. Jury Commission of Greene County, 396 U.S. 320, 90 S.Ct. 518, 24 L.Ed.2d 549 (1970). Rather than invalidate the statute, the Court remanded the case back to the district court recognizing that “[t]he federal courts are not incompetent to fashion detailed and stringent in-junctive relief that will remedy any discriminatory application of the statute at the hands of the officials empowered to administer it.” Id. at 336-37, 90 S.Ct. at 527.
The district court should be left free to. develop a remedy which would assure nondiscriminatory appointment of Board members, an avenue of affirmative action already having been opened by the Board. An appropriate remedy structured on the *1012present statute could well result in better representation of minority groups in the non-discriminatory selection of Board members, than if the existing statute is invalidated and the legislature adopts a method which, while constitutional, might well have the ultimate effect of replacing a now integrated Board with an all-white Board.
Having found the statute facially constitutional, the Court then goes too far by invalidating it as a remedy. The statutory scheme is not itself discriminatory. It is “capable of being carried out with no racial discrimination whatsoever.” Smith v. Texas, 311 U.S. 128, 130-31, 61 S.Ct. 164, 165-66, 85 L.Ed. 84 (1940) (footnote omitted); Carter, 396 U.S. at 335, 90 S.Ct. at 526. The case should be remanded to the district court to allow it to fashion a suitable remedy-