The Importance of Citizen Oversight of the Judiciary
The Iowa Independent reports that Doug Gross,—Iowan lawyer has served as a lobbyist and as a former advisor to Iowa Governor-elect Terry Branstad—has criticized the involvement of the Iowa Bar Association in judicial elections:
“They’re elitists,” Gross said of the Bar Association in an interview with WHO-AM’s Jan Mickelson. “They’re intellectual snobs and elitists, and they don’t understand that what makes our government an intrinsically genius form of government is that it rebalances itself with the will of the people.”
The Iowa Bar Association, which is a professional group of lawyers, supported the retention of the three Supreme Court justices who were removed from the bench by voters due to the court’s unanimous 2009 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. The president of the American Bar Association recently penned a guest column for The Des Moines Register calling the vote to oust the judges a form of intimidation against the judicial branch. The effort to oust the judges was led by a handful of out-of-state anti-gay organizations that spent nearly $1 million on the campaign.
Chicago Appleseed and the Chicago Council of Lawyers have long been involved with VoteforJudges.org, which aggregates state and local bar evaluations of judges sitting for election or for retention in Cook County. The Chicago Council provides its own recommendations concerning the qualifications of the judicial candidates, and recently Chicago Appleseed has provided administrative support and independent research to the Judicial Performance Commission of Cook County in its evaluations of judicial retention candidates. It has been part of our mission to provide a public service by surveying the legal community to provide comprehensive information about the qualification of judges and judicial candidates in Cook County.
It is critical to the integrity of the evaluations, however, that they be based on judicial performance rather than their decision outcomes. Judges should be “out of touch” to the extent that they are not legislators beholden to the will of the people when making judicial rulings, and evaluations of judicial performance should reflect this.
Nonetheless, an elected judiciary serves at the pleasure of the electorate, which creates tension in any evaluation process. The performance commission model, in use in many states forms the basis for the Judicial Performance Commission of Cook County. The performance commission model aims toward self-improvement in the judiciary and supports judicial independence by focusing on performance metrics in evaluating sitting judges. The performance commission model is often viewed as superior to the methods in use by most bar associations. Where many bar association evaluations rely heavily on self-reporting from judges and insufficiently neutral surveys of the attorney members of the bar associations, performance commission evaluations strive for greater objectivity in the data collection for their recommendations.
The Judicial Performance Commission of Cook County (the JPC) takes objectivity very seriously in its investigations. The Commissioners are drawn from a variety of institutions in Cook County both in and out of the legal profession. Starting in 2011, we will use volunteers drawn from the community at large—not specifically from the legal community—to begin court-watching for the expected 2012 judicial retention candidates. We will also begin court-watching the 2010 judicial retention candidates who received performance improvement recommendations from the JPC to provide mid-term evaluations.
Independence in the judiciary is vital to the promotion of justice. So is excellence. It is our mission at Chicago Appleseed to promote both.