New York Supreme Court Justice Eugene Devine today upheld New York’s law ending prison-based gerrymandering in the Little v. LATFOR lawsuit. His decision squarely rejects the plaintiffs’ claim that the New York law violated various provisions of the New York State Constitution.

The New York Civil Liberties Union was among seven civil rights organizations representing 15 voters from around New York State who joined the suit as intervenor-defendants.

"Today’s decision upholds the fairness of recognizing imprisoned people as residents of their home communities rather than some remote community where they are incarcerated," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "It brings more fairness to voting in New York."

The seven organizations that represented the 15 voters issued the following joint statement:

"By eliminating the political distortion caused by prison-based gerrymandering, the new law upheld by today’s decision will ensure fairer representation for all New Yorkers, starting with this year’s redistricting.

"Judge Devine’s decision affirms what we have known from the beginning: the law ending prison-based gerrymandering advances fairness in redistricting and is in complete agreement with New York’s state constitution. Now that Justice Devine has made his decision, we look forward to seeing LATFOR implement the new law in the coming months."

The organizations are the NYCLU, Brennan Center for Justice, the Center for Law & Social Justice, Dēmos, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Prison Policy Initiative. In today's ruling rejecting plaintiffs' legal challenge, the court repeatedly cited the organizations' arguments explaining the policies and legal precedent supporting New York’s law.

On Aug. 4, Judge Devine granted the 15 voters permission to intervene and defend the law. The defendants in the lawsuit were government bodies charged with carrying out the new law: the New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment (LATFOR), and the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). The New York State Attorney General’s office is representing DOCCS.

The new law, known as “Part XX,” requires that incarcerated persons be allocated to their home communities for state and local redistricting and reapportionment but does not affect funding distributions. This tracks with the New York State Constitution’s explicit provision that incarceration does not change one’s residence.

New York State Senator Elizabeth Little and a group of co-plaintiffs sought to restore New York’s former practice, which artificially inflated the voting strength of select communities at the expense of all others by allocating incarcerated persons to the districts where prisons are located, rather than to their home addresses.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll reported that public opinion is against prison-based gerrymandering, with a majority of New York State voters agreeing that “prison inmates should be counted as residents of their home districts, not of where they're imprisoned.” The poll found that majorities of voters from both parties, and majorities of both upstate and downstate voters, favored “counting inmates in their homes, not their prisons.”