Federal Court Rules Mississippi Must Redraw Legislative Map

A Morgan Lewis pro bono team won a major voting rights case when a federal court ordered the State of Mississippi to redraw several 2022 state legislative maps. In concert with various civil rights organizations, our team persuaded the court that the state maps unlawfully diluted the voting strength of Black Mississippians.

The ruling came from a panel of federal judges in the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi on July 2. Our team worked alongside the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Mississippi, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Mississippi Center for Justice, and civil rights attorney Carroll Rhodes to represent the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP and voters from across the state. After an eight-day trial, the court held that plaintiffs had met their burden to establish that Mississippi’s 2022 state legislative maps violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The ruling decreed that state lawmakers must create new Black-majority Senate districts in the areas around DeSoto County in Northern Mississippi as well as in and around the city of Hattiesburg. They also must draw a new Black-majority House district in the counties of Chickasaw and Monroe.

This was a complex case. The plaintiffs’ team called six expert witnesses—an electoral mapmaker, a historian, and multiple political scientists who conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses of voter turnout, racial polarization in voting, and race in politics—who examined Mississippi politics from every angle.

Eight plaintiff trial witnesses also testified. Residents of the contested districts, they presented powerful, uncontradicted testimony about their living and voting conditions, which testimony was cited by the court as support for its determination that the totality of the circumstances weighed in favor of plaintiffs on their Voting Rights Act claims. 

In addition to the successful ruling, plaintiffs’ counsel was rewarded by the court with a compliment in its ruling that acknowledged the high quality of lawyering performed by lawyers on both sides of the issue: “Voting-rights litigation can be contentious. In this lawsuit, though, lawyers and witnesses were respectful and measured in the expression of the disagreements about the law and the evidence. Some very wise and experienced Mississippi voting-rights lawyers appeared on both sides of this dispute. New and quite able lawyers from within and beyond the state’s borders appeared as well. All are to be commended.”

Read more about the trial in The AmLaw Litigation Daily, which recognized the team as a runner-up in its Litigators of the Week contest.