Another Admission: “Merit” Selection Campaign is About Perception, Not Reality
March 8, 2010
Last week I did a little post on the ABA’s striking admission that the whole “merit” selection campaign is based purely on “perception” – not any real evidence that elected judges are “for sale” as most “merit” selection proponents claim. Well, it seems to have struck a nerve!
Our friends over at JudgesOnMerit – the group trying to end democratic judicial elections in Pennsylvania – were out this morning with an item entitled, “Why Perception Matters.” After admitting that elected judges are “certainly not” corrupt and are “by and large fully qualified to serve,” the blogger makes a run at defining the “perception” problem. There’s a lot of throat-clearing, but the main point seems to be this:
“The greatest problem, however, has to do not with the outcomes in specific cases, but with the effect judicial campaigning and fundraising have on the public’s perception of justice. We pay respect and honor to judges when we address them; we clothe them in grave black robes; and we have them sit elevated from the rest of us, looking down in judgment. A simple traffic court judge is addressed as ‘Your Honor,’ while even the office of the President of the United States commands no such title. All of this, so that decisions handed down by the courts are respected – and that respect is so critical because the judiciary as an institution has no means to enforce its edicts. Indeed, for a court to have any power at all, the public must believe that justice, and not some perversion of it, is being meted out in its marble hallways, and that judges are impartial arbiters of disputes and interpreters of law rather than mere political actors.”
The implication here is that the “perception” – which the blogger admits is false – justifies doing away with a right as fundamental as voting. But if “perception” alone disqualifies a judicial selection system, what about the “perception” associated with “merit” selection?
Under “merit” selection, judges are chosen not in open, transparent elections involving all the people, but by a tiny handful of elites (mostly lawyers) who deliberate behind closed doors. Isn’t there a “perception” that this turns the courts into closed, lawyers-only clubs?
And what about public accountability? In contested democratic elections, the people can decide if a judge is too beholden to this or that group and dismiss that judge from public service. Under the retention elections “merit” selection supporters promote, more than 99% of judges are re-elected. Doesn’t that create the “perception” that retention elections are just a fig leaf designed to insulate judges from the people they serve?
If all these groups – the ABA, JudgesOnMerit, Justice at Stake – believe the only problem with judicial elections is a false public perception, then why are they spending so much money to inflame this perception rather than debunking it?
Posted by Dan Pero in the categories: Judicial Elections, Justice at Stake
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