judgesonmerit.org

Dave Davies of the Philadelphia Daily News wrote yesterday in response to Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts’ press release on the huge amount of money spent by the candidates and third-parties on this year’s PA Supreme Court race. Data from the current year is still incomplete, yet PMC reports that at least $4.5 million has already been spent.

In recent years, Pennsylvania has been leading the nation in money spent on judicial elections. These extreme figures highlight the need to switch to a merit-based selection process. PMC’s Lynn Marks told Davies of the inherent dangers of judicial election fundraising:

These candidates have to raise enormous amounts of money, and it comes from groups that are often in state court – lawyers, businesses, unions and political committees, and also the state political parties. If you think of yourself in court, you don’t want to be sitting there wondering whether your opponent, or your opponent’s attorney, made a large contribution to the judge.”

A procedural switch from elections to merit selection requires a change in the state constitution. There is current legislation pending in both the House and Senate to achieve such an amendment.

Hopefully the data from the 2009 Supreme Court race will make both voters and their representatives take note and reconsider our current system of choosing judges. Justice is not a commodity. No one should ever worry that it might be for sale.

An interesting article in the Times Herald-Record [serving the Hudson Valley and the Catskills) contemplates  how the recent conviction of a former New York state judge for attempted bribery may be used to advance the cause of judicial selection reform.

Former New York Supreme Court Justice Thomas Spargo was being investigated for improper conduct during his election campaign.  With defense fees mounting, Spargo allegedly began soliciting lawyers practicing before him for contributions to his defense fund.  As the article explains, one such solicitation involved Spargo telling lawyer Bruce Blatchly that he oversaw several of Blatchly's pending cases and that a friend of Spargo's was presiding over Blatchly's own divorce: "The commission [on Judicial Conduct] didn’t see that as a solicitation. They saw it as a shakedown.”  Spargo was removed from the bench in 2006 and then faced federal charges of attempted extortion and bribery. He was convicted by a jury last week.

What does this have to do with judicial selection reform? Well, the article posits that Blatchly’s experience is very relevant to the problem of money in judicial elections:

There’s a school of thought that says similar “pay or suffer” or “pay, and reap the benefits” messages can be sent when you have judges running for office and their surrogates solicit for campaign contributions from lawyers who appear before those very same judges. Judges aren’t allowed to personally solicit for campaign contributions. They’re not even supposed to know who’s contributing to their campaigns through their campaign committees, although that information is readily available online and as one local judge once put it, “I’m not supposed to know, but you guys keep putting it in the paper.”

Certainly, extortion and bribery are very different from campaign fundraising. But as the article notes, “Bruce Blatchly’s testimony, about how it felt to be hit up for money on behalf of the same judge who had Blatchly’s fate in his hands,” has a certain resonance when it comes to the issue of judicial campaigns raising money from lawyers who are likely to appear before the judge in the future.