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Former Missouri chief justices defend court plan

The spate of attacks aimed at upending Missouri’s 67-year-old nonpartisan court plan has drawn a pointed response from four former chief justices of the Missouri Supreme Court.

Responding to an editorial in the Springfield News-Leader criticizing the judicial selection process for not being open, the four defended it as necessary to protect the careers and reputations of judicial candidates.

Clients might hire other lawyers if they learned that their attorney was seeking to become a judge, they wrote in a letter to the newspaper’s editorial-page editor. The publicity could discourage qualified candidates from applying at all.

And that same publicity, they said, “would encourage lawyers who have not earned a good reputation to apply for judgeships for the purpose of having their names included among those discussed in the press for appointment to an appellate bench.”

Moreover, they said, “some excellent lawyers and judges are subject to frivolous complaints or silly suits. Public discussion of meritless complaints would be a disservice and discouragement to many, very well qualified applicants.”

The letter was signed by Andrew Jackson Higgins, who was chief justice from 1985 to 1987; Edward “Chip” Robertson, chief justice from 1991 to 1993; Ann K. Covington, chief justice from 1993 to 1995; and John C. Holstein, chief justice from 1995 to 1997. All but Higgins were appointed by former Gov. John Ashcroft, a Republican. Higgins was appointed by former Gov. Joe Teasdale, a Democrat.

The News-Leader’s editorial ran amid an increasingly vitriolic campaign by some Republican lawmakers to modify or jettison the process by which judges in Missouri are selected for the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals. The process, which Missouri adopted in 1940, aims to insulate the judicial selection process from partisan politics.

The campaign reached fever pitch after Gov. Matt Blunt’s office criticized the seven-member Appellate Judicial Commission for supposedly acting in secret when it picked the finalists for a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Blunt, who has frequently lambasted “activist judges” and backed measures to strip them of jurisdiction, has demanded transcripts of the proceedings and extensive background material on all 30 applicants for the position.

The commission screens candidates and submits three names to the governor, who has 60 days to pick one. The commission consists of three members elected by lawyers, three appointed by the governor, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Last month, the panel sent the names of three appeals court judges to Blunt: Ronald Holliger of Blue Springs and Nannette Baker of St. Louis, both of whom were appointed to the bench by former Gov. Mel Carnahan, a Democrat; and Patricia Breckenridge of Nevada, Mo., who was appointed by former Gov. Kit Bond, a Republican.

“You don’t see any of these candidates who has done anything outside the norm of what judges do,” Robertson said in an interview last week. “I’ve asked — and nobody’s been able to point to it — for an opinion that displays judicial activism. …

“I think this is a panel that meets the governor’s criteria. And what I’ve said is that the governor got what he wanted. He just may not have gotten who he wanted.”

Robertson, now in private practice with the local firm of Bartimus Frickleton Robertson & Gorny, may seem an unlikely critic of the governor. A lifelong conservative Republican, he was roundly bashed when Ashcroft appointed him to the Supreme Court 22 years ago. Robertson was Ashcroft’s chief of staff at the time and all of 33 years old.

But Robertson said he was incensed over the attacks on the nonpartisan court plan, which he insisted has worked well for nearly 70 years.

“We’ve avoided in this state all of the controversy, all of the difficulty that has attended court systems in other states that have a different method,” he said.

Robertson is one of several prominent Missourians behind the newly formed Missourians for Fair and Impartial Courts, a group that aims to counter the attacks on the Missouri plan.

“You begin to hear this steady drumbeat of ‘judicial activism,’ ” he said. “But when you ask somebody for an example of that, they can’t give you one, beyond something a federal judge may have done …

“Somebody thinks there’s a political advantage to be gained or that we’re in danger of having the judiciary do some things that our judiciary has never done.”

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