North Carolina seeks to change its judges: rebalancing or constitutional overreach?
Buncombe County Chief District Judge Calvin Hill has practiced law in Asheville, N.C., for 25 years, rising from one of the city’s first black public defenders to a court appointment to winning three elections unopposed. He was elected to the county’s top judicial job in 2010.
But next year, when he’s up for reelection, the people of Asheville won’t be voting on whether Judge Hill keeps his job.
The lone African-American judge in the liberal mountain city, Hill will have to run in a newly drawn district composed largely of white rural and suburban Republicans, including many of the 55,000 locals who voted for President Trump last November.
“As an African-American who is now in the primarily Republican area, I don’t know how racial gerrymandering as it is applied to me – I don’t know how that’s not clear,” Hill says in a Monitor interview, noting that Gastonia County, a similarly sized conservative enclave, was
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