Redistricting suit to cost $3m in fees

By Scott S. Greenberger
Globe Staff
March 6, 2004

Taxpayers will pick up an estimated $3 million in legal fees to draw and defend the state's redistricting plan, including a House map that a panel of federal judges rejected last week as a textbook case of politicians attempting to dilute minority voting strength.

Nearly $600,000 went to Nixon Peabody, the firm that employs Lawrence S. DiCara, a boyhood friend of House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran. Another firm, Robinson & Cole, received $1.3 million to defend the House, according to state records.

Plaintiffs' lawyers in the case, who themselves are likely to get more than $1 million, say they were surprised that Finneran insisted on defending the district map, because, in their view, it was obviously vulnerable to a federal court challenge. The 2001 House plan created five districts that included majorities of blacks and Hispanics, or one district fewer than existed before, despite the increase in the minority population in Boston in the 1990s.

Burton Nadler, a lawyer who has worked on election cases for two decades and who served on the plaintiffs' team, said Finneran and his lieutenants "defended this vigorously and to the hilt."

"They never offered us any discussion about realistic, potential compromise," Nadler said. "We read all the other redistricting cases around the country over the past 50 years, and it was pretty clear from the evidence in those cases that this was a clear case of packing in order to dilute the minority vote in other parts of the city."

Finneran declined to comment on the cost of drafting and defending the plan. The judges gave Finneran and his lieutenants six weeks to redraw the House map, probably increasing the fees to DiCara and Nixon Peabody.

DiCara said that about half his fee was for drafting the statewide plan, which included congressional districts, in 2001. More than half of the remainder paid for his help in successfully defending three other challenges to the redistricting plan in Chelsea, Cambridge, and Chelmsford. Robinson & Cole worked on the Chelsea case, but the attorney general's office handled the Cambridge and Chelmsford cases with DiCara's help.

The private lawyers were hired because the state attorney general did not have lawyers qualified to handle the redistricting case, officials said. "We did not have anyone on staff with expertise on the federal Voting Rights Act to effectively handle the case," said Corey Welford, spokesman for Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly. "This is a highly specialized area. Federal redistricting challenges only come about every 10 years and are very complex."

Under the rules governing voting rights cases, the lawyers who represented the black and Hispanic plaintiffs in the Boston case are also entitled to reimbursement from the state.

Those lawyers, who worked pro bono for their clients and would not have received anything if they had not prevailed, are likely to receive more than $1 million if they are paid for all their time and expenses, but the judges will determine exactly how much they will get.

The plaintiffs' team includes the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the firms of Petrucelly and Nadler and Foley Hoag. The Lawyers Committee and Petrucelly and Nadler said they had not yet calculated their bills and expenses, but Richard Belin, the lead lawyer for Foley Hoag, said his firm's time charges total "more than a million." Belin said Foley Hoag would most probably donate its share of the money to the Foley Hoag Foundation, which combats racism.

According to the judges, the House should have drawn either seven or eight majority-minority districts, given the city's minority population.

David H. Harris Jr. of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said a day after the ruling that he had "never seen a plan so obviously illegal."

Brenda Wright of the National Voting Rights Institute, another ally of the plaintiffs, said that voting-rights cases are difficult to win, but that in this one "the evidence was very strong of illegal vote dilution."

The judges agreed. In a ruling notable for its strong and sometimes colorful language, the three federal judges concluded that Finneran and his lieutenants drew the boundaries for Boston's districts in a way that "sacrificed racial fairness to the voters on the altar of incumbency."

Specifically, the panel ruled that the redistricting plan the House approved in fall 2001 took African-American voters out of the districts of Finneran and Representative Elizabeth A. Malia, both white, and packed them into the district of Representative Shirley Owens-Hicks, who is black. The plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in June 2002.

"The House was comfortable with manipulating district lines to benefit two white incumbents without pausing to investigate the consequences of its actions for minority voting opportunities," the judges wrote. "Once again, race was used as a tool to ensure the protection of incumbents."

Finneran testified that he didn't pay much attention to how the redistricting plan would affect his own district, but the judges said they doubted it.

"Although Speaker Finneran denied any involvement in the redistricting process, the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests the opposite conclusion," the judges wrote in a footnote to the ruling. "For one thing, he hand-picked the members of the [Redistricting] Committee and placed [Representative Thomas M.] Petrolati at the helm. For another thing, he ensured the Committee hired his boyhood friend and longtime political collaborator, Lawrence DiCara, as its principal functionary."