Candidates vie to join PA Supreme Court
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
By: Susan Phillips
sphillips@whyy.org
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is the final word on the state's constitution, deciding everything from beer sales in supermarkets to whether or not a convicted murderer lives or dies. Two candidates vying for an open seat on the Court will face each other in a debate Thursday in Philadelphia.
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Pittsburgh Republican Jane Orie Melvin and Easton Democrat Jack Panella are hardly household names. If elected, they will serve on the same court that upheld the controversial 2005 legislative and judicial pay raise, ruled more than a dozen times on challenges to the state's gambling laws, and would be the final decider of whether a local municipality can enforce its own gun laws.
Franklin and Marshall political science professor Terry Madonna says despite the stakes, little is known about judicial candidates.
Madonna: Because the candidates don't typically have enough money to go out and campaign through the state and get themselves known, that creates a serious information gap.
Most of the money they do raise, comes from attorneys. That's a conflict of interest reformers are trying to change by proposing to institute merit selection. Until then, Pennsylvania remains one of only 6 states that elect its judges.
Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts (PMC) has been advocating for a change in our judicial selection process for more than 20 years. We believe that choosing judges in partisan elections, in which candidates often know little more than the political party of the candidate before making their choice, is not the way to put judges, who routinely decide on the most important matters in citizens' lives, on the bench.
Instead, we advocate for a merit-selection system, where appellate judges are chosen based on their qualifications and then face the public in a retention election.
That said, we organized this debate, along with the League of Women Voters of PA and students at Temple University Beasley School of Law, to make sure that as long as judges are being elected, the public has as much information going into the voting booth as possible.
To learn more about PMC and merit selection, visit our website at http://www.pmconline.org