High court to hear Texas redistricting case

At issue is whether to redraw on basis of eligible voters or total population

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear a case about whether states must count only those who are eligible to vote, rather than the total population, when drawing electoral districts for their legislatures.

The case from Texas could be significant for states with large foreigner populations, including Hispanics who are children or not citizens. The state bases its electoral districts on a count of the total population, including noncitizens and those who aren't old enough to vote.

But those challenging that system argue that it violates the constitutional requirement of one person, one vote. They say that taking account of total population can lead to vast differences in the number of voters in particular districts, along with corresponding differences in the power of those voters.

A ruling for the challengers would shift more power to rural areas and away from urban districts in which there are large populations of foreigners who are not eligible to vote because they are children or not citizens.

The court's 1964 ruling in Reynolds v. Sims established the one person, one vote principle and means that a state's legislative districts must have roughly the same number of people. But the court has never determined whether the state must count everyone or just eligible voters -- or have some leeway to choose.

The case filed by Texas residents Sue Evenwel and Edwared Pfenniger highlights a mainly rural district northeast of Houston that has 584,000 eligible voters, while a neighboring urban district has 372,000 eligible voters.

Then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, signed the redistricting plan into law. The state urged the justices to reject the case because "multiple precedents from this court confirm that total population is a permissible" way to draw districts.

The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, 14-940, is to be argued in the fall.

Child custody case

Also Tuesday, the Supreme Court decided to stay out of an international child custody dispute between a New Hampshire woman and her former husband in Turkey.

The justices let stand a lower court ruling that said the woman must return custody of her two daughters to her ex-husband.

The girls' mother says she fled Turkey with her daughters in 2007 because she believed that her husband was sexually abusing them. The father claims his ex-wife defied a Turkish family court's decision granting him custody and illegally took the children to Europe and later to New Hampshire.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled last year that the Turkish order should be enforced.

Black jurors list

The Supreme Court will also consider whether prosecutors improperly singled out potential black jurors in notes and then excluded them all from the death-penalty trial of a black Georgia man accused of murder.

The justices agreed Tuesday to hear an appeal from Timothy Foster, who was sentenced to death in 1987 after being convicted of murdering a 79-year-old white woman in Rome, Ga.

Lawyers for Foster are relying on prosecutors' notes that they discovered 19 years after the trial through an open-records request.

The notes show that the name of each potential black juror was highlighted on four different copies of the jury list and the word "black" was circled next to the race question on questionnaires for the black prospective jurors.

A Georgia state court sided with prosecutors who said they challenged each of the possible black jurors for legitimate, race-neutral reasons and did not rely on the highlighted jury lists to make their ultimate decisions. The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed.

The Supreme Court is to hear arguments in Foster v. Humphrey, 14-8349, when the court begins its new term this fall.

Bankruptcy courts

Justices also said Tuesday that bankruptcy courts have authority to rule on disputes that fall outside the bankruptcy proceedings if the parties to the case consent.

The 6-3 ruling Tuesday helps clarify the power of bankruptcy judges. That had been in question since a 2011 high court decision that limited their authority to decide nonbankruptcy issues.

The case involves efforts by Wellness International Network Ltd. to recover $655,000 in attorney fees from Richard Sharif, a Chicago resident with whom the company had a legal dispute. Sharif filed for bankruptcy in 2009 to avoid paying the debt. Wellness said that Sharif had assets in a family trust that could be tapped, and lower courts agreed.

The Supreme Court said lower courts must decide whether Sharif consented to the bankruptcy court deciding the issue.

Information for this article was contributed by Sam Hananel and staff members of The Associated Press.

A Section on 05/27/2015

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