John W. Sanders v. Dooly County, GA

[PUBLISH]
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS \
FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT FILED
________________________ U.S. COURT OF
APPEALS
ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
No. 00-12850 MAR 29, 2001
________________________ THOMAS K. KAHN
CLERK
D. C. Docket No. 98-00412-CV-2-DF-5
JOHN W. SANDERS, PERRY L. BRIDGES, et al.,
Plaintiffs-Appellants,
versus
DOOLY COUNTY, GA, TERRELL HUDSON,
in his official capacity as member of Dooly County
Board of Commissioners, et al.,
Defendants-Appellees,
DOOLY CO. NAACP, JAMES L. TAYLOR, et al.,
Interveners-Defendants-
Appellees.
________________________
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Middle District of Georgia
_________________________
(March 29, 2001)
Before BLACK, RONEY and COX, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM:
The plaintiffs, five voters in Dooly County, Georgia, sued county officials,
claiming that a districting plan, shared by the county commission and the board of
education and effectuated by consent decree, contains racially gerrymandered districts
that violate the equal-protection principles announced in Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630,
113 S. Ct. 2816 (1993), and elaborated in Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 115 S. Ct.
2475 (1995), and many cases since. The district court granted the defendants
summary judgment on laches grounds. According to the court, the plaintiffs’ waiting
until November 1998 to file suit — over six years after the first use of the plan and
five years after Shaw v. Reno issued — was an inexcusable delay. This delay
prejudiced the defendants and citizens of Dooly County, the court concluded, in two
principal ways: (1) redistricting late in the decade would lead to back-to-back
redistrictings (the court-ordered one and the one using new census data) that would
confuse voters and be unnecessarily costly to the County; and (2) the census data
available to redistrict now are over ten years old and thus unreliable. The plaintiffs
appeal.
Before reaching the merits of the appeal, we discharge our duty to examine the
district court’s jurisdiction, here questionable because two of the plaintiffs lack
standing. See Wilson v. Minor, 220 F.3d 1297, 1303 n.11 (11th Cir. 2000). Beginning
with Hays v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court has limited standing on this kind of equal-
2
protection claim to residents of the challenged district. 515 U.S. 737, 738, 115 S. Ct.
2431, 2433 (1995). The plaintiffs do live in the districts they challenge, but since the
district court entered its judgment, the Supreme Court has further trimmed the number
of proper Shaw plaintiffs by holding that the residents of intentionally racially
gerrymandered 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, 121
S. Ct. 446, 447 (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. 2000) (finding after trial
that intentional race-motivated gerrymandering produced some of the majority-
majority districts challenged by plaintiffs who lived in them). The plaintiffs allege
that the plan set out to create three majority-black districts. Taking that allegation as
true (because standing did not come up below, the plaintiffs have had no opportunity
to present evidence), it means that the plaintiffs who live in majority-white Districts
2 and 3, George C. Griggs and John W. Sanders, have suffered no cognizable harm
from the alleged gerrymandering of their districts. The district court therefore lacked
jurisdiction over their claims, for want of standing.
3
Turning to the merits, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its
discretion in deeming the claims seeking injunctive relief to be laches-barred for the
reasons that we described above. Cf. Fouts v. Harris, 88 F. Supp. 2d 1351, 1353 (S.D.
Fla. 1999) (relying on similar laches reasoning to dismiss Shaw claims), aff’d sub
nom. Chandler v. Harris, 120 S. Ct. 1716 (2000). But we do think that the district
court overstepped its discretion in judging the claims for declaratory relief to be
similarly barred, because the third element of a laches defense — prejudice to the
defendants from the unexcused delay — is missing. See AmBrit, Inc. v. Kraft, Inc.,
812 F.2d 1531, 1545 (11th Cir. 1986) (listing elements). None of the grounds for
prejudice that the district court relied on applies to the plaintiffs’ claims for a
declaration that the 1992 plan violates the Equal Protection Clause. There is no risk
of confusion from a redistricting, obviously; no burden to the county to redistrict; and
no use of out-of-date census data. An effect of a grant of such declaratory relief could
be to prevent the Attorney General from using the 1993 consent-decree plan as a
baseline for retrogression analysis in the post-2000 census round of preclearance
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proceedings under § 5 of the Voting Rights Act,1, 2
but that effect is no more
prejudicial to the defendants now than it would have been in 1993.
For the foregoing reasons, we (1) vacate the judgments against plaintiffs Griggs
and Sanders; (2) affirm the summary judgment against the remaining plaintiffs on
their claims for injunctive relief; (3) reverse the grant of summary judgment against
the remaining plaintiffs on their claims for declaratory relief; and (4) remand for
further proceedings and with instructions to dismiss Griggs’s and Sanders’s claims for
want of jurisdiction.
VACATED IN PART; AFFIRMED IN PART; REVERSED IN PART;
REMANDED WITH INSTRUCTIONS IN PART.
1
42 U.S.C. § 1973c.
2
See Abrams v. Johnson, 521 U.S. 74, 96, 117 S. Ct. 1925, 1938 (1997) (plan declared
unconstitutional under Shaw may not serve as retrogression baseline); Office of the Assistant
Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, Guidance Concerning Redistricting and Retrogression
Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. 1973c, 66 Fed. Reg. 5412, 5413 (January
18, 2001) (“Absent . . . a finding of unconstitutionality under Shaw by a federal court, the last
legally enforceable plan will serve as benchmark for Section 5 review.”); see also 28 C.F.R. §
51.54(b)(1)(retrogression comparison under § 5 is with the last “legally enforceable” practice
when existing practice is not “in effect” and otherwise unenforceable under § 5).
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