President's Page
| Jurisdiction | Alabama,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 72 No. 6 Pg. 0443 |
| Pages | 0443 |
| Publication year | 2011 |
JAMES R. PRATT, III
jim@hwnn.com
"We all have a stake ensuring that courts remain fair, impartial and independent. If we fail to remember this, partisan in-fighting and hardball politics will erode the essential function of our judicial system as a safe place where every citizen stands equal before the law."
-Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (ret.)
Are We Being Fair to Our Judges and the Perception of Justice in Alabama by Having Partisan Elections for Judicial Office?
The purpose of this article is not to campaign for a particular form of judicial selection or even to propose one type of judicial selection, but, rather, to raise awareness about the effect our current method of judicial selection has on our judges and our system of justice.
Judicial selection from various viewpoints
Recently, Keith Norman and I attended a conference in St. Louis sponsored by the Missouri State Bar concerning judicial selection. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (ret.) was the keynote speaker and an active participant in the two-day conference. Justice O'Connor has an interesting background. She served in the Arizona legislature, was an elected judge in the Arizona state court system and later was nominated by the President and confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Thus, she has seen the issue from various viewpoints and is one of the best informed and most experienced individuals active in the discussion concerning judicial selection. In Justice O'Connor's speech to bar presidents and executives from all over the country, she reiterated the point she made in New Politics of Judicial Elections 2000-2009 published by the Brennan Center for Justice in 2010. In her forward she said:
"We all expect judges to be accountable to the law rather than political supporters or special interests. But elected judges in many states are compelled to solicit money for their election campaigns, sometimes from lawyers and parties appearing before them. Whether or not these contributions actually tilt the scales of justice, three out of every four Americans believe that campaign contributions affect courtroom decisions....
"This crisis of confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary is real and growing. Left unaddressed, the perception justice is for sale will undermine the rule of law that the courts are supposed to uphold.
"To avoid this outcome, states should look to reforms that take political pressure out of the
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