Tag Archives: justice

Justice for Some

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Last Thursday’s ruling by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals striking down Minnesota’s rules barring judges or judicial candidates from personally accepting campaign money or from endorsing political candidates has added another nail to the coffin of impartial justice.

The appeals court said there are protections against the influence of money such as allowing judges who receive campaign contributions from people appearing before them in their courtrooms can remove themselves from the case. But federal courts have consistently struck down rules limiting political speech by those seeking seats on the bench. And the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations now have the same rights as individuals.

The circuit court ruling will soon turn judicial campaigns in Minnesota into the same ugly partisan contests that we have seen in states that have opened the judicial campaign floodgates like Wisconsin, our neighbor to the east. Allowing judges to seek campaign contributions will sever the few remaining threads holding our system of equal and impartial justice together.

Confidence and trust in our elected public officials has pretty much bottomed out. The overwhelming majority of people in the country believe our elected officials are bought and paid for and are in Congress strictly to serve their own moneyed interests. But losing confidence and trust in our judiciary could lead to more dire consequences.

Lobbyists and special interests will support judges they think will rule in their favor. Negative attack ads will proliferate as money pours into judicial coffers, much of it from outside the state. The huge influx of dollars will lead to an even greater explosion of big money into judicial races in this state and in others. It’s a never-ending cycle that has already led to obscene amounts of money being spent on political races.

Minnesota has elected its judges since 1857 and has had a reputation for fair and impartial justice. Given the recent circuit court ruling, the states last and best hope to preserve its untainted justice system, may be to drop its system of electing judges. Many judges currently run unopposed now.

The legislature has begun work on a constitutional amendment that would make all judicial seats appointed, subject only to what is known as “retention election.” Voters would only be allowed to decide whether judges had done a good enough job to keep their seats.

The rich and powerful can already buy the best lawyers. Let’s not allow them to buy the judges as well.

Juvenile Justice

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Last Thursday, the Minnesota State Supreme Court rejected the appeal of Lamonte Martin, who, along with 19 year-old Cornelius Jackson, was convicted of first-degree premeditated murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of release for shooting 19-year-old Christopher Lynch nearly a dozen times in May of 2006. The ruling upheld the convictions of both gang members who coldly executed Lynch as he begged for his life in a north Minneapolis alley.

This horrific act might have been just another in the long list of crimes associated with gang violence–crimes that occur daily in large cities across the country–except that Lamonte Martin was 17 at the time of the murder. His age was one of the issues cited on appeal.

A divided Minnesota court ruled that sentencing juveniles to life without the possibility of release does not violate the constitution’s ban on cruel or unusual punishment. Citing a 2005 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on a Missouri case involving a juvenile killer, which overturned the death sentence for the juvenile but upheld a sentence of life without release, Justice Christopher Dietzen concluded that, “When a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the state can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties.”

While the prosecution hailed the verdict, Martin’s public defender argued that the ruling was another case of the justice system failing to properly distinguish between teenagers and adults when it comes to criminal responsibility and life sentences.

So did the Supreme Court make the right decision in sentencing Martin to life in prison? After all he was just days from his 18th birthday when he participated in Lynch’s brutal execution.

According to a 2005 report from Human Rights Watch, more than 2,225 juveniles across the country are serving life in prison without parole. Forty-two states permit judges and juries to sentence juveniles to life in prison without parole. Pennsylvania leads the nation in the number of juvenile lifers, with more than 330. Interestingly, Human Rights Watch found that 59% of the juveniles serving life-without-parole sentences nationally had no prior criminal convictions before being placed in prison for life.

So while some may argue that the decision handed down by Minnesota’s Supreme Court was cruel, it’s difficult to argue that it was unusual.

Politicizing Justice

60 Minutes reported on Sunday that fifty-two former state attorneys-general have asked Congress to investigate whether the conspiracy and bribery charges brought against former Alabama governor Don Siegelman were part of a five-year secret campaign to ruin the governor orchestrated by none other than President Bush’s chief hatchet man, Karl Rove.

A judge dismissed the first case against Siegelman in 2004 because it was so weak. The Justice Department re-indicted him in 2005 when he launched another campaign for governor. The office of U.S. Attorney Leura Canary handled the prosecution. Her husband Bill Canary, one of Rove’s close Alabama associates, had run the campaign of Siegelman’s opponent, Governor Riley, in 2002.

Siegelman was accused of giving a position on a state board to businessman Richard Scrushy in exchange for a $250,000 donation to a lottery campaign. The star witness, Nick Bailey, claimed that he saw Siegelman take the check after meeting Scrushy. The check, however, was cut days after the meeting, and prosecutors knew it.

Bailey, who was facing ten years in prison for extorting money from Alabama businessmen, had agreed to cooperate with prosecutors to get a lighter sentence. Prosecutors met with Bailey 70 times and made him write and rewrite his proposed testimony in order to get his story straight. Those notes, by law, should have been turned over to the defense.

Karl Rove and others at the White House have been subpoenaed to testify before Congress but have refused to appear. And the Justice Department has refused to turn over hundreds of documents in the case.

Using federal prosecutors as political tools to investigate people instead of crimes is yet another instance of politics corrupting and undermining our system of justice. If we choose to ignore the mounting evidence that our justice system has been politicized, we do so at our peril.