Duckworth v. State Admin. Bd. of Election Laws

• Decision Date: 19 June 2003
• Docket Number: No. 02-1936.,02-1936.
• Parties: Robert P. DUCKWORTH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. STATE ADMINISTRATION BOARD OF ELECTION LAWS; Board of Supervisors of Elections for Anne Arundel County; John Willis, In his official capacity as Secretary of State, Defendants-Appellees, and Nancy Kopp, In her official capacity as Secretary of State, Defendant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

332 F.3d 769

Robert P. DUCKWORTH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. STATE ADMINISTRATION BOARD OF ELECTION LAWS; Board of Supervisors of Elections for Anne Arundel County; John Willis, In his official capacity as Secretary of State, Defendants-Appellees, and Nancy Kopp, In her official capacity as Secretary of State, Defendant.

No. 02-1936.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued: May 8, 2003.

Decided: June 19, 2003.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

ARGUED: John R. Greiber, Jr., Greiber & Scheibe, Glen Burnie, Maryland, for Appellant. Steven Marshall Sullivan, Assistant Attorney General, Baltimore, Maryland, for Appellees. ON BRIEF: Phillip F. Scheibe, Greiber & Scheibe, Glen Burnie, Maryland; Roy L. Mason, MASON, Ketterman & Cawood, P.A., Annapolis, Maryland, for Appellant. J. Joseph Curran, Jr., Attorney General of Maryland, Maureen M. Dove, Assistant Attorney General, Baltimore, Maryland; Robert A. Zarnoch, Assistant Attorney General, Kathryn M. Rowe, Assistant Attorney General, Annapolis, Maryland, for Appellees.

Before LUTTIG and MICHAEL, Circuit Judges, and GOODWIN, United States District Judge for the Southern District of West Virginia, sitting by designation.

Affirmed by published opinion. Judge LUTTIG wrote the opinion, in which Judge MICHAEL and Judge GOODWIN joined.

OPINION

LUTTIG, Circuit Judge:

This case presents the question of first impression before our court of whether a plaintiff can sustain his attack on the constitutionality of congressional district apportionment by alleging that the challenged districts are bizarrely drawn.

Appellant, Robert P. Duckworth, sued various Maryland agencies and officials, appellees, alleging that their enforcement of the state's 2002 congressional reapportionment statute, Laws of Maryland Chapter 340, violated the one man-one vote principle embodied within Article I, section 2 of the United States Constitution, the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, by apportioning Anne Arundel County voters into four different bizarrely-drawn congressional districts. The district court dismissed the case for failure to comply with Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6). On appeal, Duckworth does not challenge the dismissal of his Article I, section 2 and his First Amendment claims. He appeals only the district court's dismissal of his Fourteenth Amendment political gerrymandering claim. Having reviewed Duckworth's pleadings, we too conclude that he failed to state a valid claim, and so, for the reasons given below, we affirm the judgment of the district court.

I.

The central pleadings within Duckworth's Fourteenth Amendment complaint are that the state's 2002 apportionment of Anne Arundel County voters into four different congressional districts "intentionally, arbitrarily and invidiously debases and dilutes the votes of the residents of Anne Arundel County," First Amended Complaint, J.A. at 11, that the apportionment is "an illegal and intentional prearrangement of voters that ensures the election of Democratic candidates and thereby consistently degrades plaintiff's participation in and influence on the elective and political process as a whole," id. at 12, and that the challenged districts have "bizarre" shapes and are not contiguous. He argues that the bizarre appearance of the districts, and their alleged lack of contiguity, are proof of the state's districting manipulations, of the assured electoral victory of Democratic candidates, and of illegal repression of his political voice.

The district court rejected Duckworth's Fourteenth Amendment complaint, relying principally upon a 1991 decision by a three-judge district court in Anne Arundel County Republican Central Comm. v. State Admin. Bd. of Election Laws, 781 F.Supp. 394, 401 (D.Md.1991). In that case, Republican and Democratic committees from Anne Arundel County challenged the prior congressional apportionment, similarly claiming that the apportionment of county residents into four separate, bizarrely-drawn districts diluted the political voice of county residents. The three-judge court, after trial and consideration of proof, rejected the plaintiffs' claims, and the Supreme Court summarily affirmed. 504 U.S. 938, 112 S.Ct. 2269, 119 L.Ed.2d 197 (1992).

The district court concluded that since Duckworth's complaint did not differ materially from the Anne Arundel County Republican Central Comm. complaint,¹ and since it alleged no particular changed circumstances between the prior apportionment and the new, the complaint failed to state a claim. See District Court's Memorandum Opinion, J.A. at 113 ("As Duckworth fails to allude to any facts that suggest his claims are based on any particular provision in the 2002 plan, he cannot argue now that his claims hinge on a distinction between the plan at issue in the 1991 case and [Chapter 340]."). The district court reinforced its conclusion that Duckworth had not pled facts sufficient to state a claim by examining the facts at issue in Anne Arundel County Republican Central Comm. and demonstrating that Duckworth failed to allege certain equivalent facts here. See J.A. at 114-15.

Having concluded that Duckworth's complaint stated no claim, the court reasoned that the questions presented by the pleadings were insubstantial. As a result, the court did not forward Duckworth's complaint to a three-judge court, as provided for by 28 U.S.C. § 2284(a) (providing that a district court of three judges be convened to hear cases challenging congressional districting as unconstitutional), and instead dismissed the case itself on the authority of this court's precedent in Simkins v. Gressette, 631 F.2d 287, 295 (4th Cir.1980) (noting that convening a three-judge court is not required to address insubstantial claims).

Duckworth now appeals from that dismissal.

II.

We review de novo the district court's grant of a motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), inquiring solely whether Duckworth's pleadings adequately state a set of facts, which, if proven to be true, would entitle Duckworth to judicial relief. See Chisolm v. TranSouth Financial Corp., 95 F.3d 331, 334 (4th Cir.1996). If, as the district court concluded, Duckworth's pleadings do not state a claim, then by definition they are insubstantial and so properly are subject to dismissal by the district court without convening a three-judge court. See Simkins, 631 F.2d at 295.

A.

The district court's conclusion that Duckworth failed to state a claim rested on errant reasoning, and so we do not rely on it in affirming that court's judgment. While the district court rightly noted that Duckworth's pleading omitted certain facts pled in Anne Arundel County Republican Central Comm. (in particular the court noted the absence here of allegations as to the lack of political success by county Republicans) and that the omitted facts represented elements of the claim, the court improperly evaluated whether the facts Duckworth did plead satisfied the elements the omitted facts might have otherwise satisfied and thus sufficed to state a claim on their own.

The district court rejected the adequacy of the facts Duckworth did plead via a two-step analysis. First, the court concluded that Duckworth alleged no changed circumstances from the prior suit, Anne Arundel County Republican Central Comm. And then on that basis the court reasoned that the prior decision required the conclusion that Duckworth's claims were not well stated. In reaching this conclusion the court did not assert principles of res judicata or collateral estoppel, but instead relied on the precedential value of the earlier case.

Two points make evident the lower court's error in its analysis. First, though the court concluded that Duckworth pled no new changes in the districting, he did in fact plead changes. Because Duckworth's claim involves a different apportionment plan than was involved in Anne Arundel County Republican Central Comm., the maps of the districts that were and are alleged to be unconstitutionally drawn differ. And, since part of Duckworth's claim is that the districts' general appearance is "bizarre," and that that bizarreness evinces unconstitutional political gerrymandering, the pleading of the new districts' general appearance, though utilizing verbatim recitations, necessarily differs from the prior districts' general appearance pleading.

Secondly, the 1991 case on which the district court relied was decided on the merits after full review of the facts. See Anne Arundel County Republican Central Comm., 781 F.Supp. at 394-95. Thus, that court did not conclude as a matter of law that the pleadings were inadequate to state a claim. Indeed it implied the opposite, proceeding to trial and concluding that the proffered facts did not prove the (presumably well pled) claim.

The district court was therefore both presented with new allegations as to general appearance and with a decision from Anne Arundel County Republican Central Comm. that at least implied that pleadings as to general appearance might state a valid political gerrymandering claim on their own. In light of these circumstances, the lower court's conclusion that Duckworth's claims were foreclosed by precedent was in error.

B.

1.

Notwithstanding the district court's analytical error, we nonetheless conclude that its judgment of dismissal was proper. This is so because none of Duckworth's allegations, including his general appearance pleadings, are adequate to prove an unconstitutional political gerrymander, as that claim has been defined by the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court established that political gerrymandering claims are justiciable in federal courts in Davis v. Bandemer, 478 U.S. 109, 119-27, 106 S.Ct. 2797, 92 L.Ed.2d 85 (1986). There, importantly, the Court also gave clear definition to what is otherwise, by virtue of its widespread use in common parlance, a somewhat confusing term subject to different understandings: the political gerrymander.

First, the Court...