|
Friend,
As the Alabama Supreme Court considers hearing arguments on whether the transfer of a judgeship earlier this year from a large, majority-Black county to a smaller, less diverse one violates the state’s constitution, prominent members of the Magic City Bar Association are raising questions about the reallocation of the circuit court seat.
At issue is the vote by a commission created by Alabama’s Republican-dominated Legislature to permanently relocate the seat from Jefferson County, the most populous and diverse in the state, to majority-white Madison County. The vote, divided along racial lines, effectively dissolved the seat that Tiara Hudson, a veteran public defender, had been nominated to fill after a decisive win in a primary election.
The transfer means the state’s largest metropolitan area, where criminal cases are numerous and complex, has one fewer circuit court judge to hear such cases. It means the bench will not include Hudson, who would have been the first Black woman with a background as a public defender to serve on the bench anywhere in Alabama and the first public defender to serve as a circuit judge in Jefferson County. And it means that despite winning 54% of the primary vote, Hudson is left fighting in the courts for the position she was on track to win at the ballot box.
“What happened here is problematic,” said Ralph Cook, a retired associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and a former law school dean who in 1976 became the first Black person to be elected to a district judgeship in the state. “The judgeship should not have been transferred.”
Cook and others who are openly expressing their concerns about the transfer underline that their questions are rooted in analysis of the state constitution. No evidence has emerged that the decision to transfer the seat was racially motivated, and the chairman of the Judicial Resources Allocation Commission (JRAC) called the move a simple matter of filling a need in Madison County. Still, the dispute is opening the wounds of Alabama’s deeply troubled past, as questions swirl over whether the new commission is being deployed to deny diverse communities fair representation in the judiciary.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama are representing Hudson in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the transfer. In August, they appealed the case to the state Supreme Court after a circuit judge dismissed it.
The plaintiffs argue that the state constitution 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 have been unsuccessful until now, according to the original complaint.
‘Red flag’
Ahmed Soussi, a voting rights staff attorney with the SPLC, called the delegation to the commission of the power to shift the seat from one county to another “a red flag for voting rights and specifically for the people to elect their local judges and other officeholders.”
The timing of the transfer, Soussi said, is especially problematic, coming as it did on the heels of an election in which the voters of Jefferson County cast ballots overwhelmingly for Hudson.
“The reason our system works is we vote people in to make decisions,” Soussi said. “When you give power to people not voted in by the electorate, like this commission, this is when you start having judgeships moved from a diverse county to a majority-white county.”
READ MORE
In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
|
