Sunday, January 11, 1998

State courts' health at risk in primaries

Say you're on a desert island and need a doctor. You have the names of eight who'll fly in to make a house call, but you don't know anything about their experience or competence or specialties.

How do you decide which one you want?

Pick a name you like because it reminds you of an actor or athlete you admire? Choose a woman because she's a woman or a man because he isn't? Put the names on a board and have a monkey throw darts? Phone the Psychic Hotline?

Face it: Your choice is a crapshoot. You might get lucky, you might not.

But you'll be stuck with the consequences -- just as Texans will be stuck for six years with the decisions voters make in March about electing judges to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

For Place 1 on the court, the state's highest appeals court for criminal cases, five Republicans are vying for the party's nomination. In Place 2, eight GOP contestants are entered!

How can voters in the Republican primary possibly choose the most qualified candidates from among so many unknown names?

Most of the eight in the Place 2 race, for example, are attorneys from Austin and Dallas. They may all be excellent lawyers. But is any of them worthy to be on the court that sets policies and precedents for Texas' criminal justice system all the way down to street level law enforcement? Do voters far away from the cities in which those lawyers practice have any way of telling?

We value our own health enough to expend a lot of effort deciding which surgeon or specialist to see if we're seriously ill. Whether we're as concerned about the health of our criminal justice system is a different matter. Will voters go to the lengths required to inform themselves about such a large field of judicial candidates?

With three of the nine seats on the Court of Criminal Appeals up for grabs and four of the nine on the Texas Supreme Court (the state's highest review panel for civil litigation), Texas voters this year will make a major impact one way or another on administering justice throughout the state, an impact that will last for years. That's a serious responsibility to exercise in the midst of the slogan-shouting campaigns of a crowded, partisan political contest.

An additional concern is that most Texans won't vote in the March primaries, and not all who do will be participating on the Republican side. That means GOP judicial candidates for the November ballot will be determined by a minority of the population and by a fairly narrow range of issues and perspectives.

Last year's Legislature had the opportunity to change the way Texas selects its top judges but failed to agree on either an appointment-and-review method or on separate, nonpartisan judicial elections. Thus, power over our courts is again left in the hands of voters, who have expressed reluctance to relinquish that control despite occasionally elevating unqualified or incompetent candidates to high office.

The crapshoot method is not how we would choose a doctor. It's no better way to select the judges for the most powerful courts in Texas.