Judge denies temporary restraining order in Tarrant County court redistricting case
A Tarrant County district judge on Wednesday denied a request for a temporary restraining order over the county’s redistricting of the county’s justice courts.
Judge Lee Gabriel, who presided over the restraining order hearing Wednesday afternoon, told the courtroom that her ruling on the restraining order should not be taken as a ruling on the facts of the overall case.
Stephen Maxwell, the lawyer representing the Democratic constables and justices of the peace who filed the civil lawsuit, said in an email that the group has not decided whether it will move forward with the civil case or instead focus on a federal lawsuit it plans to file.
The group filed the civil lawsuit against the Tarrant County Commissioners Court on Tuesday, claiming that the county’s three Republican commissioners violated open meetings laws as they planned to redraw the justice court boundaries in favor of the Republican justices. Opponents said the maps are discriminatory against Black and Hispanic voters.
The Republican “Justices of the Peace had seen their prospects for future office wane in the face of increases in Tarrant County’s minority population, and they needed the Commissioners’ help to dilute this minority vote thereby increasing their chances of retaining their Justice of the Peace positions,” the suit says.
The county’s attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Tarrant County has eight justice court precincts, and each elects its own constable and justice of the peace. Justice courts oversee a wide variety of cases, including evictions, small claims and low-level criminal cases. While the elected justices preside over these cases, the elected constables act as enforcement by overseeing evictions and executing warrants and summons.
The group suing the county wants to see the new court map overturned and replaced with the previous map. Maxwell said the federal lawsuit will argue that the redistricting violated residents’ voting rights.
The group contends that the new court map moves Black and Hispanic voters out of districts that are Republican and into districts that are already Democratic.
Judge Sergio De Leon, a Democrat in Tarrant County’s Precinct 5 justice court, said on Wednesday that the effect of the redrawn map would be that the county’s Hispanic and Black residents are not appropriately represented.
“If this map stays in place, what happens is that after I leave office, there may not be a Juan or a Juana that represents me,” said De Leon, who is Hispanic. “And that, in the long term, is the tragedy here.”
The Republican justices who spearheaded the redistricting — led by Judge Jason Charbonnet, of Tarrant County’s Precinct 6 justice court — say that the map was redrawn in an effort to balance an uneven workload across the eight precincts.
The civil lawsuit complains primarily of the process by which the county commissioners decided to redraw the court boundaries.
As a point of comparison, the lawsuit references a related redistricting process for the county commissioners’ boundaries, which were also up for possible redrawing this year. While the county commissioners ultimately voted not to redraw their own districts’ boundaries, they did consider the possibility. According to the county’s website, throughout the month of October, the commissioners scheduled two drawing sessions and six public sessions on the topic.
The commissioners then voted at a Nov. 2 meeting not to redraw their own districts’ boundaries.
But when it came to the redistricting of the constable and justice of the peace court districts, the process was different.
The possibility of redistricting the courts appeared on the agenda for the county commissioner’s Nov. 9 regular meeting. When introducing the topic at that meeting, county administrator G.K. Maenius said that “this item was added to the agenda Friday afternoon,” which would have been four days before the meeting.
Charbonnet, the Republican judge in Precinct 6, then presented a map that would redraw the boundaries of his and the other judges’ districts. Charbonnet said at the meeting that his proposed map had been drafted by Murphy Nasica, a political consulting firm that has worked on the campaigns of a number of conservative elected officials, including Charbonnet himself. (Charbonnet did not respond to a request for comment.)
During the hour and a half of public comment at the Nov. 9 meeting, Democratic justices and constables fired accusations at the Republicans who had presented the redistricting proposal. One key accusation was that the Republicans had drafted the map in secret, without input from the public or from their Democratic counterparts.
Although the commissioners asked some follow-up questions, they did not establish a definitive timeline. However, De Leon said at the Nov. 9 meting that he did not receive a copy of the proposed map until the day before the meeting; Democratic commissioners Devan Allen and Roy Brooks, who would be asked to vote on the map, said they did not see a copy until the meeting was already underway.
“For all intent and purposes, this map certainly was a secret, again, because I just saw it for the first time at 11:53 this morning,” Allen said at the meeting. “That’s ridiculous.”
Judge Christopher Gregory, a Republican in the Precinct 4 justice court, said at the meeting that he took issue with the accusation of a lack of transparency.
“This hasn’t been backhanded, this hasn’t been slight,” Gregory said at the meeting. “We’re in a short time frame here … this was a very short time frame that we were having to try to put this together.”
Maxwell told the Star-Telegram on Tuesday that the Democrats who filed the civil lawsuit planned to file the federal voting rights lawsuit by early 2022.
This story was originally published December 8, 2021 at 5:37 PM.
