The Ugly Tactics of “Merit” Selection Goon Squads
April 26, 2010
Missouri’s “merit” selection system is always promoted as a nonpartisan way to ensure judges remain independent and impartial. But if anyone doubts that raw politics rather than good government lies at the heart of the Missouri Plan, just take a look at the tactics of the goon squads hired by a lawyer-funded group fighting against a ballot initiative that would take the power to pick judges away from lawyers and return it to the citizens.
Last week, James Harris of ShowMe Better Courts made a second attempt to have a judge grant a temporary restraining order against these lawyer-backed goon squads. (The effort failed.) In signed affidavits filed by Harris’s group, petition gatherers’ detailed the lengths Missouri Plan supporters will go to in order to stop democratic judicial elections.
Rebecca Myer, who was helping gather signatures to get the petition on the ballot, testified in an affidavit that intimidators hired by the lawyers “jumped out of a van and surrounded me and knocked my clip board out of my hands and threatened to assault me while calling me a ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ and other offensive names.”
Another signature gatherer, Lynn Patrick Powe, reports two men “followed me around for several hours in an effort to prevent me from gathering signatures….Shortly before they left one of these men told me that he was going to ‘snuff me out.’”
Fredderick Jones testified that he was “called racial slurs such as ‘monkey’ and ‘[the ‘n’ word].”
Harassment, intimidation, racial slurs, physical aggression: These are now the tools of choice for powerful lawyers determined to preserve their privileged position when it comes to picking judges.