Cite as: 528 U. S. 320 (2000)
Opinion of Souter, J.
It becomes all the clearer that the prospect of splitting precincts was no genuine reason to reject the NAACP plan (or otherwise to refuse to consider creating any majority-black districts) when one realizes that from early on in the Board's redistricting process it gave serious thought to adopting a plan that would have required just such precinct splits. When the Board hired Joiner as its cartographer in May 1991, his estimate of 200 to 250 hours to prepare a plan for the Board, see App. to Juris. Statement 173a (Stipulation 86), indicated that there was no intent simply to borrow the recently devised Police Jury plan or to build on the precincts established by the Police Jury, a possibility that Joiner thought could be explored in "[s]everal hours at least," App. 271. It seems obvious that from the start the Board expected its plan to require precinct splitting, and Joiner acknowledged in his testimony that any plan "as strong as" the Police Jury plan in terms of traditional districting criteria would require precinct splits. Ibid. Splitting precincts only became an insuperable obstacle once the NAACP made its proposal to create majority-black districts.
C
1
Despite its stated view that the record would not support a conclusion of nonretrogressive discriminatory intent, the District Court majority listed a series of "allegedly dilutive impacts" said to point to discriminatory intent: "[t]hat some of the new districts have no schools, that the plan ignores attendance boundaries, that it does not respect communities of interest, that there is one outlandishly large district, that several of them are not compact, that there is a lack of contiguity, and that the population deviations resulting from the jury plan are greater than the limits (± 5%) imposed by Louisiana law." 7 F. Supp. 2d 29, 32 (DC 1998) (Bossier Parish II). The District Court found this evidence
353
Page: Index Previous 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007