Redistricting trial opens with missteps, delays

MIAMI -- Frustrated by repeated delays on the opening day of a redistricting trial, three federal judges summoned the lawyers to an extraordinary closed-door meeting late Monday.

With a trouble-free election hinging on the timely resolution of a lawsuit attacking the new Florida congressional districts, the message from the judges was clear: Shape up.

"Talk, okay? Talk," pleaded U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan, in whose chambers more than a dozen lawyers gathered. A St. Petersburg Times reporter was allowed to observe the off-the-record meeting.

The meeting ended a day marked by several missteps in a case brought by Democrats seeking to invalidate the new congressional map. The case is being tried in a hurry-up fashion in hopes of avoiding any disruption for election clerks, candidates and voters.

The Democrats' first expert witness, University of Alabama political geographer Gerald Webster, stopped testifying when attorneys for the Legislature complained they didn't have copies of the alternative maps Webster was discussing. When copies were made, they were in black and white and not color, making the boundaries almost impossible to discern. By then, Webster was headed to the airport to catch a plane to a West Coast conference.

He can't return to Florida until next week.

"Unforgivable . . . enough is enough," complained Miguel De Grandy, one of House Speaker Tom Feeney's lawyers. Disruption and delay, he told Jordan, "is part of the design of the plaintiffs' case."

Thomasina Williams, attorney for the Democrats, acknowledged she "embarrassed myself" by not having complete copies of documents for the opposition to review. But she rejected De Grandy's allegation that she was deliberately disrupting matters to block the districts from going into effect.

Earlier Monday, the judges got a quick immersion in the turbulent ethnic politics of Miami-Dade County. Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez, a political oddity as both a Cuban-American and a Democrat, testified that his city was split between two congressional districts because Republicans feared he would run, endangering Republican state Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart's congressional ambitions.

As a result, Martinez said, non-Cuban Hispanics, who tend to vote Democratic, were grafted onto another district, minimizing them as a political force in Hialeah, which is overwhelmingly Cuban-American.

"There's a slogan, you know: Voto por lo nuestro -- vote for our people," Martinez told the judges. "There's an implication that "our people' are Cuban-American."

Testimony continues today.

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