Dillard v. Baldwin County Com'Rs
| Decision Date | 13 July 2004 |
| Docket Number | No. 03-14668.,No. 03-16061.,03-14668.,03-16061. |
| Citation | 376 F.3d 1260 |
| Parties | John DILLARD, Plaintiff-Cross-Claimant-Appellant, Damascus Crittenden, Jr., Earwen Ferrell, Clarence J. Jarrells, Ullysses McBride, Louis Hall, Jr., Plaintiffs-Appellants, Billy R. Smith, Joe E. Horace, Willie E. Edwards, Intervenor-Plaintiffs-Cross-Claimants-Appellants, Dale Eugene Brown, George R. Johnson, James Austin, Alvin Lee Pitts, Intervenor-Plaintiffs, Cross Defendants-Appellees, v. BALDWIN COUNTY COMMISSIONERS, Defendants-Appellees, Adrian Johns, Intervenor-Defendant, Appellee. John Dillard, Plaintiff-Cross-Claimant-Appellant, Damascus Crittenden, Jr., Earwen Ferrell, Clarence J. Jarrells, Ullysses McBride, Louis Hall, Jr., Plaintiffs-Appellants, Billy R. Smith, Joe E. Horace, Willie E. Edwards, Intervenor-Plaintiffs-Cross-Claimants-Appellants, Dale Eugene Brown, George R. Johnson, James Austin, Jr., Alvin Lee Pitts, Intervenor-Plaintiffs, Cross-Defendants-Appellees. v. Baldwin County Commissioners, Defendant-Appellee, Adrian Johns, Intervenor-Defendant, Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit |
James U. Blacksher, Birmingham, AL, for Appellants.
Patrick H. Sims, Mobile, AL, Albert L. Jordan, Wallace, Jordan, Ratliff & Brandt, L.L.C., Birmingham, AL, Algert Swanson Agricola, Jr., Wallace, Jordan, Ratliff & Brandt, John J. Park, Jr., Montgomery, AL, for Appellees.
Appeals from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama.
Before DUBINA and CARNES, Circuit Judges, and MILLS*, District Judge.
In this appeal, we are confronted with the question of whether a federal court must award relief on a vote dilution claim brought under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 42 U.S.C. § 1973, where the circumstances of the case make clear that no form of relief available under section 2 will empower the protected minority group with any meaningful opportunity to elect the candidate of its choice. We answer the question in the negative and therefore affirm the district court's order dissolving a permanent injunction that the district court had imposed on Appellee Baldwin County Commission (the "Commission") in 1988, after concluding, nearly fifteen years later, that further section 2 relief was unavailable.
The epic history of this case began nearly twenty years ago, as an outgrowth of earlier proceedings in another case initiated by Plaintiff-Appellant John Dillard and other African-American citizens of Alabama (collectively "Dillard")1 in order to challenge the at-large, numbered-post election schemes2 employed by nine Alabama counties under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. See Dillard v. Crenshaw County, 640 F.Supp. 1347 (M.D.Ala.1986). The district court found in that case that these election schemes were the product of, or tainted by, racially inspired enactments of the Alabama legislature, id. at 1357-60, and subsequently allowed Dillard to expand his complaint to include 183 cities, counties, and county school boards that were using similar voting systems.
The Commission was among the entities added to Dillard v. Crenshaw County after the district court made its initial findings. At that time, the Commission was composed of four commissioners that were elected under a system that included the challenged structural features. See Dillard v. Baldwin County Comm'n, 694 F.Supp. 836, 837 (M.D.Ala.1988) ("Dillard I"). Rather than litigate the entire dispute, the Commission entered into a consent decree with Dillard in which it agreed "not [to] contest the plaintiffs' claims that its present at-large election system violates the Voting Rights Act." However, the Commission vigorously contested the issue of what would constitute an appropriate remedy for this conceded violation. Id.
In proceedings conducted in the district court, the Commission offered to increase the size of the Commission from four to five and to abandon the challenged numbered-post feature of its existing voting system. Id. at 838. In theory, the resulting "pure" at-large voting system would have improved minority voting strength by allowing candidates that were less popular with the white majority to win elections with a plurality of votes cast.
Dillard argued that the Commission's proposed remedy itself violated the Voting Rights Act, and urged the district court to carve Baldwin County into seven single-member districts, gerrymandered to create a district with an African-American majority. Id. According to Dillard, increasing the Commission to seven members was imperative because of the small and declining size of the African-American population in Baldwin County, which was projected to fall below 14% of the county's total population by 1990. Id. at 839-40. The district court agreed with Dillard and entered a permanent injunction adopting Dillard's proposal. Id. at 844-45.3 The redistricting of the county created a district with an African-American population that was expected to be over 63% in 1990. Id. at 843.
Six years after the district court entered its injunction, a plurality of the Supreme Court decided in Holder v. Hall, 512 U.S. 874, 114 S.Ct. 2581, 129 L.Ed.2d 687 (1994), that a federal court cannot modify the size of an elected governing body in order to remedy a section 2 violation because "[t]here is no principled reason why one size should be picked over another as the benchmark for [determining whether vote dilution has occurred]." Id. at 881, 114 S.Ct. at 2586. Subsequently, this court held in Nipper v. Smith, 39 F.3d 1494 (11th Cir.1994) (en banc), that "under Holder, federal courts may not mandate as a section 2 remedy that a state or political subdivision alter the size of its elected bodies." Id. at 1532; see also White v. Alabama, 74 F.3d 1058, 1072 (11th Cir.1996) ().
In light of these decisions, Dale Brown and other residents of Baldwin County (collectively "Brown") moved to intervene in the case in October 1996, seeking vacatur of the injunction on grounds that it exceeded the district court's powers under the Voting Rights Act, and that it violated the Tenth and Eleventh Amendments. The district court allowed Brown to intervene post-judgment but then dismissed his complaint on grounds that he failed to state a claim on which relief could be granted. Dillard v. Baldwin County Comm'n, 53 F.Supp.2d 1266, 1268, 1273 (M.D.Ala.1999) ("Dillard III"). On appeal from that decision, we reversed, holding that Brown had stated a claim for relief cognizable both under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violations of the Tenth and Eleventh Amendments. Dillard v. Baldwin County Comm'rs, 225 F.3d 1271, 1280-82 (11th Cir.2000) ("Dillard IV"). We remanded the case to the district court to consider inter alia whether the 1988 injunction may have been an appropriate remedy under the Fourteenth Amendment, even though it had been improper under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Id. at 1282-83.
On remand, the district court conducted a bench trial, during which the evidence showed that the 1988 injunction had not increased African-American voting power in Baldwin County as intended because the proportion of African-American voters in the county had continued to decline. As of the 2000 census, the county's voting-age African-American population had declined to 9.13%, and Baldwin County no longer had a majority-minority district. Faced with this reality, Dillard now asked the district court to abandon the single-member district scheme that he had demanded fifteen years earlier, and argued instead for the court to compel the Commission to adopt a cumulative voting system,4 or in the alternative, to order the Commission to adopt a "pure" at-large system, the remedy Dillard complained was inadequate fifteen years earlier, when Baldwin County's African-American population represented a substantially larger proportion of the county's total population. In either case, Dillard argued that the district court had "no basis" for reducing the Commission to its pre-injunction size, in spite of the Supreme Court's decision in Holder, and this court's en banc holding in Nipper. Dillard stressed that, although the injunction could be modified, it could not be modified against the interest of the minority class if the injunction had been a legitimate remedy in 1988, as voting rights law was understood at that time, even though subsequent mandatory authority has made clear that it could never be a legitimate remedy for any future section 2 plaintiff.
The district court rejected Dillard's arguments and concluded that it lacked any basis for retaining supervision of the Commission's election system. Dillard v. Baldwin County Comm'n, 222 F.Supp.2d 1283, 1287 (M.D.Ala.2002) ("Dillard V"). After Dillard moved to amend the district court's judgment, the court explained that it could no longer find a section 2 violation because "[t]he political weakness of the African-American community in Baldwin County [now] results from its being less than 10% of the voting age population and the fact that it does not live in a geographically compact community." Dillard v. Baldwin County Comm'n, 282 F.Supp.2d 1302, 1303 (M.D.Ala.2003) ("Dillard VI"). The court further concluded that the cumulative voting system that Dillard now sought was not an appropriate section 2 "results" remedy because "there is no objective and workable standard for choosing [it as a] reasonable benchmark[ ] over the many forms of government." Id. (internal quotations omitted). This appeal followed.
Whether the district court abused its discretion by dissolving its injunction on the ground that the African-American...
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