Handpick your judge, or get one picked for you

Alarmed by the rising campaign costs of electing judges, lawyers and members of the bench across the state are taking on the issue of converting the way we pick our judicial candidates in Washington.

The trigger was the last round of races for the state Supreme Court, which drew in money from East Coast interest groups and powerful lobbies within the state. The rising costs of a Supreme Court campaign are indisputable; the solution proposed by some members of the legal community is not so clear.

A look at campaign contributions for the state court shows more money coming into Washington last fall than was needed to fund all the judicial campaigns from 1990 to 2002.

According to the Washington Chapter of the American Judicature Society, campaign funds in 2006 leaped to nearly $4.5 million, a dramatic increase from $1 million spent the previous election year of 2004. In fact, campaign contributions were less than $500,000 in 1990. That's now pocket change for a seat on the Washington Supreme Court.

What's going on?

"We're just catching up as a state," responded Charlie Wiggins, former appellate court judge and president of the local chapter of the American Judicature Society. "Most other states have seen a sharp increase in campaign donations, and now they've arrived here."

John R. Ruhl, an attorney with the Seattle office of Eisenhower & Carlson and current president of the King County Bar Association, also raised the question of how much money it will take in the future to get on either the state's appellate or supreme courts.

In the Bar Bulletin, Ruhl writes that opposing political-action committees quickly formed to fund their favored candidates. Speaking to The Seattle Times editorial board last week, Ruhl advocated serious discussion of judicial campaign reform, including public financing of judicial elections, with a cap on expenditures, or more drastically, appointed judges from a panel of lawyers and lay people.

The race that spooked all the lawyers was the Supreme Court contest between sitting Chief Justice Gerry Alexander and challenger John Groen, a Seattle-area attorney. Citizens to Uphold the Constitution, known as FAIRPAC, aligned the defense lawyers, unions, state employees and tribal money to pull together more than $500,000. The building industry and a devilishly named PAC, "It's Time for a Change," helped Groen with almost the same amount of money.

The result, as these pages commented at the time, was one nasty campaign for the Supreme Court seat, with ads that failed to fully reveal their source of money, or mendaciously misinformed TV viewers about the issues and the candidates.

Now comes the hard part: what to do about it. Wiggins believes there is enough public sentiment to support public financing, adopted in North Carolina in 2002 and considered a success in limiting campaign financing.

Appointment of judges to the bench by the governor or an independent panel would require a change in the state constitution. Although people pay less attention to judgeships than almost any other political post, it's hard to imagine the voters of Washington giving up a right to elect their Supreme Court.

The Groen-Alexander race was perhaps the most bitter, but no close observers of the campaigns thought either candidate was unqualified. In a more languid time of elections, perhaps the candidates themselves would have emerged and been selected based on what the people saw in them.

The system we have now will most certainly deliver judicial candidates in the future who are symbolic of the interests that directly and indirectly fund their campaigns. Throwing a couple million bucks at a candidate for state Supreme Court comes only when the candidate shares the philosophy of the donors. That doesn't make them dishonest as judges, but it tilts the system away from a fully independent judiciary.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com