Justice for sale.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - Column

It was a state Supreme Court race so ugly it made national news. An article on Newsweek 's website compared it to the John Grisham novel The Appeal .

As in the Grisham story, a white, business-backed challenger used a deceptive, Willie-Horton-style campaign to try to oust the state's only African American supreme court justice.

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An ad sponsored by the challenger, Mike Gableman, lingered on a picture of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler's face juxtaposed with the face of a rapist, who also happened to be black. "Louis Butler worked to put criminals on the street," a voice-over intoned. "Like Reuben Mitchell, who raped an eleven-year-old girl with learning disabilities. Butler found a loophole. Mitchell went on to molest another child."

In fact, Butler represented Mitchell as a public defender, years before he became a judge. While Mitchell was Butler's client he never got out of custody--right up until he lost his last appeal. Butler had nothing to do with his eventual release. He committed his next crime after he had served his time and was out on parole. Today he is back in prison, serving forty years.

Another ad, by the Coalition for America's Families, used lurid graphics to tell the story of an awful rape and murder and claimed Butler overturned the perpetrator's conviction despite "eyewitness testimony" and blood under the convict's fingernails. The trouble is, the DNA evidence didn't match up. On that basis, Butler ruled for a new trial.

Gableman won despite a campaign characterized by outright lies and attacks on Butler for doing his job: representing his clients when he was a lawyer, and upholding the Constitution when he was a judge.

Gableman's campaign was fundamentally dishonest in another way. While the ad campaign focused on lurid true-crime stories, crime is nowhere on the agenda of groups like Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce or the Club for Growth, which paid for the ads. In Wisconsin, it was lead paint liability and caps on medical malpractice awards that galvanized business opposition to Butler. But those issues never showed up on TV.

It didn't help that Butler, though he renounced negative campaigning, nonetheless received the "help" of liberal groups that ran their own negative campaign against Gableman.

"The trial lawyers and the unions ended up depriving Butler of any perception of taking the high ground," says James Sample of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.

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