The fight over Mississippi’s state supreme court districts just entered a new phase.
A federal judge has reopened the case over Mississippi’s Supreme Court districts, issuing an order asking the Black voters, who previously prevailed in their suit, to prove something the law did not require the first time.
In a July 8 order, U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock reopened discovery and set a new evidentiary hearing so the parties could present proof on “the presence — or lack thereof — of the current intentional discrimination.” The U.S. Supreme Court, she wrote, “has made clear such evidence is crucial.” Those words carry the case, invoking the test the U.S. Supreme Court imposed this spring, and meeting it may require proving the motives of a Legislature that drew the lines almost 40 years ago.
Aycock had already ruled once. In August 2025, after a trial, she found that Mississippi’s three Supreme Court districts, unchanged since 1987, dilute Black voting strength in violation of the Voting Rights Act, and she ordered the state to redraw them. She reached that finding without needing to examine the intentions of the lawmakers who drew the districts in the late 1980s. Under the law as it stood, a map that produced discriminatory results was enough. Intent did not have to be shown.
Then, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais in April, raising the bar for proving a Section 2 violation. A court may now find that a map violates the Voting Rights Act, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority, only when the circumstances give rise to “a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Aycock’s order and sent the case back to her to apply the new standard. In her July order she acknowledged that the earlier evidence still stands, while directing that the record be supplemented to address the question the higher court now demands an answer to. She has said the Mississippi dispute over how judges are elected is a different matter from the Louisiana congressional case, and her order applies the new standard to it regardless.
The two sides read that demand differently. The state and the Republican leaders who want the current maps to survive take Callais to have returned the drawing of districts to the Legislature and to have left plaintiffs a burden they cannot carry. On that reading, a finding of discriminatory effect no longer decides the case, and without proof of intent the map stands. The plaintiffs read it as a standard that shields the oldest discrimination by making it the hardest to prove, and they maintain that the facts that won the case at trial have not changed.
What the standard asks, in practice, is a documented state of mind from 1987. Proving intent in a districting case means building a record of what the mapmakers knew and wanted, drawn from the floor debates, committee minutes, working papers and correspondence of the session that produced the lines. For a plan nearly four decades old, that record is thin where it exists at all. Many of the legislators who drew the 1987 districts have died or left office. Contemporaneous documents, if they were kept, sit in scattered archives and personal papers, and Mississippi kept no verbatim transcript of its legislative floor debate then, as it keeps none now. A plaintiff cannot depose a 1987 committee that no longer exists.
That difficulty is not incidental to the standard. It follows from it. By moving the question from what a map does to what its authors meant, Callais places the oldest maps, the ones most difficult to question, furthest beyond reach, even where their discriminatory effect is undisputed. Aycock found that effect after a full trial. The map cracks the majority-Black Delta and, with the Jackson metro area, splits the population that a fairly drawn Central District would join, leaving Black voters unable to elect a candidate of their choice to a court that has seated four Black justices in its history and never two at once. None of that is in dispute between the parties. The dispute is over intent, and the evidence of intent is what time has thinned.
While the legal question waits, the machinery of the court has stalled. Because Aycock’s injunction bars the state from using the current map and no new map exists, the secretary of state’s office has concluded that no candidate may qualify for a Supreme Court seat under the frozen lines. Justice David Ishee, the only justice whose term is up this year, has been unable to run for reelection. Two other seats on the nine-member court sit vacant, their former occupants having left for the federal bench in 2025, and the governor has not named replacements. The court that will eventually rule on Mississippi’s hardest cases is running two members short while the case over how its members are elected returns to a trial court.
Aycock has set no date for the new hearing, and the magistrate judge managing the case has ordered discovery completed by Sept. 24. A ruling is months away, and whatever she decides will likely return to the Fifth Circuit and perhaps beyond. The standard she now applies was written to keep courts from ordering race-conscious maps without proof of intent. Its first test in Mississippi is a map whose effect a court has already condemned, and whose intent a plaintiff must now reconstruct from a Legislature that adjourned in 1987.
Image: Mississippi Supreme Court (file photo)
Very well written. The Supreme Court has made it all-but-impossible to prove racial gerrymandering. This Supreme Court’s majority will live in infamy.