The 5-1 opinion written by Chief Justice Justice Carlos Muñiz found the old Congressional District 5, which stretched for more than 200 miles along the Florida/Georgia border to encompass Black populations in Duval, Leon, and Gadsden counties, is likely an illegal race-based gerrymander that violates federal equal protection rights.
Writing for the majority, Muñiz concluded that legislators had a “superior” obligation to follow federal equal protection law, not the Fair Districts Amendment passed by Florida voters in 2010, which says districts can’t be drawn in a way that diminishes the ability of minorities to “elect representatives of their choice.”
Justice Charles Canady, whose wife, Lakeland Republican Jennifer Canady, sits in the Legislature, recused himself. Justice Jorge Labarga, the sole justice not appointed to the court by DeSantis who dissented, wrote a seven-page opinion.
DeSantis, meanwhile, touted the decision on social media posting on X.
“This was always the constitutionally correct map—and now both the federal courts and the FL Supreme Court have upheld it.”
The case stems back to 2022, when the state House and Senate approved a redistricting plan that would have preserved a Black-opportunity district in North Florida, meaning one in which Black voters had a chance to elect their candidate of choice.
DeSantis vetoed the maps and insisted the Legislature adopt his own map, which abolished the district, and the Legislature complied. The DeSantis-drawn congressional maps divided Black voters living within the state’s old plantation zone between white-majority districts that elected Republicans. Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, had served the old district.
The DeSantis administration argued in court the district constituted a racial gerrymander, but a trial judge ruled that the governor’s map violated Florida’s Fair Districts Amendment, a constitutional ban on the diminishment of minority voting power.
The state successfully appealed to the First District Court of Appeal, which chose to consider the case instead of immediately certifying it to the Supreme Court, a move that slowed the suit’s path to Supreme Court review, and was criticized in the majority opinion and Labarga’s dissent.
“We reject the First District’s contrary approach. Finally, we remind all district courts of their constitutional authority to certify for this Court’s direct review of trial court judgments in which an appeal is pending and which are of “great public importance” or “have a great effect on the proper administration of justice throughout the state,” Muñiz wrote.
“The parties in this case jointly asked the First District to do the same here, to no avail. Had the district court honored the parties’ request, this dispute could have been resolved before the 2024 election cycle.”
The Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute, League of Women Voters of Florida, Equal Ground Education Fund, Florida Rising Together, and individual voters brought the lawsuit and blasted the court’s decision Thursday.
“The Florida Supreme Court’s refusal to enforce state law, allowing an unconstitutional map to remain in place, is alarming. The court is abandoning the most basic role of the judiciary: to provide justice for the people,” Marina Jenkins, the National Redistricting Foundation’s executive director, said in a prepared statement.
“This decision shamefully dismisses the fact that the state’s map actively diminishes the voting power of Black Floridians—a fact agreed to on record by Florida’s Secretary of State, the Florida House of Representatives, and the Florida Senate. Make no mistake, the fight for the fight for fair maps in Florida is far from over.”
Genesis Robinson, executive director of Equal Ground, a Black-led, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to expand Black political power in Florida, called it “another dark day in the history of Florida.”
“With today’s ruling, the Florida Supreme Court has turned its back on Black voters, the state constitution, and the fundamental principles of representative democracy,” Robinson said in a written statement.
“By allowing a map that clearly diminishes Black voting power to stand in a 5-1 decision, the Court has sent a chilling message: the constitutional rights of Black Floridians are negotiable, and the will of the people can be ignored, even when it is written into the very fabric of our laws.”
‘Unenforceable as a matter of law’
In his dissenting opinion, Labarga complained the decision “lays the groundwork for future decisions that may render the Non-Diminishment Clause practically ineffective or, worse, unenforceable as a matter of law.”Labarga said the court should have remanded the case to the trial court to give the plaintiffs another opportunity to prove the possibility of drawing a North Florida district that is both non-diminishing and non-race-predominant.
Labarga did agree with the majority’s critique of the Tallahassee appellate court’s decision to consider the case and not pass it along to the Supreme Court.
“Exercising pass-through jurisdiction would not have been an act of surrendering the district court’s jurisdiction to this Court—quite the contrary. Submitting the case for this Court’s consideration … would have been an acknowledgment of the import of deciding this case in a timely manner.
“This was a case that was all but likely to reach this Court one way or the other—and it did—far later than it should have. By declining to certify the trial court’s judgment for immediate resolution and instead deciding the case on the merits, the district court injected an unacceptably lengthy delay in getting this important matter before this Court.”
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
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This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2025.