judgesonmerit.org

The Harrisburg Patriot-Times, which recently ran our opinion piece in support of merit selection, published a letter yesterday in which the author questioned whether merit selection of judges is any better than electing them. While we thank the author for mentioning the work we do to educate voters, we feel obliged to make clear that there is a big difference between the two methods of judicial selection.

The author reasons that because, from his experience, retention elections produce very low voter turnout whether the judge was initially elected or appointed, the public must be equally satisfied with judges in both systems, because:

In Pennsylvania and in Colorado, where I had once resided, retention elections have notoriously poor turnout. Judges routinely win retention on voter turnout of only 17 to 25 percent of registered voters. The conclusion I draw from this is that electing judges for their first term is no better or worse than merit-selection.”

We must respectfully disagree with this broad conclusion. The problem with electing judges is not merely the risk of getting less qualified candidates. The biggest problem with electing judges is that even if an election were to produce the exact same judges as would merit selection, elections beget campaigns, campaigns beget expenses, and expenses beget donations.  Once money is injected into the mix, there is a perception that those who support the candidate will have more influence before the court than will others.

Our recent Supreme Court race is a telling example of this. Both candidates, Joan Orie Melvin and Jack Panella, were rated as highly recommended by the PA Bar Association. According to experts and editorial boards, either candidate could have served competently, and either could have been chosen through a merit selection process. And under either system, the winner could be removed from the court in a retention election if he or she were to fail to live up to the standards of the electorate.

So far so good. But in Pennsylvania, instead of vetting the candidates before a non-partisan group, the candidates were forced to raise gobs of money from the very groups likely to appear before them. In fact, the candidates accused each other of being influenced by the money each had received, as we pointed out in our piece in the Patriot-News.

Can the public help but question the impartiality of a court under these conditions? Can we really have faith that politics will play no part in challenges to the upcoming reapportionment of state legislative districts that go before the court when the political parties spend so much money getting candidates elected?

The influence of money, real or perceived, is something that even the most ardent voter-education campaigns can’t overcome. While we strongly believe in voter education, and are often frustrated at the dearth of media coverage of judicial elections, only merit selection can truly take money out of the mix.

Just a few days ago, we reported on a negative banner ad that ran briefly and was sponsored by the Republican Party of PA in support of its judicial candidates. That banner featured a Soviet-style hammer and sickle inside the “O” of Obama. No, the president is not running as a PA judicial candidate – what relevance he has to our state judicial elections is unclear. What is clear is that the campaign between Democrat Jack Panella and Republican Joan Orie Melvin is getting ugly very quickly.

In the introduction to that post, we described the tone of a typical negative television ad – “clichéd black and white low-angle images of the opposing candidate, dramatic fade-ins of damning headlines, and music that would make Alfred Hitchcock proud.” Yesterday, we planned to write about a news report from Pittsburgh’s Channel 4 ABC news covering a TV ad sponsored by Panella’s campaign, which follows the negative campaign playbook almost to a tee: ominous tones, dark backgrounds, and most importantly – questionable statements about the opposing candidate.  The ad, according to the report, “has tough words, but little documentation to back up the attacks.”

That was yesterday. Since then, articles have been streaming in to our news desk about how this race keeps getting uglier, and how attacks, accusations, and negative ads are oozing from both sides. At least here in Philly, where we are all glued to our TV sets, these ads are getting a lot of attention. The gist of the ads getting airtime: Orie Melvin is bad for women; Panella is bad for children.

The Republican Party of Pennsylvania is now airing an ad which blames Panella for failing to stop the cash-for-kids scandal in Luzerne from happening. The ad claims, “Judge Panella turned his back on these children when he and the Judicial Conduct Board received a complaint about the judges.” But as John Baer at the Philadelphia Daily News pointed out, “[It] seems a stretch to lay the collapse of a county system at the feet of a single state judge.” Especially because the U.S. Attorney confirms the conduct board referred the issue to the feds, he explains.

But the poop-flinging is coming from both sides. In addition to the ad discussed in the Channel 4 piece, Panella’s campaign is running another doozy, with a “Warning for women,” that “only Panella will protect women in their healthcare decisions.”

Now, the Republican Party of PA is condemning the Panella ads, and accused him of violating the Pennsylvania Code of Judicial Conduct, while at the same time continuing to lay it on thick about Panella’s position on the Judicial Conduct Board during the Luzerne fiasco. Is this double speak, or just a “we’re bad, but they’re worse” tactic (not unfamiliar to Orie Melvin, who recently condemned  the $1 million Panella received from the trial lawyers while brushing off the $125 thousand her campaign received from the exact same group)?

Today, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review quoted our own Lynn Marks, executive director of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts.

“The ads diminish the candidates and the judicial office in the minds of the public,” Marks said. “The reality is, it is very hard to educate the voters about what the courts do and about what candidates do and why they’d be good judges. These ads do not help the voters.”

We’ve met Panella and Orie Melvin, and they both strike us as honorable, decent people. One of them will soon be a justice on our state’s Supreme Court. The editorial boards of the state’s major papers seem to concur, as all noted in their endorsements that either candidate would be a good choice, and that both are highly qualified (except for this paper which refused to endorse any candidate because it is calling for the end to judicial elections). But campaigning brings out the worst in everyone. To quote Mr. Baer again:

So when you see judicial campaigns driven by special-interest-funded ads that stretch credulity . . . ask yourself if there just might be a better way to pick the people who sit on our highest court.

There is a better way. It’s called Merit Selection, and it protects the judiciary from all these negative side effects of campaigns and elections. We think it’s time Pennsylvania comes out of the 19^th century, when our current election system was adopted, and move to a system that doesn’t debase the members of the judiciary by pushing them to stoop so low.

NOTE: JudgesOnMerit, PMC, and PMCAction are non-partisan and our cause is a non-partisan one. We do not support any judicial candidates or political parties, and we are equally critical of all problems with the judicial selection process.