| 19 February 2004 From: Executive Director, Malcolm Rich To:
Members/Friends of the Chicago Council of Lawyers
& the Chicago Appleseed Fund For Justice In this
e-Newsletter:
President's
Column It is Time to Make Changes to the Way We Evaluate Judges The Chicago Council of Lawyers devotes untold person hours to the task of evaluating sitting and would-be judges. The Cook County retention ballot for sitting judges this fall will ask voters to decide whether nearly 80 Circuit Court judges and three Appellate Court judges should remain in their positions. The Council will evaluate all of these retention candidates. I am enormously grateful to the many Council members who volunteer their time to interview and investigate judicial aspirants; to survey lawyers who have appeared before judicial retention candidates; and to report their findings. And, of course, I’m very proud of our evaluations, which, I believe, are the best and most thorough in town. Our Executive Director, Malcolm Rich; David Melton, the able chair of our Judicial Evaluation Committee; David’s committee members; and many others go to heroic lengths to make this happen. No one doubts that the Council’s top quality judicial evaluations are an important contribution to the Chicago legal community. Our Directory of State Judges in Chicago, for example, is the reliable source of information on the temperament and abilities of sitting judges. But if the ultimate goal of judicial evaluations is to remove incompetent and intemperate judges from the bench and to prevent the election of unqualified candidates, we should be taking a hard look at the return we are getting for our enormous investment of time and energy. Consider the judicial retention election. It has been 14 years since any retention candidate has been defeated, even though most would agree that, each election cycle, the retention ballot includes a handful of judges who have performed abysmally. The bar associations’ views about the judges up for retention aren’t penetrating the consciousness of the electorate. Of course, the ballot is lengthy and other races attract more attention. But part of the problem may be that our evaluations don’t appear authoritative to the public at large. The Council’s ratings are among the separate views of more than ten bar associations for each candidate. Small wonder then that the bar evaluations seem fragmented and confusing. If the public sees them at all, that is. With all the time and energy the bars expend on evaluating candidates, few resources are left over to publicize the findings. The average member of the public is completely ignorant of whether there are judges who are not fit to be retained in office. It is time for the State of Illinois to consider establishing a Judicial Performance Commission with funding from the state to conduct comprehensive evaluations of every sitting judge up for retention. Such commissions already exist in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Tennessee. A similar Commission is overdue here. For the Commission to be trustworthy and effective a few conditions would need to be met:
The foregoing should insure that the Commission would have teeth and that it will be willing and able to recommend removal of those judges who lack the skills or temperament for their position. In those cases where the state’s Performance Commission has found a sitting judge not worthy of retention, a clear, forceful and unambiguous message can be communicated to voters: the state Commission charged with evaluating sitting judges finds this candidate unqualified; vote him off the bench. Years ago, the Council of Lawyers energized the process of evaluating judges. We should be very pleased that, today, our work is being emulated. A number of bar associations, in addition to our own, participate in a judicial evaluation process that is, in the main, thorough and objective. Now we need to move to a new stage. The Council should push aggressively for a state Judicial Performance Commission. Speaking
Out: The Council and the Cook County Bar Association Oppose the
Use of Subpoena Power Against the National Lawyers Guild in Iowa.
The following
statement was printed in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin in its February
17, 2004 edition.
The Chicago Council of Lawyers and the Cook County Bar Association join with others concerned with the erosion of civil liberties in this country in condemning the recent issuance of a federal grand jury subpoena to Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, seeking the identity of persons attending an anti-war conference at the University. The subpoena also
sought the identity of the officers of the Drake chapter of the National
Lawyers Guild, sponsor of the conference, as well as meeting agendas
and annual reports of the Guild chapter filed with the University. In
addition, four peace activists were subpoenaed to testify before the
grand jury. The prosecutor
has stated that the subpoenas were issued in conjunction with the investigation
of trespass by protestors on military property the day after the conference,
but such an overbroad subpoena interferes with Freedom of Speech and
Freedom of Association guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United
States Constitution. The Supreme Court (in NAACP v. Alabama, 1958) has
held that Freedom of Association is one of our most valuable rights.
For the Chicago
Council of Lawyers: For the Cook County
Bar Association: A March 3, 2004 Forum: The Future of Protest In Chicago
Chicago
Council of Lawyers / Chicago Appleseed Fund For Justice
750 N. Lake Shore Drive, Fourth Floor, Chicago, Illinois 60611 Phone: 312-988-6565 / Fax: 312-654-8644 E-mail: ccl@chicagocouncil.org or caffj@chicagoappleseed.org Website: www.chicagocouncil.org or www.chicagoappleseed.org |