Marcus Carey has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to open up what judicial candidates can reveal during a campaign.
A candidate for the Kentucky Supreme Court is challenging ethics rules regarding judicial races.
If the legal challenge is successful, it could dramatically alter Kentucky judicial elections in November and in years to come. This year, 263 judicial races are on the ballot.
Marcus Carey, 53, a Northern Kentucky lawyer, filed a lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court in Frankfort, contending that the state's judicial ethics canons violated his First Amendment right to free speech. Carey says he wants to be able to state his views on political issues, tell voters his political party affiliation, seek endorsements from other political officials and directly solicit contributions during his campaign, all of which are prohibited by Kentucky judicial canons.
Carey is also challenging a provision that would require judges to disqualify themselves in proceedings where they have "expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the proceeding."
This is the problem with judicial races. Voters have no way of determining anything useful about a judge before they are asked to cast ballots for that person. That means that the only candidates to win are the ones that are best financed. Personal wealth or financial connections should not be the main determining factors in elections. This leads to a random assortment of judges, some of which can be down right incompetent.
Of course Carey's way is not any better. I don't necessarily want judicial candidates campaigning like representatives. To me the best thing to do is to have the executive branch appoint the judges for eight year terms. These appointments must be approved by a simple majority of the representative bodies.
A system like that would at least lead to a baseline of competency from judges that is currently not found in the elective process. And it could be assumed that the appointed judges share the same judicial philosophy as the current executive administration. Thus the judges appointed would follow closer to the will of the people than random elections provide.
