Court Opinion

ID: 9785954
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 23:04:46.680522+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:36:18.246165
License: Public Domain

KESSLER, District Court Judge,
dissenting.
This ease is before us on remand from the United States Supreme Court for further proceedings consistent with its May 12, 1997 decision in Reno v. Bossier Parish Sch. Bd., et al., 520 U.S. 471, 117 S.Ct. 1491, 137 L.Ed.2d 730. Upon further review and consideration of the record in accordance with the Supreme Court’s mandate, I am forced once again to conclude that I cannot in good conscience agree with the result reached by my colleagues. Instead, I remain convinced that “the School Board’s decision to adopt the Police Jury redistricting plan was motivated by discriminatory purpose”, Bossier Parish Sch. Bd. v. Reno, et al., 907 F.Supp. 434, 463 (D.D.C.1995) (Kessler, J., dissenting), and should thus be denied preclearance under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 42 U.S.C. § 1973c (“Voting Rights Act”).
I.
In its opinion, the Supreme Court confirmed that “a violation of § 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] is not grounds in and of itself for denying preclearance under § 5 [of the Act].” 117 S.Ct. at 1500. The Court stated that nevertheless, such “[§ 2] evidence of a plan’s dilutive impact may be relevant to our § 5 purpose inquiry”. 117 S.Ct. at 1502. The Court emphasized that § 2 evidence, while potentially relevant to the § 5 purpose inquiry, is not dispositive of that inquiry. Consequently, the Court directed us to consider and weigh the relevance of “evidence of the dilutive impact of the Board’s redistricting plan”. Id. at 1503.
The Supreme Court also directed us, in conducting our inquiry into the School Board’s motivation, to apply the framework articulated in Arlington Heights v. Metro. Hous. Dev. Corp., et al., 429 U.S. 252, 97 S.Ct. 555, 50 L.Ed.2d 450 (1977). The Arlington Heights framework has been used both to evaluate “whether invidious discriminatory purpose was a motivating factor” in a government body’s decisionmaking and also, “at least in part, to evaluate purpose in [the Court’s] previous § 5 cases.” 117 S.Ct. at 1502 (citing City of Pleasant Grove v. United States, 479 U.S. 462, 469-70, 107 S.Ct. 794, 93 L.Ed.2d 866 (1987)).
My colleagues have limited their § 5 purpose inquiry to a search for intent to retrogress and have declined to consider whether the § 5 inquiry ever extends beyond that search for retrogressive intent. I read the Supreme Court’s mandate more broadly. The Supreme Court stated that, while it did not assume “that the Board enacted the Jury plan with some nonretrogressive, but nevertheless discriminatory, ‘purposed, t]he existence of such a purpose, and its relevance to § 5, are issues to be decided on remand.” 117 S.Ct. at 1501. Given the clarity of these words, I fail to see how we can avoid carrying out the Supreme Court’s directive to (1) inquire into the existence of “some nonretro-gressive, but nevertheless discriminatory, ‘purpose’ and (2) determine the relevance of such a purpose (should one exist) to our § 5 inquiry.
Finally, the Supreme Court directed us to address the government’s arguments that the District Court “erred in refusing to consider evidence that the Board was in violation of an ongoing injunction” to attain a unitary system of education in the Parish.1 117 S.Ct. at 1503.
II.
The majority finds that School Board has made out its prima facie case for preclear-anee. The School Board states that it adopted the Police Jury plan for at least two nondiscriminatory motives — the “plan offered the twin attractions of guaranteed preclearance and easy implementation”. 907 F.Supp. at 447. To make out its prima facie case, “the School Board must demonstrate that the *35proposed change will have no retrogressive effect, and that the change was undertaken without a discriminatory purpose. Proof of nondiscriminatory purpose must include ‘legitimate reasons’ for settling on the given change.” Id. at 446 (citing Richmond v. United States, 422 U.S. 358, 375, 95 S.Ct. 2296, 45 L.Ed.2d 245 (1975)).
I find that the reasons given by the School Board for adopting the Police Jury plan are not at all “legitimate”. The majority, in its earlier opinion, conceded that the School Board did not favor the Police Jury plan until “the redistricting process began to cause agitation within the black community”, 907 F.Supp. at 447, since the plan “wreaked havoc with the incumbencies of four of the [twelve] School Board members and was not drawn with school locations in mind.” Id.
The conclusions I reached in my original dissent are as valid now as they were then:
The Policy Jury plan only became “expedient” when the School Board was publicly confronted with alternative plans demonstrating that majority-black districts could be drawn, and demonstrating that political pressure from the black community was mounting to achieve such a result. The common-sense understanding of these events leads to one conclusion: The Board adopted the Police Jury plan — two years before the next election — in direct response to the presentation of a plan that created majority-black districts. Faced with growing frustration of the black community at being excluded from the electoral process, the only way for the School Board to ensure that no majority-black districts would be created was to quickly adopt the Police Jury plan and put the issue to rest. This sequence of events of “public silence and private decisions,” culminating in the Board’s hasty decision, is evidence of the Board’s discriminatory purpose.
907 F.Supp. at 457-58 (Kessler, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (footnote omitted).
The School Board has thus failed to establish a prima facie case that is “supported by ‘credible and credited evidence’ ”. 907 F.Supp. at 446 (citation omitted). Its proffered reasons for acceptance of the Police Jury plan are clearly pretextual. This conclusion alone permits us to deny preclearance to the School Board’s plan.
A more thorough evaluation of the School Board’s intent, under the purpose prong of § 5, only reinforces the necessity of this conclusion and outcome.
III.
The parties agree that the School Board’s proposed redistricting plan will not have a retrogressive effect. Resolution of this case thus turns on whether the School Board can demonstrate by a preponderance of the evidence that it did not adopt the plan with an unlawful purpose. The Supreme Court left it to us to decide whether our “purpose” inquiry is limited to a search for retrogressive intent, or whether our inquiry should extend beyond that search.
The Voting Rights Act was enacted by Congress “to ‘attac[k]- the blight of voting discrimination’ across the Nation.” 117 S.Ct. at 1496-97 (quoting S.Rep. No. 97-417, 2d Sess., p. 4 (1982) U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1982 pp. 177,180; South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 308, 86 S.Ct. 803, 15 L.Ed.2d 769 (1966)). Before implementing a change in “any voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting”, a jurisdiction must first obtain either administrative preclearance from the Attorney General or judicial preelearance from the District Court for the District of Columbia. 42 U.S.C. § 1973c. Section 5 of the Act imposes on a jurisdiction the burden of proving that its proposed change “does not have the purpose and will not have the effect, of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” 42 U.S.C. § 1973c. It is well-settled that a plan has an impermissible effect under § 5 only if it “would lead to a retrogression in the position of racial minorities with respect to their effective exercise of the electoral franchise.” 117 S.Ct. at 1497 (quoting Beer v. United States, 425 U.S. 130, 141, 96 S.Ct. 1357, 47 L.Ed.2d 629 (1976)). We must decide whether a plan has an impermissible purpose under § 5 only if the *36jurisdiction intends the plan to “lead to a retrogression”, or if an impermissible purpose also includes a “nonretrogressive, but nevertheless discriminatory purpose”.
The Supreme Court stated that “Congress enacted § 5, not to maintain the discriminatory status quo, but to stay ahead of efforts by the most resistant jurisdictions to undermine the Act’s purpose of ‘ridfding] the country of racial discrimination.’” 117 S.Ct. at 1509 (Stevens, Souter, JJ., dissenting in part and concurring in part). If we were to deny preclearanee under § 5 only to those new plans enacted specifically with a retrogressive purpose, however, we would commit ourselves to granting § 5 preclearance to a “resistant” jurisdiction’s nonretrogressive plan even if the record demonstrated an intent by that jurisdiction to perpetuate an historically discriminatory status quo by diluting minority voting strength.
Since “a new plan enacted with the purpose of unconstitutionally diluting minority votes is an unconstitutional plan,” 117 S.Ct. at 1505 (Breyer, Ginsburg, JJ., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) (citations omitted), a construction of § 5 that limits its purpose inquiry to a search for retrogressive intent could require us to pre-elear nonretrogressive but nevertheless unconstitutional voting plans. Such a result is clearly inconsistent with the purpose of both the Voting Rights Act in general and § 5 in particular. Along with Justices Breyer and Ginsburg, I do not “believe that Congress would have wanted a § 5 Court (or the Attorney General) to approve an unconstitutional plan adopted with an unconstitutional purpose.” Id. at 1506.
I thus join Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Stevens, and Souter in concluding that “the ‘purpose’ inquiry does extend beyond the search for retrogressive intent.” Id. at 1505.
IV.
The Supreme Court stated that § 2 “evidence of the dilutive impact of the Board’s redistricting plan” may be relevant in a § 5 proceeding to establish a jurisdiction’s “intent to retrogress”. Id. at 1501. As stated above, however, I find that our § 5 purpose inquiry should extend beyond a search for the jurisdiction’s intent to retrogress; I will thus assess the relevance of § 2 evidence to establish not only whether the School Board acted with an intent to retrogress, but also whether it acted with the unconstitutional purpose of diluting minority voting strength. Thus, pursuant to the Court’s mandate, I believe we must first consider evidence that would be relevant to the § 2 inquiry on dilu-tive impact, and second, determine the relevance of that evidence to our § 5 purpose inquiry.
Plaintiffs claiming vote dilution under § 2 must first establish that the racial group “is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district”. Id. at 1498 (citations omitted). In this case, the School Board received, in addition to the plan presented on September 3, 1992, two other plans demonstrating that “it is possible to draw majority-black districts in Bossier Parish which are fully consistent with traditional districting principles.” Bossier Parish Sch. Bd. v. Reno, et al., 907 F.Supp. 434, 454 n. 3 (D.D.C.1995) (Kessler, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Furthermore, the School Board has admitted that it is “obvious that a reasonably compact black-majority district could be drawn in Bossier City.” Id. (quoting Stip. ¶ 36.)
Second, § 2 plaintiffs must establish that the group is “politically cohesive”. In order “to ascertain whether minority members constitute a politically cohesive unit and to determine whether whites vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidates”, the Supreme Court has directed courts to inquire into the existence of racially polarized voting. Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30, 56, 106 S.Ct. 2752, 92 L.Ed.2d 25 (1986). Here, the Stipulations clearly demonstrate that voting in Bossier Parish is racially polarized. 907 F.Supp. at 454 (citing Stip. ¶¶ 181-96). Such racial polarization indicates that blacks in Bossier Parish are a “politically cohesive” group.
Third, § 2 plaintiffs must establish that the white majority usually votes as a bloc to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate. 117 S.Ct. at 1498 (citations omitted). Parties stipulate, in the record before us, that no *37black person has been elected to the Bossier Parish School Board despite the fact that 20.1% of the population is black.2 (Stip-¶¶ 153, 5.) Stipulations ¶¶ 181-95 discuss racially polarized voting patterns in Bossier Parish. Analysis of several elections illustrated that, in at least two elections, “the black candidates were the choice of the black voters in these elections, but were not the choice of the white voters.” (Stip. ¶ 186; see also Stip. ¶¶ 181-95.)
Fourth, plaintiffs claiming § 2 vote dilution “must also demonstrate that the totality of the circumstances supports a finding that the voting scheme is dilutive.” 117 S.Ct. at 1498 (citing Johnson v. DeGrandy, 512 U.S. 997, 1011, 114 S.Ct. 2647, 129 L.Ed.2d 775 (1994); Gingles, 478 U.S. at 50-51, 106 S.Ct. 2752). Gingles spells out the typical factors which may be relevant to a totality analysis of a § 2 claim. 478 U.S. at 44-45, 106 S.Ct. 2752. They include:
(1) “[T]he history of voting-related discrimination in the State or political subdivision”. Id. at 44, 106 S.Ct. 2752. Parties’ Stipulations ¶¶ 213-47 discuss the extensive history of official and voting-related' discrimination in Bossier Parish.
(2) “[T]he extent to which voting in the elections of the State or political subdivision is racially polarized”. Id. at 44-45, 106 S.Ct. 2752. As already noted, the Stipulations clearly demonstrate that voting in Bossier Parish is racially polarized. 907 F.Supp. at 454 (citing Stip. ¶¶ 181-96).
(3) “[T]he extent to which the State or political subdivision has used voting practices or procedures that tend to enhance the opportunity for discrimination against the minority group”. Gingles, 478 U.S. at 45, 106 S.Ct. 2752. See, e.g., Stip. ¶¶ 228-29, which discuss the implementation by the State of Louisiana in 1968 and 1971 of voting procedures, including the adoption of at-large elections and multi-member districts, which the Attorney General found diluted black voting strength.
(4) “[T]he exclusion of members of the minority group from candidate slating processes”. Gingles, 478 U.S. at 45, 106 S.Ct. 2752. We have no evidence indicating that black individuals have been excluded from candidate slating processes.
(5) “[T]he extent to which minority group members bear the effects of past discrimination in areas such as education, employment, and health, which hinder their ability to participate effectively in the political process”. Id. at 45, 106 S.Ct. 2752. The parties have stipulated that:
Education, income, housing and employment are considered standard measures of socioeconomic status. These factors repeatedly have been found to translate into political efficacy ... Black citizens of Bossier Parish suffer a markedly lower socioeconomic status than their white counterparts. This lower socioeconomic status is traceable to a legacy of racial discrimination affecting Bossier Parish’s black citizens.
(Stip.Hf 198-99.)
(6) “[T]he use of overt or subtle racial appeals in political campaigns”. Gingles, 478 U.S. at 45, 106 S.Ct. 2752. We have no evidence demonstrating that racial appeals have been used in political campaigns.
(7) “[T]he extent to which members of the minority group have been elected to public office in the jurisdiction.” Id. The record before us shows that no black candidate has been elected to the Bossier Parish School Board. (Stip-¶ 153.)
The Gingles Court noted that “there is no requirement that any particular number of factors be proved, or that a majority of them point one way or the other.” Id (quoting S.Rep. at 29, U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1982, p. 207).
*38Finally, § 2 plaintiffs “must also postulate a reasonable alternative voting practice to serve as the benchmark “undiluted” voting practice.” 117 S.Ct. at 1498 (citing Holder v. Hall, 512 U.S. 874, 881, 114 S.Ct. 2581, 129 L.Ed.2d 687 (1994) (plurality opinion)). The School Board has been given several plans showing that it is possible to draw majority-black districts in Bossier Parish in a manner consistent with traditional districting principles. 907 F.Supp. at 454.
Having considered “evidence of the dilutive impact of the Board’s redistricting plan”, 117 S.Ct. at 1503, I conclude that it overwhelmingly demonstrates the following: the black voting population in Bossier Parish is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in at least two single-member districts; black voters are politically cohesive; the white majority votes sufficiently often as a bloc to enable it repeatedly to defeat the blacks’ preferred candidates; and finally, the totality of the circumstances supports a finding that the School Board’s plan is dilutive.3
It would be impossible to ignore the weight and the relevance of this § 2 evidence to the School Board’s intent to dilute the voting strength of blacks in Bossier Parish.
V.
The Supreme Court has also directed us to apply the framework, articulated in Arlington Heights v. Metro. Hous. Dev. Corp., et al., 429 U.S. 252, 97 S.Ct. 555, 50 L.Ed.2d 450 (1977), to evaluate the School Board’s purpose in adopting the Police Jury plan. 117 S.Ct. at 1503.
In Part II of my initial dissent, I discussed in detail the Arlington Heights framework and applied it to this record. See 907 F.Supp. at 453-60 (Kessler, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Based on that analysis, I believed then, and for the same reasons still believe now, that:
[T]he only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence is that the Bossier School Board acted with discriminatory purpose. The adopted plan has a substantial negative impact on the black citizens of Bossier Parish. The sequence of events leading up to the decision show conclusively how the School Board excluded the black community from the redistricting process and rushed to adopt the Police Jury plan only when faced with an alternative plan that provided for black representation. The plan itself ignores and overrides a number of the School Board’s normally paramount interests. And the statements of some School Board members certainly lend strength to the other evidence ... We cannot blind ourselves to the reality of the situation and the record before us.
Id. at 460 (Kessler, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
The majority has, consistent with the Supreme Court’s mandate, also applied the Arlington Heights analysis to the record. It examines each of the Arlington Heights factors, however, only for the purpose of finding evidence of retrogressive intent. This is far too limited and narrow an inquiry. Since our § 5 purpose inquiry should, in my opinion, extend beyond a search for retrogressive intent, so too should our Arlington Heights analysis.
In its analysis of the impact of the Jury plan 4 (the “important starting point” for assessing discriminatory intent under Arlington Heights), the majority states that the plan’s failure to respect communities of interest and the fact that it cuts across attendance boundaries “might support a finding of retrogressive intent, if there were any corroborating evidence that the school board had deliberately attempted to break up voting blocks before they could be established or otherwise to divide and conquer the black vote.” Majority Op. at 32 (emphasis added). I find nothing in Arlington Heights nor in the Supreme Court’s opinion in Bossier that supports the imposition of the additional requirement of “corroborating evidence” of a *39jurisdiction’s “deliberate[ ] attempt[ ] to ... divide and conquer the black vote” before evidence of dilutive or disparate impact can be considered relevant to an Arlington Heights examination of purpose.
In considering the historical background of the School Board’s decision, the majority found that the School Board has resisted court-ordered desegregation and failed to comply with the Court’s order in Lemon v. Bossier Parish Sch. Bd., 240 F.Supp. at 709. The majority admits the existence of “powerful support for the proposition that the Bossier Parish School Board in fact resisted adopting a redistricting plan that would have created majority black districts”, and concluded that “[a]ll of that history ... proves in this case, we think, [ ] a tenacious determination to maintain the status quo.” What the majority overlooks or ignores is that the status quo which the School Board is so anxious to maintain is a discriminatory one. Furthermore, the record demonstrates that the School Board hopes to maintain that discriminatory status quo by unconstitutionally diluting black voting strength. Thus, the majority’s conclusion (that the School Board acted with an intent to maintain the discriminatory status quo) leads to denial of preclearance to the Jury plan under the purpose prong of § 5.
The majority also finds that “[ejvidence in the record tending to establish that the board departed from its normal practices establishes rather clearly that the board did not welcome improvement in the position of racial minorities with respect to their effective exercise of the electoral franchise, but is not evidence of retrogressive intent”. Majority Op. at 32 (citations omitted). Such an “improvement in the position of racial minorities”, however, is precisely what is necessary to redress the current discriminatory status quo in Bossier Parish. Limiting their inquiry to a search for retrogressive intent only permits my colleagues to all but concede that the School Board acted with a nonretrogres-sive but nevertheless discriminatory intent. They nevertheless grant preclearanee under § 5-to the School Board’s plan, even though “the purpose part of § 5 prohibits a plan adopted with the purpose of unconstitutionally diluting minority voting strength, whether or not the plan is retrogressive in its effect.” 117 S.Ct. at 1506 (Breyer, Ginsburg, JJ., concurring in part and' concurring in the judgment).
VI.
Finally, the Supreme Court directed us to “address [the Government’s] additional'arguments that [the District Court] erred in refusing to consider evidence that the Board was in violation of an ongoing injunction ‘to remedy any remaining vestiges of [a] dual [school] system’ ”. 117 S.Ct. at 1508.
My initial dissent considered this evidence and found it relevant since Arlington Heights states that “the historical background of the challenged decision” is properly part of the ■purpose inquiry. 429 U.S. at 267, 97 S.Ct. 555. Since 1965, the Bossier Parish School Board has been the defendant in Lemon v. Bossier Parish School Board, Civ.Act. No. 10,687 (W.D.La., filed Dec. 2, 1964). My dissent noted that, “[t]o this day, the School Board remains under direct federal court order to remedy any remaining vestiges of segregation in its schools”, and discussed the Board’s dismantling of a Biracial Committee “in direct violation of a federal court order”. Id. at 456. Ultimately, I found that “this history reveals an insidious pattern which cannot be ignored, and must inform our decision today ... [T]he Bossier Parish School Board’s actions effectively eliminate the black community from the political process.” Id.
I thus again conclude that the School Board’s decision to adopt the Police Jury redistricting plan was motivated by a discriminatory, if not necessarily retrogressive, purpose. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the Bossier Parish School Board is one of those “most resistant jurisdictions” whose efforts Congress sought to combat when it enacted § 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

ORDER

For the reasons set forth in the opinion issued today by this three-judge court, it is this 1st day of May, 1998,
*40ORDERED that plaintiff Bossier Parish School Board is given pre-clearance for its election plan adopted on October 1,1992, and that it shall have a declaratory judgment to that effect.

. The injunction was imposed on the School Board after it was found liable for intentionally segregating the public schools. See Lemon v. Bossier Parish Sch. Bd., 240 F.Supp. 709 (W.D.La.1965), aff'd 370 F.2d 847 (5th Cir.1967), cert. denied 388 U.S. 911, 87 S.Ct. 2116, 18 L.Ed.2d 1350. See also Lemon v. Bossier Parish Sch. Bd., 421 F.2d 121 (5th Cir.1969); Lemon v. Bossier Parish Sch. Bd., 444 F.2d 1400 (5th Cir.1971).

. In his concurrence, Judge Silberman refers to the Plaintiffs request that we take judicial notice that two black individuals were elected to the School Board since the closing of the record before the first District Court opinion. It would be inappropriate in this case to take judicial notice of this fact. First, the Supreme Court explicitly denied the Schodl Board's request1 to supplement the record in Reno v. Bossier Parish School Board, et al., 517 U.S. 1154, 116 S.Ct. 1540, 134 L.Ed.2d 645 (1996). Second, the parties specifically agreed in this remand that the record should not be reopened.

. This conclusion is, of course, only reinforced by the School Board’s concession that the "plan did dilute black voting strength.” (PL’s Br. at 21.)

. Plaintiff concedes that "[t]he impact of the School Board plan does fall more heavily on blacks than on whites”. (Pl.’s Br. at 12.)