What's running got to do with sitting on the bench?

• Author: Loomis, David O.
• Position: Tennessee judge's case triggers new round of debate on selection process for Tennessee judges

When District Court Judge Susan Renfer drew an assault conviction last year for snatching shut a defense attorney's unfastened blouse, the irony no doubt made a few Democrats smile. One reason Renfer, Wake County's first and only Republican District Court judge, defeated incumbent Jerry Leonard in 1994 was his guilty plea a year earlier to indecent exposure after a woman saw him urinating in a Raleigh parking lot.

Renfer beat the rap on appeal. She still faces possible sanction from the state Judicial Standards Commission, which in May completed a yearlong investigation of the blouse affair and other incidents in her courtroom. It's alleged she misapplied the law, overstepped her authority and made slurs against blacks and battered women.

Renfer's courtroom antics have rekindled an old argument for changing the selection method for the state's 300 or so judges. For decades, reformers have sought to take it out of the hands of voters and give it to a bipartisan committee of citizens, lawyers and government officials. That's the only way, they argue, to ensure judges with the right qualifications and temperament get on the bench.

Theoretically, elections are the ultimate way to hold public officials accountable. But the reality of judicial elections is an uninformed electorate playing pin the robe on the judge. Most voters face ballots filled with the unfamiliar names of candidates they know almost nothing about.

The Tar Heel State is one of just nine that use partisan elections. The number has been dropping since 1940, when Missouri became the first to adopt merit selection.

So why hasn't it happened here? Plain old partisan politics. For generations, Democrats controlled the bench and opposed anything that could weaken their hold on the judiciary. Now that the GOP is gaining in strength, it wants the spoils. "Why any self-respecting Republican would vote, against popular election now that we're ascendant makes no sense to me," says state Rep. Steve Wood, a Guilford Republican.

But it makes sense to the American Judicature Society, which has argued against partisan judicial elections since the turn of the century. Elections work for officials who must be accountable to their constituents, the society argues, but judges are accountable to the law and the Constitution. "A judiciary has a different responsibility than a legislature," says Rhoda Billings, a law professor at Wake Forest University and a former chief justice of the N.C. Supreme...