Justices Overturn Fines on 4 Yonkers Officials : Courts: The majority says the judge acted too hastily. The councilmen balked at a plan to integrate housing.

The Supreme Court imposed new limits Wednesday on the power of judges to enforce civil rights decrees, ruling in a bitterly contested Yonkers, N. Y., case that elected officials may not be fined personally, except as a last resort, to force their compliance.

The 5-4 decision threw out the $500-a-day contempt fines levied by a federal judge against four Yonkers city councilmen who had defiantly refused to approve a housing desegregation plan in July, 1988.

But the high court earlier had upheld an $820,000 contempt fine levied by the judge against the city of Yonkers. It was that penalty, growing daily, that finally forced city officials to comply with the judge’s order in September, 1988.

Wednesday’s decision was quite narrow and left lower court judges with broad powers to mandate desegregation and to force cities to comply.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, writing for the majority, said that U.S. District Judge Leonard Sand went too far, too fast by imposing the daily fine on the councilmen at the same time that he imposed the fine on the city.

Instead, Rehnquist said, the judge should have fined the city only. Only if that move had failed to force compliance should he have considered taking the “extraordinary” approach of fining those elected lawmakers who voted against the housing plan.

During court arguments in the Yonkers case, lawyers could not cite a precedent for a judge’s imposing a personal fine on a legislator for one of his votes.

Nevertheless, some legal experts said they feared Wednesday’s ruling would be read more broadly as another move by the Rehnquist Court to undercut civil rights enforcement.

“I think this decision is much more important symbolically than legally,” said Steven Shapiro, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in New York. “It doesn’t really make new law, but it could encourage local officials to resist desegregation.”

An officer of a conservative legal group applauded the ruling for “putting a check on judicial activism. This (decision) might cause federal judges to be a little more circumspect,” said Alan Slobodin, legal director of the Washington Legal Foundation.

Although narrow, the issue raised by the Yonkers case split the high court along the fault line between its conservative and liberal factions.

Rehnquist, the conservative leader, has long criticized judges who seek to impose their will on city officials, prison wardens, school board members, police chiefs and other local or state officials.

Rehnquist was joined Wednesday by Justices Byron R. White, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy.

The court’s liberal leader, Justice William J. Brennan Jr., has been just as vehement in defending the power of judges to enforce constitutional rights, even if it means cracking down on local officials.

In dissent, Brennan lambasted Rehnquist for second-guessing the decision of a judge who faced “vehement and unyielding defiance” from the Yonkers councilmen.

Joining in dissent were Justices Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun and John Paul Stevens.

Despite the defeat for the court’s liberals, the Yonkers case resulted in a sweeping city integration plan that grew out of what had been seen as a novel attack on segregation.

In the waning days of the Jimmy Carter Administration, the Justice Department in 1980 filed a suit against Yonkers for having built subsidized housing units in the mostly black section of the city.

The relatively commonplace practice, the suit alleged, fostered segregation and therefore violated federal housing laws and the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination.

The Ronald Reagan Administration, to the surprise of some conservatives, pursued the case against Yonkers after taking office in 1981. After a 90-day trial, Judge Sand in 1985 ruled Yonkers officials were guilty of intentional segregation because of the placement of low-income housing units.

The city appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but Sand’s conclusion was upheld. Reluctantly, Yonkers officials agreed to a consent decree in 1988 that called for building public housing units in the mostly white areas.

However, reacting to a highly publicized backlash by white residents, the City Council balked at implementing the housing desegregation plan. Despite Judge Sand’s threat to impose the contempt fines, the council in August, 1988, voted 4 to 3 to block the desegregation plan.

After seven days, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called a halt to the $500-a-day fines against the four councilmen who voted against the plan: Henry Spallone, Peter Chema, Nicholas Longo and Edward J. Fagan Jr.

Meanwhile, fines Sand imposed against the city continued to mount, forcing the closing of city libraries and parks, the curtailing of garbage collection and the laying off of 447 employees.

When the fines reached $820,000, the council capitulated and voted to implement the desegregation plan.

The Supreme Court, after rejecting other appeals filed by Yonkers, agreed last year to review the $3,500 contempt fines against the four councilmen. The Yonkers officials urged the justices to declare that it was unconstitutional to punish a legislator for “voting his conscience,” as one put it.

However, Rehnquist’s opinion skirts a broad constitutional ruling and instead states only that the fines were “an abuse of discretion” by the judge.