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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Ind. Courts - South Bend Tribune series continues today

The South Bend Tribune's series, Judging the Judges, continues today with this story by Jeff Parrott, headlined "Judge evaluations help voters make informed choice." The story begins:

In Arizona, a state agency surveys people who work in or have had contact with the courts.

In Iowa, the state bar association polls attorneys across the state.

In the Indianapolis area, the Marion County Bar Association asks lawyers to evaluate judges -- even though judges there are popularly elected, meaning voters may already learn about them through the campaign process.

In each of those places, survey results are shared publicly, meaning you don't have to be a lawyer to know whether a judge is doing a decent job before voting him in or out on Election Day.

But in St. Joseph County, voters are on their own if they hope to make an informed decision on whether to keep a trial court judge on the bench.

The Indiana State Bar Association evaluates judges up for retention on the ballot, but only those in the state's highest courts: the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, said association president Jim Riley, an Indianapolis attorney.

Such evaluations typically are only done in places where judges are appointed by the governor and then retained or rejected by voters at the end of each term -- a "merit selection" system operating only in St. Joseph and Lake counties in Indiana. The Indiana State Bar Association thinks it's up to county bar associations to evaluate trial court judges, Riley said.

However, the St. Joseph County Bar Association has not found a satisfactory way of doing it, its members say.

The local group tried evaluating judges once in 1990, but bar leaders had difficulty agreeing on the level of detail from the survey results that they should release publicly, recalls South Bend attorney Mitchell Heppenheimer, the group's treasurer.

"I remember going up to Barnes and Thornburg's office for hours with a bunch of people to discuss the results," said Heppenheimer, who coordinated the project. "It was such an onerous task, we didn't do it anymore."

He said attorneys hoped the evaluation would give judges feedback on their performance while also serving voters.

Chief Judge John Marnocha of St. Joseph County agreed that local bar leaders abandoned the 1990 effort as "sort of useless."

"It was tried one time, and they spent a lot of money to get this form, and then we found that number one, the questionnaire was too complicated, and number two, we had a lot of favorable and not favorable responses from people we knew never appeared in court," Marnocha said. "When you looked at all the numbers, everybody was about the same and it didn't really tell the public anything."

In a sort of honor system, such surveys typically ask respondents only to cast opinions if they have been directly involved in the judge's court.

But Marnocha said something more needs to be done to educate voters.

"I would like to see the bar association take a more active role in informing the public about judges," the judge said. "Whether that will happen or not I don't know."

Here is the website for the entire SBT series. At least one more story is planned, for tomorrow: "Should Indiana tighten its sentencing laws?"

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 27, 2006 07:51 AM
Posted to Indiana Courts