O'Connor Says Judges Shouldn't Be Elected

Mark Sherman

The Associated Press

November 08, 2007

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said Wednesday that she'd do away with electing judges and make prosecutors and defense lawyers interchangeable as a way of improving the U.S. justice system.

O'Connor, who has spent much of her 21 months in retirement defending judicial independence, said judges who must run in partisan elections risk being compromised by the growing amount of campaign cash they must raise.

"If I could wave a magic wand ... I would wave it to secure some kind of merit selection of judges across the country," O'Connor said at a conference on her majority opinion in Strickland v. Washington in 1984, which set standards for determining whether a lawyer is providing competent representation.

O'Connor's home state of Arizona switched from partisan elections of judges to an appointed system in the 1970s. "I watched the improvement of the judiciary in that state," O'Connor said at the conference sponsored by the non-partisan Constitution Project. She was elected a trial judge under the old system and later appointed an appellate judge by then-Gov. Bruce Babbitt.

If she were granted a second use of that magic wand, O'Connor said, she would try to make sure that prosecutors and defense lawyers are comparably paid and trained. Many states struggle to pay the going rate when they provide lawyers for poor defendants or rely on inexperienced, often poorly trained attorneys.

In England, lawyers serve both as prosecutors and defense lawyers, paid from the public treasury. "We see a level of courtesy we don't see in our country," O'Connor said. "They realize there are problems in both areas."

She said would like to find some state or local governments in the United States that would be willing to create a staff of public lawyers, who "would spend some time on both sides."

O'Connor was on crutches at the event, the result of what a court official said was a temporary condition in her right hip.