Friday, September 13, 1996

Maloney seeks re-election, but wants to change election system

By Associated Press

Judge Frank Maloney will be happy to win re-election to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals under the judicial selection system that now exists.

He'll be even happier to do all he can to change the system, win or lose on Nov. 5, he told the Reporter-News in an interview Thursday afternoon.

Maloney laid out a figurative indictment of an election system for appellate judges that:

-- Risks tossing dozens of solid judges with hundreds of years of experience out of office when one major political party's candidates sweep up and down the ballot on the strength of straight-ticket voting.

-- Requires incumbent judges seeking to keep their seats to take time away from their heavy workloads to campaign for office.

-- Forces appellate judges and judicial candidates to seek many and large campaign contributions from lawyers and litigants likely to bring business before the same court, sooner or later. Criminal defense lawyers, for example, are the heavy contributors to candidates for the court on which he sits, Maloney said.

"It is wrong," Maloney declared. "They put us in a position of looking like bribees."

Maloney advocates initial appointment and then periodic retention elections for appellate judges. At the very least, he said, appellate judicial elections should be removed from partisan politics, which requires the candidates to run as Democrats or Republicans.

His own platform stresses integrity and experience - not only on the criminal appeals court, but as a lawyer who's both prosecuted and defended criminal defendants, a former law professor, and author of a textbook on criminal law.

He's also fared well in bar polls statewide and in the largest two counties, Harris and Dallas, but the specter of straight-ticket voting still haunts him.

The Democratic incumbent is opposed by Tom Price, a Dallas County district judge, in the Nov. 5 election. Maloney pointed to newspaper articles critical of Price's claiming bar association polls as endorsements this year, even though the bar associations explicitly disclaim that their polls constitute endorsements.

Price has countered he's always considered the bar polls as endorsements. And his fourth-place finish in one such poll he counted as an endorsement in his Republican runoff because his runoff foe had finished fifth.