The Rise of the Business-Friendly Bench

It ain't cheap to get elected to a state supreme court these days.

A new report from three legal advocacy groups finds that the amount spent on electing judges in American has skyrocketed over the last decade, jumping more than 150% from the 1990s. The impact?  A business-friendly bench.

Candidates for state judge jobs raised more than $200 million in the last decade, according to The New Politics of Judicial Elections, 2000-2009: Decade of Change, which was just published by the Justice at Stake Campaign, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and the National Institute on Money in State Politics. And the pace isn't slowing — at least 22 states hold some form of election for state judges, and those jobs increasingly go to the highest spender.

As former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner write, in the foreword to the new report: “Left unaddressed, the perception that justice is for sale will undermine the rule of law that the courts are supposed to uphold.”

The report finds not only that millions of dollars are flooding into judicial elections nationwide, but a few big spenders are having an outsized impact on justice in this country.

In an extreme example of the influence of money in judicial elections, the Washington Post points this week to the Massey Coal case, which was decided last year by the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a Kentucky judge should have recused himself from a case involving a company whose CEO had given $3 million to the judge's campaign. But the judge didn't, and Massey was able to essentially buy a court decision — and four Supreme Court justices thought that was just fine.

While the impact of money in judicial elections seems to rear its head most often in civil cases, our criminal courts are directly affected as well. Running for public office often pushes criminal judges to come across as tougher on criminals than necessary. Elections paint crime in black and white and make efforts like parole reform and drug courts a much harder sell.

The bottom line is that special interest money taints judicial elections, and as this new report evidences, increasingly, our state courts are getting overwhelmed by waves of cash. And smart criminal justice reform will never happen if our courts are packed by the highest bidders.

Photo Credit: walknboston