Boston's districts must be redrawn
House map is ruled to be racially unfair
A panel of federal judges ordered Massachusetts House leaders yesterday to redraw the Boston legislative map, determining that the plan crafted by House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran and his lieutenants was designed to protect their own political futures at the expense of black voters' constitutional rights.
The ruling gave House leaders six weeks to come up with a new map before the court creates a plan for them. The decision also barred the state from holding elections in the 17 House districts until the map is approved by the court.
The long-awaited ruling effectively throws this year's legislative campaigns into chaos, Secretary of State William F. Galvin said yesterday, because redrawing the districts may require changing dozens of adjacent districts. The decision also adds another divisive issue to a legislative agenda that includes the debate over gay marriage and the annual fight over the state budget.
In a ruling that chastised House leaders, the three-judge panel criticized "the House's willingness to turn a blind eye to the racial implications of its single-minded effort to protect incumbents at virtually any social cost."
The House Redistricting Committee "made African-American incumbents less vulnerable by adding black voters to their districts and made white incumbents less vulnerable by keeping their districts as `white' as possible," the Boston-based panel, led by Judge Bruce M. Selya, said in its ruling. "Its actions evinced a willingness to move district lines simply to safeguard incumbents' seats, without regard to other objectives. This course of conduct sacrificed racial fairness to the voters on the altar of incumbency protection."
At one point during the redistricting process, House leaders boasted that they had created a minority-dominated Roxbury district with no sitting incumbent. But they altered the district on the House floor to help a white incumbent who was considering a run for reelection.
The 2001 redistricting process followed a 2000 Census that showed what the judges called "a burgeoning minority population" in Boston. But the plan devised by Finneran and other lawmakers was a step back from the plan in place during the 1990s, the ruling said, noting that the number of white-dominated districts increased by one after the 2001 redistricting. Voting rights groups that brought the case hailed the ruling, and said they plan to watch Finneran and his colleagues closely as they set about crafting a new redistricting plan for the state's capital city.
"Gerrymandering is alive and well in Massachusetts," said Pamela H. Wilmot of Common Cause Massachusetts.
James E. Cofield Jr. of the Black Political Task Force, which brought the suit with several other groups, said: "Now it's back to the drawing boards for the Legislature, and we will attempt to help them during their process, as opposed to just reacting after they finish, which happened the first time around. Hopefully, they will be attentive to our suggestions."
In 1987, the Black Political Task Force sued the Legislature in US District Court on similar grounds and also won, forcing lawmakers to redraw the district map in an election year, 1988. After much fiery debate, the new map was approved in time for Election Day.
In light of the two recent cases and a spate of similar rulings nationwide, Wilmot said her group will now urge passage of an amendment to the state constitution to take the redistricting process away from the Legislature and give it to an independent commission. Arizona, for example, has an independent commission in charge of legislative and congressional redistricting.
"We're constantly in courts going over redistricitng plans, and courts are redrawing lines time and again," Wilmot said. "It goes to the conflict of interest that people who benefit from the process are drawing the lines." On Feb. 10, a three-judge panel in Georgia ruled that state's House and Senate legislative districts violate the Equal Protection clause of the US Constitution. A similar ruling came down roughly a month earlier in Arizona, and congressional district maps have been thrown out in recent months in Colorado and Texas.
Finneran was described in the ruling as keeping the redistricting process "on a short leash," and he declined to comment yesterday.
Finneran's Redistricting Committee chairman, Representative Thomas M. Petrolati, issued a brief statement defending the ultimate plan enacted by the House. "While I respectively [sic] disagree with the Court's decision I will work with the members of the committee, with all due diligence, to meet the requirements of the court within the time the court has set," Petrolati wrote.
During the trial last fall, Finneran, a Mattapan Democrat, insisted that the redistricting plan did not unfairly divide minority neighborhoods, but he conceded that his aides tried to ensure that sitting representatives were not harmed by shifting demographics revealed by a new census.
When the lines were redrawn, Finneran's district shed three overwhelmingly minority neighborhoods and took on three that were at least 95 percent white, including areas of Milton. Even as Boston for the first time emerged as a "majority-minority" city in the 2000 federal census, Finneran's district went from 74 percent minority to 61 percent minority.
"The House was comfortable with manipulating district lines," the court ruled. "This sad fact speaks to the totality of the circumstances."
Finneran, on the stand and in written testimony, also told the court that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the process of redistricting, a stance that the three-judge panel found hard to believe, saying "the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests the opposite conclusion."
The court ultimately warned House leaders not to "rob Peter to pay Paul" by generating a new legislative map that would diminish other minorities' representation in order to help African-Americans.
Galvin held a press conference yesterday to urge prospective candidates in Greater Boston to cease collecting signatures for their nominating petitions until district lines are made clear. Under state law, a candidate must collect 150 signatures from registered voters inside the district and submit them to municipal clerks, which was to have taken place this year by April 27, Galvin said. The House has until April 6 to fashion a new map for the Boston districts, but Galvin said the process of collecting signatures should take only about two weeks. "The impact of this decision is quite dramatic," Galvin said. "We would hope the Legislature moves expeditiously to remedy the deficits found. . . . It's our hope that while the Legislature has been given a six-week period that they will in fact use a lot less time to create these new districts."
George Pillsbury of BostonVOTE, which was also involved in the lawsuit, said the process could move forward speedily if Finneran and his colleagues simply adopt the plaintiff's proposal, which would focus on the districts held by Finneran and representatives Shirley Owens-Hicks, Elizabeth Malia, and Marie St. Fleur.
"The case is really all about four districts," Pillsbury said. "This should not change the entire state map." 