judgesonmerit.org

In the last weeks of the Pennsylvania judicial election season, campaign contributions in the Superior Court race are becoming the focus of more scrutiny.  A big donation from The Committee for a Better Tomorrow, the political action committee of the Philadelphia Trial LawyersAssociation to Democrat David Wecht is at issue.  The Allentown Morning Call reports that the political action committee contributed $300,000 to the Wecht campaign, and $25,000 to the campaign of Republican candidate Vic Stabile.  This raises Wecht’s fundraising to more than $500,000, which overtakes the spending of each of the nine Superior Court candidates who ran in 2009.  The Republican party has issued a press release, critcizing Wecht’s acceptance of the contribution and urging him to recuse from any case involving a lawyer who contributed to the political action committee in question.

PMC and PMCAction have long been concerned about the real and perceived influence of contributions to judicial campaigns; this concern applies to all donors and all candidates.  We know that judicial campaign contributions lead the public to believe that justice is for sale, and we therefore urge Pennsylvania to get judges out of the fundraising business once and for all. The way to do this is to stop electing appellate court judges. Merit Selection is the answer.

All of a sudden, other people seem to be doing our work for us, that is alerting the public to the evils of money in judicial elections.  Supreme Court candidates are challenging each other about campaign contributions, and the media is all over the story.  (Check out this story on NPR’s WHYY and articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer/AP, Capitolwire (subscription required), and Allentown’s The Morning Call). So, let’s talk about money.

It’s a given that to run a statewide campaign for the appellate courts, you need money.  There are sixty-seven counties in Pennsylvania, and candidates try to reach most, if not all of them.  This requires travel, television ads, radio spots, lawn signs and a good staff.  That all costs money.  Where’s the money coming from? Generally, the big givers to judicial campaigns are those who frequently litigate in the state court system: lawyers, law firms, organized groups of lawyers or bar associations, unions, and businesses.

The trouble is, these folks and entities will later appear before the judges their money helped to elect.  Who finds this troubling?  The public does — the regular folks who sometimes find themselves in court and who don’t give to judicial campaigns.  These folks are sitting in courtrooms worried that their opponents or their opponents’ lawyers have contributed to the judge’s election campaign.  This should be the last thing people in court have to worry about.  But when you elect judges, this is part of the package.

The abiding image for our courts is the statue of Justice blindfolded, signifying that judges are not swayed by personal bias, popular opinion, political expediency, or the identity of the parties.  Electing judges undermines that image.  Instead, the public imagines a judge with eyes wide open, pockets bulging with campaign cash, and knowledge of where the cash came from.

The candidates for Supreme Court are not helping to repair this image. They are fighting about who received more money from which donors. Judge Orie Melvin charges that Judge Panella received more than  $1,000,000 from the Committee for a Better Tomorrow, the political action committee of the Philadelphia Trial Lawyers.  Judge Panella retorts that Judge Orie Melvin accepted $125,000 from the same PAC and has received large donations from Republican PACs as well.

One million dollars is a lot of money, but $125,000 is nothing to sneeze at, as my nine year old son has pointed out.  Anyone coming in to court opposing someone who contributed to this PAC might justifiably be concerned about either Judge Panella or Judge Orie Melvin.  It’s not the size of the donation, it’s the fact of the donation.

The candidates’ dispute acknowledges that campaign money creates unfavorable perceptions and leads the public to believe justice is for sale.  Their debate about money is not helping to ease the public’s mind, but rather is confirming fears that campaign cash does indeed matter long after the election is over and the judge is sitting in the courtroom.

Enough is enough. It’s time to get judges out of the fundraising business and to put the blindfold back on.  Merit Selection is the answer.

We’ve been talking about the poisonous influence of money in judicial elections for a long time.  Now, the candidates are talking about it, too.

According to John Micek over at Capitol Ideas, Supreme Court candidate Joan Orie Melvin made this a topic of her address to the Press Club today.  She complained about the $1 million contributed to the campaign of her opponent Jack Panella by the Philadelphia Trial Lawyers’ PAC, the Committee for a Better Tomorrow. When asked about the $125,000 she also accepted from the PAC, she “claimed there was no comparison between the money she accepted from the trial bar and the money her competitor received.”

But Orie Melvin’s initial characterization of the contributions to her opponent offers a more convincing take on the perception contributions to judicial elections create: “”It’s pay-to-play, it’s justice for sale.’” This is surely what the public sees when the money is discussed, and it doesn’t matter how much is at issue.  It’s the fact of the contribution that makes an impression on the public.

Micek concludes his post with a discussion with PMC’s Shira Goodman:

What matters. . . is the public perception that money buys access to courtrooms – period.

“In our mind, enough is enough already,” she said.

We’ve always tried to make the point that judges are different from other public officials. As such, they should be selected differently. The way it stands now, we treat judicial candidates pretty much like other candidates.  Doing so makes it harder for the public — and even the judges themselves — to recognize the special role judges play in our system of government.  The more we blur the lines before judges reach the bench, the more blurred the lines stay.  Putting on the robe can’t be a single magic moment.  The entire process of becoming a judge should speak to the special nature of the judicial function.  Money is poison.

The Legal Intelligencer today examines (subscription required) the sources of the recently reported contributions to the election campaigns of Supreme Court candidates Jack Panella and Joan Orie Melvin.  Most interesting to us is the focus on one particular contributor and the motivation for its contributions.

The article notes that most of the money reported by both campaigns in this cycle came from a single source — Committee for a Better Tomorrow, the political action committee of the Philadelphia Trial Lawyers Association. This worries some observers:

“I just think too much money from a single organization is not a good thing,” said Rob Byer, a former Commonwealth Court judge and head of the appellate division of Duane Morris’ trial practice group. “The problem is, how do you get people interested in contributing the money needed for judicial elections unless they have an interest in the outcome of cases?”

Mark Tanner who leads the PAC explained the rationale for the existence of the PAC and its contributions:

Tanner said the committee was formed as a way for lawyers and law firms to support candidates without the ethical quandary that comes with writing a check directly to a candidate.

“A number of lawyers have contributed to that PAC with the goal of supporting the judges we believe in,” Tanner said. “Clearly Jack Panella received more in funding, but Joan Orie Melvin received funding, too. . . .”

“Certainly Judge Panella and Judge Melvin have staked out different ground regarding complaints brought by individuals,” Tanner said. “There were certainly opinions that showed Melvin was supportive of individual rights, but on balance we found that Judge Panella was more supportive of our view on how the justice system should operate.”

Tanner’s response only served to increase Byer’s concern:

“That’s totally antithetical to a fair system of justice,” Byer said. “Such statements don’t help the candidates they’re supporting.”

Organizational support for a candidate should be based on qualifications and experience, not whether the judge is more likely to rule in favor of a group’s interests, Byer said.

Why do individuals, organizations and PAC’s give to some candidates and not others? What motivates an individual or entity to contribute to a judicial candidate? And how do the answers to these questions affect the public perception of our courts — already severely diminished and inclined to believe that “justice is for sale?”