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Home > Blog > All > Judicial elections

Judicial elections

  • August 27, 2012

    Hobbling Independence of Courts: Special Interests Target LGBT Judges, Courts that Support Equality

    by Jeremy Leaming

    Lawmakers may help push equality measures for LGBT persons, but at the end of the day if the state and federal courts are made up of rightwing jurists and those beholden to corporate interests, advancements toward equality will likely be an ongoing arduous and fitful slog.

    The health and safety of the LGBT community is “inextricably tied to the health and safety and vigor of our court systems, both federal and state,” said Justice at Stake’s Praveen Fernandes, at an Aug. 24 panel discussion at the National LGBT Bar Association’s 2012 Lavender Law gathering in Washington, D.C. Fernandes, the Director of Federal Affairs and Diversity Initiatives at Justice at Stake, noted that many people concentrate on the role federal courts occupy in legal battles, but that the “vast majority” of law is determined at the state level.

    And on the state level there is an increasing challenge to ensure that judges are independent of special interests. Thirty-nine states elect judges, and an increasing amount of money is flowing into those elections to elect judges inclined to advance corporate interests at the cost to individual rights. Several of the panelists participating in the “Defending the Courts: Why the LGBT Community Should be Particularly Concerned about the Strength and Independence of the Bench,” also noted that judges who uphold or bolster rights for the LGBT community are vulnerable to well-funded efforts to remove them from the bench.

    Judge Mary Celeste of the Denver County Court highlighted one of the more infamous efforts to punish judges who supported equality. 

    “We are talking about defending people who are supportive of LGBT issues. Now is anyone here not aware of what happened in Iowa,” Celeste said, referring to the successful effort to oust three Iowa Supreme Court justices who were involved in a 2009 state court ruling that supported same-sex marriages. 

    The effort to oust the three Iowa Supreme Court justices was spearheaded by the American Family Association, a Christian lobbying group, and attracted $948.355 from out-of-state groups. In late 2010 former Arkansas Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee applauded the effort to remove the Iowa Supreme Court justices, claiming that Iowans were “sick of one branch of government thinking it is more powerful than the other two put together,” the Iowa Independent reported.

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    Tags:
    Access to Justice, Campaign finance, Judicial independence, Judicial elections, LGBT issues, Equality and Liberty, 2012 Annual Lavender Law Conference, Eric Lesh, Iowa Supreme Court, Judge Mary Celeste, Justice at Stake, Lambda Legal, Liz Seaton, National LGBT Bar Association, Praveen Fernandes, retention elections
  • August 22, 2012

    Corporate Campaign Cash Inundating Judicial Elections

    Guest Post

    By Billy Corriher, Associate Director of Research, Legal Progress, Center for American Progress

    Spending on judicial elections has skyrocketed in the last 15 years, with special interest money flooding campaign coffers. Until recently, judicial elections were almost always low-key affairs that did not require large sums of campaign cash. State supreme court candidates since 2000 have received $247 million in campaign funds. A recent report from the Center for American Progress looked at some of the states which have seen the most campaign cash in judicial elections, in an effort to assess how campaign contributions could be shaping the law. The report describes how certain special interest groups wanted the law interpreted in a certain way, and then worked to elect judges that wrote those changes into law. “In courtrooms across our country, big corporations and other special interests are tilting the playing field in their favor,” the report states.

    The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and corporate-funded groups that support "tort reform" began to pour money into judicial races, after they perceived some state courts as beholden to campaign donations from trial attorneys, many of whom made money suing corporations. The pro-corporate groups had a good track record early on. These groups now dominate judicial campaign expenditures in the states that have seen the most money – Alabama, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, and others.  Contributions from Alabama's Chamber of Commerce accounted for 40 percent of all campaign contributions in the most recent high court election in the state, according to data collected by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.  

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    Tags:
    Campaign finance, Judicial elections, Supreme Court, Billy Corriher, Center for American Progress, Citizens United v. FEC, corporate finance, courts and politics, Guest Post, judicial elections, Judicial Independence, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
  • August 9, 2012

    Washington State Supreme Court Justice Overcomes Prejudice to Retain Seat

    by Jeremy Leaming

    Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire’s selection last fall of a long-serving King County judge with a varied and sterling legal background to replace a retiring justice on the state’s high court, was widely lauded among the state’s legal community as a solid move, as Eli Sanders reported earlier this summer for the Seattle publication, the Stranger.

    But the way in which that justice, Steve González, retained his seat yesterday in a statewide election should prompt state officials in Washington and for that matter the other states that choose to elect judges to reconsider the process.

    Although González (pictured), among the state’s first of Latino heritage to serve on the Washington State Supreme Court, won his seat with 58 percent of the statewide vote, his challenger Bruce Danielson garnered 43 percent of the vote and carried 30 of 39 counties. Danielson did so, as Sanders reports, without raising any money and with his hometown Kitsap County Bar Association declaring he possessed “zero qualifications” to serve on the high court.

    Sanders, as well as others in the state, took note of what occurred: with little information, many voters picked the guy with the “very, very white-sounding name.” The state, Sanders reported did not create and send out voter guides and only “6 or 7 counties” created guides. The state cited budgetary reasons for failing to educate voters.

    Matt Barreto, a political science professor at the University of Washington, told The Seattle Times that some voters simply would not vote for a guy named González, especially in areas dominated by anti-Latino sentiment.

    “So it’s not rocket science; we know these things are happening,” Barretto said.

    González overcame prejudice by raising and spending money to educate as many voters as possible.

    Before being tapped by the governor, González had served ten years as a trial judge on the King County Superior Court, presiding over criminal, civil, juvenile and family law cases. Before that lengthy stint as a judge, he practiced criminal and civil law, and served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Western District of Washington. During his tenure as an Assistant U.S. Attorney he helped successfully prosecute a high-profile international terrorism case, for which he garnered two awards from the U.S. Department of Justice. Moreover, González has received outstanding ratings from an array of bar associations, such as the King County Bar Association, which deemed him “Exceptionally Well Qualified,” and the Tacoma Pierce County Bar Association Judicial Evaluation Committee, which did the same.

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    Tags:
    Judicial elections, Originalism, Other courts, Democracy and Voting, Bruce Danielson, Eli Sanders, Gov. Chris Gregoire, Kitsap County Bar Association, Matt Barreto, Steve Gonzalez, Washington State Supreme Court
  • June 1, 2012

    Bipartisan Recommendations for Improving Michigan’s Selection of Supreme Court Justices

    Guest Post

    By Michigan Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Kelly and retired Sixth Circuit Judge James L. Ryan. Justice Kelly will participate in a panel on judicial campaigns and public confidence in the courts during the American Constitution Society’s National Convention in June.

    Since the turn of the century, Michigan has gained a reputation for Supreme Court election campaigns that are among the most expensive, least transparent and most partisan in the country. Our campaign ads have been among the most offensive. That is why we convened a bipartisan task force of prominent Michiganders to study how Supreme Court justices are selected across the nation and recommended improvements to Michigan’s Supreme Court selection process.

    The 2010 candidates for the Michigan Supreme Court raised a total of $2.6 million. The political parties and state-based interest groups reported spending another $2.5 million. But data collected from the public files of state television broadcasters and cable systems showed that an additional $6.3 million was spent by the political parties and interest groups. Michigan law does not require this candidate-focused “issue” advertising to be reported in the state campaign finance disclosure system.

    This was not the first time that the majority of money spent in a Michigan Supreme Court campaign was undisclosed to the public. For the elections from 2000 through 2010, $21.5 million was reported and $20.8 million was paid for undisclosed television advertising.

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    Tags:
    Campaign finance, Judicial campaigns and elections, Judicial independence, Judicial elections, Other courts, Judicial Nominations, Guest Post, Michigan Supreme Court, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
  • August 23, 2011

    King’s Vision of a More ‘Just and Merciful’ Judiciary

    Guest Post

    This post is part of an ACSblog symposium in honor of the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. The author, Sherrilyn A. Ifill, is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law.

    In his speech “Give us the Ballot,” delivered on the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Martin Luther King exhorted to a crowd in Washington, D.C., “give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and love mercy.” It must have seemed in those days – before the passage of the Voting Rights Act and in the midst of fierce southern judicial opposition to the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education – that this was indeed a simple proposition. If blacks were given the right to vote and participate in elections on an equal basis with whites in the South, the elected judiciary of the South would turn away from the unjust practices against African Americans that then plagued the system.

    And so as we prepare for the ceremony unveiling the monument to Martin Luther King this week, one can only imagine how Dr. King would have responded to a recent report released by the Equal Justice Initiative, the Alabama-based civil rights firm, which reveals that judges in some southern jurisdictions use their judicial override power to impose death sentences on criminal defendants for whom juries had recommended a life sentence without parole. The report is the second in a series of studies conducted by EJI that takes a close look at inequities in the justice system in the South. The first was released last year and documented the alarming and systematic exclusion of African Americans from participation in southern juries in criminal cases. In its most recent report “The Death Penalty in Alabama: Judge Override,” EJI finds that although Alabama law allows judges to override a jury’s sentence of death and impose a life sentence, judicial override is used almost exclusively (92 percent of overrides) to impose death. 

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    Tags:
    Access to Justice, Civil rights, Death penalty, Judicial elections, Racial justice, Criminal Justice, Democracy and Voting, Equality and Liberty, Dr. Martin Luther King, Guest Post, jury participation, MLK Memorial online symposium
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