Judicial Elections

I hate electing judges. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the theory that the voters should have some say over who runs the courts. It's that I'm not certain that it's possible to actually make informed choices about judges. After all, they can't come out and make campaign promises to rule certain ways on certain issues. Most people don't really understand what judges actually do, anyway, and if they did they wouldn't care (imagine a scintillating debate on the scope of the excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule!).

That information void then gets filled with biographical platitudes, irrelevant religious pronouncements, and the occasional really nasty attack ad. One of those latter ones was in my mailbox this evening, urging me to vote against a sitting judge out here in the Valley using imagery out of Forrest Gump. And it's false to boot.

The judge in question is N. Edward Eagleoski, whom his opponent, Phillip Stowers (also a sitting judge) accuses of being "the worst sitting judge in the state" and "the lowest in intelligence and reasoning ability" based on the State Bar's 2008 Judicial Evaluation Poll. But based on the results, that claim doesn't hold up.

The poll has lawyers rate the judges in 6 categories on a scale of 1 to 5 and also reports the average rating across all categories. Indeed, among 29th Circuit judges, Eagleoski fares the worst, averaging 2.0, with a 1.9 in "intelligence/reasoning ability." Stowers picks up 3.0 in both categories (O.C. Spaulding leads the pack in the circuit with 3.6 & 3.7, respectively).

So Eagleoski certainly doesn't shine in his own area, but "worst . . . in the state?" Nope. Robert Carlton from the 30th Circuit gets 1.6 in both categories, while G. Todd Houck in the 27th Circuit weighs in at 1.3 and 1.0. Finally, Eldon Callen from the 17th Circuit scores a pair of 1.7s.

Stowers's claim is objectively false, but how many voters will figure that out? How many will care? Why should that apathy determine who sits in judgment in cases that affect lives for years and years? Maybe Ecuador has got it right - just hold a lottery.