Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin asked a federal court on Thursday to end the order that has let Black voters in five judicial circuits elect judges from districts where they are the majority. The order is 35 years old. Black judges sit on Arkansas circuit benches because of it.
The 1991 consent decree in Hunt v. Arkansas came out of a 1989 lawsuit by Black residents who said at-large judicial elections drowned out their votes. The state did not fight the case. A federal judge, Henry Woods, signed the decree, and it split circuits 1, 2, 6, 10 and 11 West into subdistricts. The first Black-majority subdistricts appeared on ballots in 1992.
Griffin says the decree has done its work. “Dividing voters based on race is wrong and unconstitutional,” he wrote in the motion. He argues the state has complied in good faith and that “any vestiges of past discrimination have been eliminated.” His main legal ground is the Supreme Court’s April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which held that the Voting Rights Act does not require states to draw majority-minority districts. That is the same ruling that erased one of Louisiana’s two Black congressional districts.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which represents the original plaintiffs, will oppose the motion. Those plaintiffs include Judge Eugene Hunt, Judge Olly Neal and the Christian Ministerial Alliance. “The Hunt Decree must remain. It is a sacred promise to the Black community in Arkansas,” said the Rev. Ronnie Miller-Yow in the group’s statement. Barry Jefferson, president of the NAACP Arkansas State Conference, called the motion an attack on Black judges “that are doing an outstanding job.”
Neal put the stakes in terms of the ballot. “Without the Hunt decree, Plaintiffs will not have an equal opportunity to continue to elect judges representative of their communities,” he said.
Arkansas did not contest the original suit, and now calls the remedy it accepted the discrimination. Black voters have few other routes: a federal court dismissed the Legal Defense Fund’s separate challenge to how Arkansas elects its appellate judges, and in 2024 refused to reconsider. The state’s Court of Appeals has one Black judge, Waymond Brown, as the Democrat-Gazette reported.
This is where the Callais ruling lands in practice. It was decided over congressional maps. Seven months later it is being used against a courthouse remedy that Black voters have used for three decades to elect judges who share their lives. Judges decide bail, custody, evictions and sentences. Who elects them is not a technicality, and a state that settled this case in 1991 should not be allowed to walk away from it on a pretext of colorblindness.
A federal judge now has to decide whether Arkansas has proved that the problem the decree solved is gone. The state has asked for a ruling. The Legal Defense Fund has said it will file its opposition.
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