Missouri’s Partisan Judicial Selection Process
Jul 21st, 2008 | By Dan Pero | Category: Judicial Elections, Missouri, State Battlegrounds |
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Missouri’s supposedly non-partisan judicial selection system is controlled by a powerful “special-interest group” – Missouri’s trial bar – that is “unelected and unaccountable” write Thomas Walsh, a St. Louis attorney, and William Eckhardt, a Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.
While Missouri’s so-called “merit selection” system was intended to remove politics from court appointments, Missouri’s high court is more partisan than ever. The two authors point out:
… 17 out of the last 18 nominees for Missouri Supreme Court positions have been Democrats. The chance of such a partisan alignment of nominees occurring by chance is less than the chance of winning the lottery – twice.
By refusing to allow the public any substantive say as to who picks their judges, the Missouri Court Plan allows partisanship and special-interest groups to exert unchecked sway over our judges.
Opponents of judicial elections worry they may create an appearance that interest groups influence the process. Merit selection ensures that special interests control the judicial selection process.
Missouri’s judge selection process is currently “owned and operated” by the lawyers just like Missouri’s “fox guarding the chicken house” attorney “discipline” process is “owned and operated” by the lawyers as they are in most if not all of the other states. And thus their “Omerta” (Meaning “Our Thing in Mafia Jargon which mandates in house control and a strict code of silence) bars effective electorate oversight monitoring and effective participation in the attorney “discipline process”. That means that “the fox is guarding the chicken house” and we are paying dearly for that.. During my career as a federal correctional officer I told a federal prisoner who had been ripped off for $25,000 by another inmate —, who had to use his attorney to facilitate the scam -, how to file a formal complaint against that attorney in order to generate enough heat to force an outside investigation of the case. What made this case even more “sinister” is the fact that $5,000 of that stolen money wound up in the bank account of the Prison Food Service Administrator’s wife. That Food Service Administrator was allowed to quietly resign and the case was “swept under the rug”.
I also procured the necessary forms for the victim to file the complaint because prison legal libraries have the forms necessary for inmates to file all kinds of lawsuits against prison staff, police officers etc but those legal libraries do not have the forms and instructions available for inmates to file formal complaints against attorneys. Remember that is in spite of the fact that inmates file a perpetual blizzard of often frivolous lawsuits against prison staff and law enforcement officers etc. So I obtained the necessary forms for the victim from the Bar Association and another inmate processed the forms for the victim. Within less than a week the victim was “expeditiously transferred” from Springfield, Missouri to Safford, Arizona. I wrote the warden at Safford and informed him of the details and of course he simply forwarded my letter back to the prison brass at Springfield.
I was called on the carpet, denied the right to have an attorney present -, by the prison’s legal counsel attorney and threatened with a 20 day suspension without pay for “unauthorized contact with an inmate and giving him preferential treatment”. I was able to parley that suspension down to a 5 day suspension by digging up some dirt on a former warden and citing the very preferential treatment that the prison administration extended to Larry Flynt the Hustler Magazine publisher when he was doing a short sentence at our facility for “sassing a federal judge”.
Incidentally during the course of this case an inmate in my area of supervision had evidence planted on him in order to bust him and for “some odd reason” he requested that I be his staff representative at his unit disciplinary hearing. Read between the lines regarding the motive behind that scenario, who manipulated that inmate to make that request and why.
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The Union filed a formal complaint with the Federal Labor Relations Authority because I had been denied the right to have an attorney. I later won that case and an administrative law judge ordered that from thenceforth staff must be permitted to have an attorney present in such cases but I had already had the five days off without pay.
Regarding the electorate voting judges in and out I support that process because the lawyers have an absolute “stranglehold” but it is not without some inherent flaws. Fat Cat bankers, predator creditors, rip off, run around and rotten service white collar sneak thieves and corporate crooks with unlimited amounts of PAC money payola already flood the airwaves and the print media with self serving “public brainwashing propaganda”. They bamboozle and hoodwink many members of the electorate into voting “special interest scoundrels” into the legislatures. Unless severe restrictions are imposed on these special interests in judicial elections -, the problem with compromised judges won’t change one iota as far as the welfare of the electorate is concerned. Those judges will simply be controlled by Corporate Fat Cats, rip off, run around and rotten service sneak thieves. predator creditors and corporate crooks instead of ambulance chasing, estate fleecing, inheritance plundering, frivolous lawsuit shyster attorneys. In restructuring the judge selection process , simply trading one “clique of crooks for another clique of crooks” is not going to serve the electorate unless some very strict limitations are imposed and enforced on PAC money politics..Otherwise we will just trade “one monster for another monster” -, who could possibly be even more corrupt and tyrannical than the first -, if that’s possible.
There is a way to drastically reduce that threat. That is to either prohibit paid advertising by special interests supporting any candidate for the bench or restrict the advertising rhetoric to only “spoon feeding the electorate the facts”, the plain, simple and provable facts about the education, experience. credit rating and reputation of the candidates. But as long as special interests are permitted to dominate the election of judges as they dominate the election of legislators there will be no significant change in the integrity of the selection process. Just one look at how corrupt and compromised the legislative election process is should make that fact clear to any thinking voter., That of course brings up another equally troubling issue. Too many voters do NOT think for themselves. Like turkeys in a rainstorm they “open their mouths and swallow” the torrent of special interest campaign propaganda in political campaigns and vote the way the “special interest spin doctors tell them to vote”. I can’t suggest a cure for that problem because it is probably a bigger problem than PAC money control of the process is.
Ivan L Fail
846 South Linden Ave
Sparta, Missouri 65753