Suit over voting districts starts up

Challenge keys on judicial races

LITTLE ROCK — A judicial districting lawsuit got underway Monday as ACLU attorneys and lawyers from the Arkansas attorney general’s office squared off over the voting rights challenge filed nearly three years ago.

The lawsuit seeks to force the creation of a single majority-minority district for electing justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court and two majority-minority districts for electing state Court of Appeals judges. In each newly created district, the majority of voters would be Black.

The suit says the change is needed because the state’s current method of electing judges to the state’s two highest courts dilutes the voting strength of Black voters, in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Currently, the seven Supreme Court justices are elected statewide to eightyear terms and the 12 Court of Appeals judges are elected from seven districts, five of which elect two members.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are the Christian Ministerial Alliance, Arkansas Community Institute, former Pulaski County Circuit Judge Marion Humphrey Sr., Olly Neal of Lee County and Kymara Seals of Jefferson County. Defendants in the lawsuit are Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Secretary of State John Thurston and Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, the three members of the state Board of Apportionment.

In early 2020 — citing sovereign immunity — U.S. District Judge James M. Moody Jr. dismissed the State of Arkansas, the State Board of Election Commissioners and the Board of Apportionment from the lawsuit, leaving only Hutchinson, Thurston and Rutledge named as defendants.

During the first day of testimony Humphrey testified

to racial discrimination he experienced when he first ran for judge. Also, a Virginia redistricting expert testified — in sometimes contentious testimony — to his methodology in drawing the districts that he proposed through a series of illustrative maps.

Humphrey, who served as a Pulaski County circuit judge from 1993 until his retirement from the bench at the end of 2010, outlined some of the challenges he faced as a Black man running for a judicial position in Arkansas during the 1980s and 1990s. Humphrey was enabled to run for circuit judge by virtue of a lawsuit brought in 1989 that resulted in what is known as the “Hunt Decree,” which saw the establishment of majorityminority sub- districts within five judicial circuits in central and eastern Arkansas.

Had it not been for the Hunt Decree, Humphrey said, he would not likely have run for the circuit judge position.

“I wouldn’t have thought I could get enough white votes to get elected,” he said.

Asked if the Hunt Decree made it easier for Black candidates to be elected to judicial positions in the state, Humphrey was unequivocal.

“Absolutely,” he said firmly.

But nearly 20 years after the Hunt Decree, Humphrey said, his belief is that elections often hinge on race even more so than party affiliation.

“I don’t hear the blatant racial appeals I heard when I was young, but I think now, 90 percent assume that whites are going to vote for white candidates and Blacks are going to vote for Black candidates,” he said. “It’s just understood.”

That dynamic, he said, makes it difficult if not impossible for Blacks — who comprise 16.5% of the state’s population of just over three million people — to elect a Black candidate in a statewide election, including for at-large Arkansas Supreme Court justice elections.

Humphrey testified that ties between Black voters in Arkansas are maintained largely through family ties, church affiliation and a shared interest in civil rights, despite differences in geographical location.

“We’re cohesive in Arkansas as it pertains to civil rights,” he said. “It’s difficult for an African- American to walk into the Arkansas Supreme Court, see an allwhite Supreme Court and think there’s going to be any measure of justice, especially in cases that have some cutting-edge issues to them on race.”

Humphrey said his belief is that more diversity on the bench would make for a stronger judiciary and a stronger democracy by providing both white and Black jurists the opportunity to learn from one another.

As he stepped down from the stand just before noon Monday, Humphrey, who had bantered back and forth with Moody during part of his testimony, asked, “Y’all going to take lunch?”

“We work a little harder in federal court than in district court,” Moody reciprocated as both sides in the courtroom laughed.

William Cooper, a private mapping consultant from Virginia, testified for the next five hours regarding his methodology in drafting illustrative maps showing how majority- minority judicial districts can be drawn in both the Supreme Court and the Arkansas Court of Appeals. His testimony detailed how he used U.S. census data to draw 12 Appeals Court districts that would give Black voters in eastern and central Arkansas an opportunity to elect two Black judges to the court.

Currently, one Black judge sits on the Court of Appeals and none on the state Supreme Court.

During questioning, Dylan Jacobs, an attorney with Rutledge’s office, bore down on Cooper’s intent in drawing districts that split county lines in Pulaski, Jefferson and Mississippi counties, which Cooper said was required to equalize populations in the illustrative maps while providing Black majority districts that reflected Black population percentages in the 2020 census count.

Jacobs, on several occasions, challenged Cooper’s assertion that Black voters from urban and rural areas held common interests, which Cooper countered by pointing out an overriding common interest he said Humphrey had outlined.

“If Black voters want an opportunity to elect a Supreme Court justice, don’t you think that’s a common interest?” Cooper asked. “How about a shared history going back to 1619? Slavery? Jim Crow? You don’t see that?”

The trial continues this morning with Kymara Seals taking the stand.