SINKFIELD ET AL.
v.
KELLEY, ET AL.

U.S. | 2000-11-27
No. 00-132
531 U.S. 28 Supreme Court of the United States (2000) Positive Treatment
Also reported at: 148 L. Ed. 2d 329 · 121 S. Ct. 446 · 2000 U.S. LEXIS 8081 · SCDB 2000-004
Cited by 11 cases

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Synopsis

White voters in Alabama challenged their own majority-white legislative districts as products of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, claiming that the districts' irregular shapes resulted from the state's deliberate creation of adjacent majority-minority districts. The Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the challenge because they failed to show they were personally subjected to racial classification or denied equal treatment, establishing that evidence of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering in neighboring majority-minority districts does not automatically prove an injury to voters in adjacent majority-white districts.


Headnotes

[1] A voter lacks standing to challenge a legislative district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander if the voter does not reside in the challenged district and has not p…

[2] A voter's claim of injury from racial gerrymandering is not cognizable under the Fourteenth Amendment merely because the racial composition of their own district might ha…

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Per_curiam
Per Curiam.

Per Curiam.

These cases involve a challenge to Alabama state legislative districts under the equal protection principles announced by this Court in Shaw v. Reno, 509 U. S. 630 (1993). Appellees, the plaintiffs below, are white Alabama voters who are residents of various majority-white districts. The districts in which appellees reside are adjacent to majority-minority districts. All of the districts were created under a state redistricting plan whose acknowledged purpose was the maximization of the number of majority-minority districts in Alabama. Appellants in No. 00-132 are a group of African-American voters whose initial state lawsuit resulted in the adoption of the redistricting plan at issue. Appellants in No. 00-133 are Alabama state officials.

Appellees brought suit in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama challenging their own districts as the products of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. A three-judge court convened to hear the case pursuant to 28 U. S. C. §2284. The District Court ultimately held that seven of the challenged majority-white districts were the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering and enjoined their use in any election. 96 F. Supp. 2d 1301 (MD Ala. 2000). On direct appeal to this Court pursuant to 28 U. S. C. § 1253, appellants in both cases contend, among other things, that appellees lack standing to maintain this suit under our decision in United States v. Hays, 515 U. S. 737 (1995). We agree.

Hays involved a challenge to Louisiana’s districting plan for its Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. The plan contained two majority-minority districts. The appel-lees lived in a majority-white district that bordered on one of the majority-minority districts. The appellees challenged the entire plan, including their own district, as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under our decision in Shaw v. Reno, supra. United States v. Hays, 515 U. S., at 739-742.

We concluded that the appellees lacked standing to maintain their challenge. We assumed for the sake of argument that the evidence was sufficient to state a Shaw claim with respect to the neighboring majority-minority district. Id., at 746. But we concluded that the appellees had not shown a cognizable injury under the Fourteenth Amendment because they did not reside in the majority-minority district and had not otherwise shown that they had “personally been denied equal treatment.” Id., at 744-746 (internal quotation marks omitted).

The appellees’ failure to show the requisite injury, we noted, was not changed by the fact that the racial composition of their own district might have been different had the legislature drawn the adjacent majority-minority district another way. Id., at 746.

Appellees’ position here is essentially indistinguishable from that of the appellees in Hays. Appellees are challenging their own majority-white districts as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering under a redistricting plan whose purpose was the ereation of majority-minority districts, some of which border appellees’ districts. Like the appellees in Hays, they have neither alleged nor produced any evidence that any of them was assigned to his or her district as a direct result of having “personally been subjected to a racial classification.” Id., at 745; see also Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U. S. 899, 904 (1996).

Rather, appellees suggest that they are entitled to a presumption of injury-in-fact because the bizarre shapes of their districts reveal that the districts were the product of an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. See App. to Pet. for Cert. 120a, 148a, 153a.

The shapes of appellees’ districts, however, were necessarily influenced by the shapes of the majority-minority districts upon which they border, and appellees have produced no evidence that anything other than the deliberate creation of those majority-minority districts is responsible for the districting lines of which they complain. Appellees’ suggestion thus boils down to the claim that an unconstitutional use of race in drawing the boundaries of majority-minority districts necessarily involves an unconstitutional use of race in drawing the boundaries of neighboring majority-white districts.

We rejected that argument in Hays, explaining that evidence sufficient to support a Shaw claim with respect to a majority-minority district did “not prove anything” with respect to a neighboring majority-white district in which the appellees resided. 515 U. S., at 746.

Accordingly, “an allegation to that effect does not allege a cognizable injury under the Fourteenth Amendment.” Ibid.

The judgment of the District Court is vacated, and the cases are remanded with instructions to dismiss the complaint.

It is so ordered.


Cases With Similar Vibessemantic neighbors from the corpus


Citator

Cited By

  • Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama, 135 S. Ct. 1257 (U.S. 2015)
    …stricting plans were modeled after max-black-inspired plans that the State put in place in the 1990's under the DOJ's max-black policy. See generally Kelley v. Bennett,96 F.Supp.2d 1301 (M.D.Ala.2000), vacated on other grounds by Sinkfield v. Kelley,531 U.S. 28, 121 S.Ct. 446, 148 L.Ed.2d 329 (2000)(per curiam). Following the 1990 Census, the Alabama Legislature began redrawing its state legislative districts. After several proposals failed in the legislature, a group of plaintiffs sued, and the State en…
    1 / 2
  • Sanders v. Dooly Cnty., 245 F.3d 1289 (11th Cir. 2001)
    …andered districts have suffered no cognizable harm if the districts are not the ones the districting plan originally set out to create, even if those gerrymandered districts are indispensable to the racially motivated plan. See Sinkfield v. Kelley, 531 U.S. 28, 121 S.Ct. 446, 447, 148 L.Ed.2d 329 (2000) (plaintiffs lacked standing because they did not live in the supermajority-minority districts of a max-black plan), vacating for lack of standing Kelley v. Bennett, 96 F. Supp. 2d 1301, 1312-20 (M.D.Ala.20…
    1 / 2
  • Hershell Gill Consulting Eng'rs, Inc. v. Miami-Dade Cnty., 333 F. Supp. 2d 1305 (S.D. Fla. 2004)
    …Caribbean and Latin America and long-term migration from countries like Cuba, but it is not a stretch to imagine the same sort of mix elsewhere given current demographic trends in the United States. Cf. Sinkfield v. Kelley, 531 U.S. 28, 30-81, 121 S.Ct. 446, 148 L.Ed.2d 329 (2000) (discussing minority — majority districts). As noted earlier, the MWBE programs provide “participation goals” of 25% for HBEs, 17% for WBEs, and 12% for BBEs. Yet in the County some of the “minorities” for whose benefit t…

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