Opinion here, and excerpt below from the Detroit News:

Lansing — Federal judges have declared 13 of Michigan’s House and Senate districts unconstitutional and ordered them redrawn, overturning a key portion of the maps drawn in 2021 by Michigan’s inaugural Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission.

The three-judge panel ordered the Secretary of State to refrain from holding elections in those districts until they are redrawn in compliance with the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. . . .

“We’re thrilled that the court unanimously ruled that the challenged districts are illegal and that Black voters in Detroit were disenfranchised,” said John Bursch, an attorney for the Black Detroiters who challenged the maps. . . .

[P]laintiffs have argued that the experts guiding the commission consistently pressured its members to lower the number of Black voters in Metro Detroit House and Senate districts out of an effort to “unpack” past districts and achieve better partisan fairness scores across the state.

The result, the plaintiffs argued, was a dilution of the Black vote across spaghetti-like districts that stretched from majority-Black Detroit into majority-White suburbs in Oakland and Macomb counties.

The Voting Rights Act requires that when there is a large, compact minority — such as the Black population in Detroit — those voters cannot be broken up into largely White districts where their votes are diluted and where they are unable to elect a minority-preferred candidate.

The Equal Protection Clause largely bars states from drawing district maps that sort voters primarily by race.

Michigan’s redistricting case is unique because, unlike processes led by the majority party of the Legislature, the citizens commission documented every decision in a transcript that runs about 10,000 pages, noted Kethledge, an appointee of Republican former President George W. Bush. That transcript is quoted continuously throughout the federal court ruling. . . .

In many cases, the commission lowered the Black voting age population between 35% and 45% for legislative districts in a city whose African American population is nearly 78%, with little to no primary data showing a Black-preferred candidate could make it through a primary with those concentrations.

Hat tip: Derek Clinger of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School