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In a weekend commentary in the St. Louis Dispatch, Missouri Bar President Charlie J. Harris praises the judicial selection system used in Missouri, the model for many other Merit Selection plans and proposals:

No million-dollar campaigns, no vicious attack ads. . . . The beauty of the plan is that judicial candidates don’t have to curry the favor of either political party or prowl about for campaign contributions. What judicial candidates do need are impeccable credentials, a strong understanding of the law and the standing within the legal profession and their community to gain the trust and respect of others.

Harris contrasted the situation in Missouri with the ugly judicial elections in many states, such as Pennsylvania, noting: “In those states, voters are barraged by demeaning political attack ads, designed to destroy the opposing candidate’s credibility. The content of those ads encourages the public to think poorly of the candidate, and the money behind the ads raises serious concerns.”

The proposal to bring Merit Selection to Pennsylvania includes a framework based on the Missouri Plan, modified to reflect the unique cultural and political history of Pennsylvania. We hope Pennsylvania will soon join states like Missouri that choose their appellate court judges through Merit Selection.

With a vacancy on Missouri’s Supreme Court, there is renewed criticism of the Missouri Plan, and talk in some circles about trying to get rid of the Plan and institute judicial elections. Check out Blue Girl’s post on Show Me Progress, which defends Missouri’s Merit Selection system.

Highlighting the benefits of the state’s model Merit Selection system, Blue Girl explains; “One of the most elegant features of the plan is the way it defangs the money monster. Success in partisan elections depends on money, on the financial contributors of donors (a very specious proposition when we are talking about the very concept of Justice)…” Implementing Merit Selection for Pennsylvania’s appellate courts would “defang the growing money monster” here as well.

Using common sense and frank talk, Blue Girl also attacks a frequently heard criticism of Merit Selection:

Detractors say that the process is too reliant on the input of lawyers, but that argument doesn’t get off the starting blocks with me. Who better to make judgments about legal professionals than other legal professionals? [W]hat a nightmare [it] would be if judges owed political favors to certain segments of the electorate, and naturally had a political bias against others. How could you call that justice?

Thanks, Blue Girl for some excellent insights on Merit Selection. We’ll keep our readers posted on the fight to preserve the Missouri Plan.

Merit Selection of judges in Tennessee involves a 3-part system of Merit Selection, judicial performance evaluation, and retention elections. Judges are nominated for gubernatorial appointment by a 17-member Judicial Selection Commission (14 lawyers and 3 non-lawyer citizens). Appellate judges stand for retention election every 8 years.

The Tennessee Plan has been in place since the early 1970s and is also known as the “Modified Missouri Plan.” It’s “winding down” this year, because the Tennessee legislature failed to reauthorize it, mostly because of allegations of too much secrecy in the meetings of the Judicial Selection Commission.

But the way to address the problems is not to scrap the Tennessee Plan and replace it with elections, says Governor Phil Bredesen — and we agree. Tennessee risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As Governor Bredesen suggests, perceived problems of secrecy and alleged “back-room dealing” can be addressed by amending the statute to require additional public meetings of the Commission. As the Governor explains, putting a worse system in place is not the answer:

The issue is that when you have state-wide elections, basically for appellate judges, the only people who care about those are people with very narrow special interests. They’re expensive elections because they’re state-wide, and I just think you’d have this scramble to have, you know, every interest out there whether it be business or trial lawyers or anybody else trying to elect their judges and we’d have a vastly worse system than we have today.

The problem in Tennessee isn’t secret meetings in smoke-filled rooms. That flimsy accusation is mostly a “smokescreen” itself for the special interests who seek to inject even more politics — and potentially millions of dollars — into Tennessee’s judicial selection system.

On April 17th, the Missouri state House rejected an effort to radically revise the state’s “Missouri Plan,” which has served as a model for Merit Selection of judges in 30 other states. Proposed changes to the plan would have eliminated the nonpartisan nomination commission, and replaced it with a system controlled entirely by the governor and state legislators.

A broad coalition of community groups, lead by Missourians for Fair and Impartial Courts, made it clear to the legislature that the voters of Missouri didn’t want to politicize judicial selection. The state House clearly got the message, and decisively defeated the proposed changes.

The vote caps the most recent skirmish in a long fight to protect Missouri’s Merit Selection system from efforts to make its process more political. We’re glad that the people and legislators of Missouri recognize that nonpartisan, nonpolitical judicial selection is an important part of a fair and impartial justice system.

via Gavel Grab

  As a scandal unfolds in the West Virginia Supreme Court, an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor looks to Missouri as a model for freeing state judiciaries from the influence of big campaign donations. You can read the entire editorial here.