Cook v. Luckett

• Decision Date: 09 July 1984
• Docket Number: No. 83-4653,83-4653
• Parties: Billy N. COOK, Robert Carter, Individually and on behalf of all other resident citizens and qualified electors of Madison County, Mississippi, Plaintiffs- Appellees, v. Pat H. LUCKETT, Jr., Dorothy L. Dowdle, J.S. Harris, Jr., A.E. Crawford and E.D. Mansell, in their official capacities as duly elected supervisors of Madison County, Mississippi, et al., Defendants. CANTON BRANCH, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR the ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Don LANE, George Elliott, Willie Harrell, Alive Scott and Roy Davis, in their official capacities as Election Commissioners of Madison County, Mississippi, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 912

735 F.2d 912

Billy N. COOK, Robert Carter, Individually and on behalf of

all other resident citizens and qualified electors

of Madison County, Mississippi, Plaintiffs- Appellees, v. Pat H. LUCKETT, Jr., Dorothy L. Dowdle, J.S. Harris, Jr.,

A.E. Crawford and E.D. Mansell, in their official

capacities as duly elected supervisors

of Madison County,

Mississippi, et al.,

Defendants.

CANTON BRANCH, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR the ADVANCEMENT OF

COLORED PEOPLE, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Don LANE, George Elliott, Willie Harrell, Alive Scott and Roy Davis, in their official capacities as

Election Commissioners of Madison

County, Mississippi, et al.,

Defendants-Appellees.

No. 83-4653.

United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit.

July 9, 1984.

Powell & Fancher, Joe R. Fancher, Canton, Miss., Crosthwait, Terney, Noble & Eastland, Hubbard T. Saunders, IV, Jackson, Miss., George Milton Case, Ridgeland, Miss., for Luckett et al.

Christopher & Stater, Stanley F. Stater, III, John W. Christopher, Canton, Miss., McTeer & Bailey, Charles Victor McTeer, Greenville, Miss., for Cook, et al.

Edward Blackmon, Jr., Canton, Miss., for Branch, et al.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.

Before WISDOM, REAVLEY and HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judges.

REAVLEY, Circuit Judge:

Madison County, Mississippi has elected its supervisors from the same five geographic districts since at least 1890. Shifts in population since that time have rendered the old districts seriously uneven in population. The local chapter of the NAACP and several private plaintiffs filed separate actions in 1983 seeking a reapportionment of the supervisor districts. The district court received proposed plans from the county, in which the NAACP joined, and from the private plaintiffs. That court rejected the county's proposal and ordered that impending elections proceed under the plan suggested by the private plaintiffs. The county and the NAACP appealed, but the county withdrew after we declined to stay the district court's order. Supervisory elections have now taken place under the new plan. We hold that the district court erred in rejecting the county's plan in its entirety. Recognizing that resort to the county's original plan may now be effectively foreclosed, we dissolve the district court's injunction imposing the private plan and remand the case to the district court with directions.

I

Madison County lies just to the north of Jackson, Mississippi's largest city. Like all Mississippi counties, Madison is divided into five supervisory districts, or "beats," each of which elects a single member of the Board of Supervisors, which governs the county. Madison County has experienced explosive growth in the past few decades, especially at its southern end where the effect of Jackson's expansion is most directly felt. Despite its geographically uneven growth, the county has elected its five supervisors from the same five districts since at least 1890. By 1980, the population disparity had become extreme. The largest was district one, which included the whole of Canton, the county seat, and had a population of 16,963. The smallest was district five, which covered Madison's rural northern end; its population was only 2,169. The total percentage-point variance from the mean was about 178%. ¹

Billy N. Cook and Robert Carter (the Cook plaintiffs) filed suit against the sitting supervisors and several Madison County election officials on June 6, 1983; the Canton branch of the NAACP filed a week later. Both complaints alleged that Madison's supervisory districts violated the principle of one man, one vote announced by the Supreme Court in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 84 S.Ct. 1362, 12 L.Ed.2d 506 (1964), and both sought to enjoin the primary and run-off elections then scheduled for August 2 and 23, 1983. The NAACP also alleged that the existing district lines unconstitutionally diluted the political power of black voters in violation of the equal protection principle announced in early cases such as Fortson v. Dorsey, 379 U.S. 433, 85 S.Ct. 498, 13 L.Ed.2d 401 (1965), Burns v. Richardson, 384 U.S. 73, 86 S.Ct. 1286, 16 L.Ed.2d 376 (1966), and White v. Regester, 412 U.S. 755, 93 S.Ct. 2332, 37 L.Ed.2d 314 (1973). See Rogers v. Lodge 458 U.S. 613, 102 S.Ct. 3272, 73 L.Ed.2d 1012 (1982); City of Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55, 100 S.Ct. 1490, 64 L.Ed.2d 47 (1980) (plurality); Jones v. City of Lubbock, 727 F.2d 364 (5th Cir.1984). ² The county defendants responded to both complaints by admitting that the existing supervisory districts were malapportioned under Reynolds v. Sims. They denied the NAACP's claim that the district lines unconstitutionally diluted the voting strength of black citizens.

The district court consolidated the actions and on July 23, 1983, declared the population variance among the supervisory districts unconstitutional and enjoined the scheduled August elections. ³ An evidentiary hearing was set for August 31, 1983, at which "all parties to this litigation and all other interested parties may come forward with plans" for redistricting Madison County.

All parties immediately set to work. The county retained an expert, Robert B. Hardy, and asked him to prepare a reapportionment plan. Hardy submitted his proposal at a public meeting August 16, 1983. For two hours the Board of Supervisors discussed the district lines proposed in Hardy's draft plan with a crowd of citizens, consisting mostly of blacks concerned that their voting strength not be diluted. Several modifications were made, and the Board eventually approved the amended plan (the County Plan). The NAACP negotiated with the county in the formulation of its plan and participated in the public hearings; it joined in the county's final version. The Cook plaintiffs also retained an expert, Joseph A. Lusteck, who prepared a second plan (the Cook Plan). Both the County Plan and the Cook Plan were submitted to the district court at the August 31 hearing.

The County Plan can only be understood in light of the existing district lines, for, as the district court recognized, the county proposed to retain the old lines whenever possible. Cook v. Luckett, 575 F.Supp. 485, 487 (S.D.Miss.1983). Madison County's urban population was concentrated in two high-population districts: district one covered the north-central part of the county and included all of Canton, a city of about 11,000 people in 1980; district three comprised the southern section of the county and contained both Ridgeland and Madison, two towns just north of Jackson totalling almost 8,000 people. The central problem in redistricting the county was to distribute these two urban pockets among the several supervisory districts and thereby to equalize the population of all five districts.

The County Plan achieved this population distribution by using the old districts as a starting point and creating corridors from outlying districts into Canton and down into the Jackson environs in southern Madison County. One corridor ran from sparsely populated district five in rural northern Madison County down along the west side of Highway 51 into Canton, where it broadened to take in the northern half of the city. A second corridor extended rural district four into a corner of district one and took in part of south Canton. The effect of these two population corridors was to leave district one bizarrely shaped: its western and most of its eastern sections were unchanged, but they were joined by only a narrow corridor that meandered through Canton, at times only a block or two wide. Similar corridors were used to distribute southern Madison County's urban population among districts two and four. District two, in the far western part of the county, extended south and east to take in half of Ridgeland; district four in eastern Madison County expanded down the shore of the Ross Barnett Reservoir along a very narrow corridor to pick up urban population in the southern part of the county. These two corridors left district three a compact triangle shape including all of Madison and part of Ridgeway.

The Cook plaintiffs abandoned the old district lines entirely because they found them arbitrary and insufficiently tied to discernable geographical boundaries. Beginning afresh, Lusteck simply divided the county as a pie with Canton at its center. The Cook Plan described district lines along much more discernable boundaries than those proposed by the county and created districts shaped much more comprehensibly than the county's "dumbbell" district one or its extremely narrow district four corridor.

Hardy testified that the County Plan created five districts of almost equal population, varying at the extremes only a total of 0.2% from the mean. That figure was challenged by the Cook plaintiffs' expert, Lusteck. Both he and Hardy used census data in drafting their plans, and both were forced to draw lines through the geographic units into which that data is organized. Lusteck had recalculated the population in split census units under the County Plan, and testified that the districts proposed by the county varied more from the mean than Hardy had figured. That error, together with an adjustment for population from an apartment complex in southern Madison County, created a total variance of 10.6% under Lusteck's analysis of the County Plan. Lusteck calculated the total variance under the Cook Plan to be only 2.5%.

The two plans also differed in their effect on the voting strength of blacks in Madison County. ⁴ The 1980 census revealed that 55.9% of Madison county's population was black; the proportion of blacks to whites in the county had fallen steadily over the past 20 years from a 1960 level of 71.8%. Under the old apportionment, three districts contained populations over 70% black, one had a population of 56% black, and one had only 27.2% black. The County Plan would have created two districts...