Jack Lessenberry: Cleaning up races for court

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Lessenberry

December 19, 2010

By JACK LESSENBERRY Syndicated Columnist The Record Eagle Sun Dec 19, 2010, 06:14 AM EST

What's wrong with this picture? In order to be elected or re-elected a judge in Michigan, candidates must raise vast sums of money, especially at the highest court levels.

Where do they go for it? To their fellow lawyers — and also, well-heeled people whose cases might just end up in their courts.

Marilyn Kelly, the chief justice of Michigan's Supreme Court, is troubled by that. She's troubled even more by the huge barrage of negative TV advertising now common in judicial races.

"Over the last decade, millions of dollars have been spent to portray Michigan judicial candidates as being unfit for office," she said. "If you watch these ads, you get the impression we are choosing among scoundrels and incompetents."

That bothers the chief justice, who has given her life to the law, and who is now in her last term on Michigan's highest court.

So she's trying to do something about it. She and a senior federal appellate judge, James L. Ryan, have put together a Michigan Judicial Selection Task Force.

And they mean to shake up the system. They've gotten two dozen of Michigan's most distinguished citizens to serve on it, not all of whom are lawyers.

Though Kelly is a Democrat, she's being supported by a Republican jurist who has agreed to serve as the panel's honorary chair: Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman member of the nation's highest court.

"People see judges running for office and begin to think of them as just politicians in robes," O'Connor said in a letter. "That perception degrades the courts as an institution," she said.

That's not the only issue the panel intends to look at. Not only are vast sums spent on judicial races (at least $8.2 million in this year's state supreme court contests) but under state law, much of it is allowed to be spent anonymously.

This is something that Rich Robinson finds outrageous. He runs the non-partisan, non-profit Michigan Campaign Finance Network.

"Imagine if airlines sponsored anonymous advertisements saying their competitors are unsafe. It would destroy an industry in no time." He fears that the barrage of negative judicial advertising "undermines public confidence in the impartiality of the court system."

That, he added, is potentially very dangerous: "No trust in courts, no rule of law." That's one of the things the panel hopes to address, Kelly said.

"We intend to produce a report by the end of the year," she said. "We'll have to see what we come up with, but I anticipate that some of what we recommend may require amending the state constitution. We may be able to accomplish other things through legislation." The recommendations may not all be unanimous.

"I imagine we'll strive for consensus, but there's nothing wrong with a good solid minority report," she said.

Justice Kelly is more aware than most of the state's judicial problems since in Michigan, the Supreme Court is in charge of overseeing, disciplining, and regulating all the other courts in the state. Her term in office lasts two more years, but she is likely soon to have a little more time on her hands.

The GOP won a majority on the state's highest court in November. The new majority is likely to replace her as chief with Justice Robert P. Young.

While she'll still be an active member of the high court, she intends to work diligently not only with her panel, but to do what she can to see that its eventual recommendations don't just sit on a shelf.

This all means little, Judge Ryan noted, unless it leads to "practical ways to improve the process." Based on a devastating recent ranking by the University of Chicago law school, Michigan's judicial processes are indeed in need of improvement.

Question for Lansing

Few were surprised last week when a federal grand jury indicted former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, his father Bernard, and several associates on corruption charges. However, it was interesting that the indictment traced some of his crimes back a decade, to when he was in the Legislature.

Kwame Kilpatrick, then house minority floor leader, got the state to appropriate $800,000 to two nonprofits he said would help children and seniors. Instead, the indictment alleges much of it went to "personal expenses" for Kwame and his wife.

According to the Gongwer News Service, officials had their suspicions at the time. Don Gilmer, who was Gov. John Engler's budget director, noticed that after half the grant had been spent, Kilpatrick had never provided any proper documentation for how it had been spent. When he failed to provide it, Gilmer refused to release the second half of the grant money.

But why didn't anyone ask more questions about this 10 years ago? That might have saved a lot of people a lot of heartache in the decade that followed.