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Friend,
The rain was coming down in sheets the day Tiara Young Hudson won the Democratic primary for circuit court judge in the Alabama county she has long served as a public defender. Voters were undeterred.
When the ballots were counted in Jefferson County, the most populous and most diverse in the state, they showed that more than 31,000 people had braved the storm to vote in the primary on that day in May. Fifty-four percent of them chose Hudson.
With no Republican challenger in the race, the outcome was tantamount to victory for Hudson in the general election in November. The attorney, wife, mother and dedicated churchgoer rejoiced, thanking her family and God in a public Facebook post.
Hudson was on track to be the first public defender to serve as a judge on the Jefferson County circuit court, and the first Black woman with a background as a public defender to serve on the bench anywhere in Alabama.
The celebration was short-lived.
Just over two weeks later a state commission, divided along racial lines, dissolved the judgeship Hudson had effectively won.
First, Circuit Judge Clyde Jones resigned from the seat, eight days after the May 24 primary and seven months before the end of his term. That gave the Judicial Resources Allocation Commission (JRAC) – created by Alabama’s Republican-dominated Legislature in 2017 – the opportunity to consider transferring his seat.
The next week, the commission voted to permanently relocate the seat from Jefferson County, where the crime rate is the highest in Alabama, to majority-white Madison County. All three Black members of the commission voted against transferring the judgeship. All eight white members voted in favor.
The chairman of JRAC called the move a simple matter of filling a need in Madison County. But the transfer of the judgeship, the first by the commission since it was created, has been met with overwhelming objections. At a JRAC meeting before the vote, members of the public testified that the move strips a county with a substantial Black population of a critical resource and gives that resource to a county where white people comprise nearly 70% of the population (as opposed to 48% in Jefferson County).
Last month, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama filed a lawsuit on behalf of Hudson to challenge the constitutionality of the transfer.
Underlying the case is a question that goes to the heart of the SPLC’s mission: By stripping a judgeship from the state’s largest metropolitan area, where criminal cases are numerous and complex, is an injustice being done? And is this new commission being weaponized to shuffle judgeships in such a way that diverse communities lack fair representation in the judiciary?
“This goes back to the people’s power to have representation. It goes to the power of voting,” said Ahmed Soussi, voting rights staff attorney for the SPLC. “Judges are elected by the people in Alabama, and we believe the constitution states that only the Legislature decides how many judges can be in a specific area. JRAC doesn’t represent the people. It is this niche state agency that is making this first big move. We want to challenge this right away, because we believe this is unconstitutional, and we want to make sure that no other judges are removed unconstitutionally. If we don’t, what will stop JRAC from taking all the judges out of Jefferson County?”
According to the complaint, the decision to eliminate Jefferson County’s Tenth Judicial Circuit, Place 14 judgeship and permanently relocate the seat to the Twenty Third Judicial Circuit in Madison County violates the Alabama Constitution. The state constitution, the plaintiffs argue, gives only the Legislature – not a commission created by it, unelected and unaccountable to voters – the authority to reallocate judgeships. The white members of the commission have made multiple attempts to transfer judgeships from Jefferson County to Madison County, but unsuccessfully until now, according to the complaint.
At an Aug. 8 hearing, attorneys for the SPLC and the ACLU of Alabama asked a judge to issue a preliminary injunction to immediately block the commission’s decision.
On Aug. 12, Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Jimmy B. Pool dismissed the lawsuit on the basis that the plaintiff did not use the correct procedure to remove a sitting judge from office under these circumstances. As a result, the judgeship will remain in Madison County unless a higher court overrules Pool’s decision.
“We are disappointed that the court refused to step in and prevent this unconstitutional removal of a circuit court judgeship from Birmingham,” Soussi said. “The community of Jefferson County deserves fair representation on the bench and access to a court system with the full resources to serve them, but they are being denied both by Alabama’s current system.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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