April 18, 2008

Briley Tries To Have It Both Ways

According to a report in today's Nashville City Paper, state Rep. Rob Briley "repeated his defense of closed-door meetings of a powerful judicial panel Thursday, despite Gov. Phil Bredesen’s efforts to shine light upon its proceedings." Specifically, the administration pushed legislation that would have made the Judicial Selection Commission’s meetings open, but that legislation was killed recently by a lawyer-dominated House subcommittee on which Briley, a trial lawyer, serves.

Briley's defense of closed-door meetings for the commission is a flip-flop from last year, when he sponsored legislation - House Bill 1338 - that would have required all meetings of the Judicial Selection Commission to be open to the public. (Link good only until the start of the next General Assembly, in 2009.) You can read the text of House Bill 1338 here.

Meanwhile, the American Courthouse blog continues to comment on the debate over the future of Tennessee's Judicial Selection Commission

The Judicial Selection Commission is group of 17 people - mostly lawyers picked by the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association and other legal industry special interest groups - that gives the governor a list of people he can appoint to the bench. Then, although the state constitution says judges are to be elected by the people, the judges are allowed to serve until a "retention" election in which voters get to vote "yes" or "no" if the judge gets to stay on the bench

As reported by the American Courthouse yesterday, the related Judicial Evaluation Commission - a group of 12, you guessed it, mostly lawyers - generally gives a unanimous positive recommendation for the retention of every judge.

In Tennessee, there’s a 12-member Judicial Evaluation Commission that evaluates judges appointed by the Judicial Selection Commission and reports to the voters on whether or not judges should be retained. Basically, it’s a second group of lawyers deciding whether a judge appointed by the first group of lawyers should keep his or her job.

Guess what? They pretty much always tell voters to keep the judge! Here’s their latest report. Every single commissioner voted to retain every single judge - not one dissenting voice. It gets worse: Since Tennessee adopted the Star Chamber, only one judge has ever lost a retention election. And if a judge actually does lose, the same committee gets to nominate another one in his place.

Retention elections are really just a shell game to bamboozle voters into blithely giving up their constitutional right to vote for state judges. But the bottom line is still the same: When lawyers choose, voters lose.