The walking judge from Alabama.

• Author: Baschab, Pamela Willis

Unless you have been there, the humidity and heat in South Alabama are unimaginable. Even during the last days of May, the sun bears down and the heat rises from the asphalt in undulating waves. Anyone who would walk along the highway at noon on the outskirts of Mobile would have to have a very good reason. And I did. Last year I trudged along Highway 31, carrying a walking stick with a sign, an American flag, and an Alabama flag. I was drenched in sweat and sunburned. Exhausted but elated to be nearing the end of my long journey. Two months previously on a cold and rainy day in March, I had stood on the Alabama-Tennessee state line preparing for the first steps of a 411 mile walk from one end of my state to the other. I had a very good reason. I was going to save our courts. Each step was a rebuke against the moneychangers who had taken over the temple of our courts by buying and selling judgeships at the highest levels of the Alabama Supreme Court.

My journey actually started long before the walk. It was the culmination of years as an elected judge serving at every level of Alabama's judiciary. I knew from the inside that Alabama's judiciary had become totally dependent on special interest money.

Alabama elects its judges in a party primary which yields the nominee whose name goes on a November general election ballot. Throughout most of its history, Alabama was a solidly Democrat state--to such an extent that the Democratic primary determined who the judge would be. In the last fifteen years, the Republican Party has strengthened, leading to a two party system and hotly contested elections. When I ran as a Republican in 1988 for a lower trial court judgeship, I ran as an underdog candidate expecting to lose to the favored Democrat unless I could pull off a grass roots upset. Judicial elections, if contested at all, had generally been low-key and dignified with little or no actual campaigning. I pulled out all the stops. I got a logo and a slogan, put out 5000 yard signs, printed brochures, attended fish fries, and went door to door. Very little money went into my successful campaign. Grass roots efforts clinched my elections first to the district court and later to the circuit court in my fast growing home county on the Alabama Coast.

In 1996 a retiring judge left a vacancy on the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. Campaigning for this state-wide position made grass roots effort less feasible. I traveled across the state to political forums, visiting sixty of Alabama's sixty-seven county courthouses. I had a billboard in Birmingham, sent a newsletter to Republicans, and won against the Democrat after spending $90,000.

It was during this campaign that I first became aware of the rising tide of special interest influence that, in four short years, would inundate our state with the most expensive judicial elections in America. Along with me on the campaign trial was a candidate for a seat on the supreme court. His candidacy was being handled by a political consultant from Texas, and Texas size donations were pouring into his coffers as well as the coffers of his opponent. Millions were donated to the two mud-slinging candidates. The Republican was supported by business interests funneled through the Business Council of Alabama. These business interests had brought in Texas consultants to help. The Democrat was supported by the "greedy trial lawyers." The Texas consultants had turned the Texas supreme court around to a majority Republican (read "business oriented") court. The trial lawyers were depicted as parasites dragging down Alabama's hopes to attract business to a state that had become "tort hell." The business interests won the 1996 election. The war continued in 1998 when the Republicans...