Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky was recalled Tuesday. He’s the jurist who faced huge blow-back for sentencing Stanford University student Brock Turner to what many believed a too lenient 6 months rather than as much as 14 years for sexual assault and attempted rape of an unconscious 22-year old woman. In a May interview the judge said he had no regrets over the sentence he gave Turner.
Persky, a judge since 2003, was turned out by the county’s electorate by a vote just under 60%. See “California Voters Remove Judge Aaron Persky.”
It’s been 86 years since a California judge was last recalled. It’s rare. Incumbent judges rarely lose. And so-called merit-selected judges up for retention also almost never lose. Yet given the overreaction of Judge Persky’s defenders, you’d have thought the legal system cratered. That’s because his defenders don’t put much stock on judicial accountability like they do on the sancrosanctity of judicial independence.
At Flickr by Robert Couse-Baker, Creative Commons Attribution License
Per one account, “LaDoris Cordell, a retired judge and a spokeswoman for Judge Persky, called the recall an attack on judicial independence and said it had “encouraged people to think of judges as no more than politicians.” Conveniently omitted by the judge is that Persky was — after all — an elected public servant ultimately answerable to voters. Meantime, Palo Alto’s newspaper was also over-the-top editorializing that the Persky recall campaign had spawned “a lynch-mob movement that threatens the independence of the judiciary.”
And as for the ‘politicians in robes’ argument, it’s not like legal scholars haven’t argued that judges’ decisions are best explained by their political preferences.
Accountability
So what about the electorate? Are voters’ opinions irrelevant? And when did holding judges accountable become a kind of societal evil? Besides, if a judicial recall is wrong-headed, what other recourse is left to a community in cases like Judge Persky’s? Not even those opining against“recalling judges just because we don’t like their decisions” have good answers. Writing at The Hill lawyer Joel Cohen for one, swats at holding judges accountable, “But to the extent that judicial independence is a core value, we need to find a better way to ensure that decisions by elected state court judges don’t bow to the caprice of the electorate.”
Is there “a better way“? As it is, when judges engage in misconduct or violate professional ethics rules, judicial disciplinary commissions who operate mostly in secret mainly treat such ethics violations with wrist slips administered with kid gloves. An instance of one such wrist slap was the complaint of several years ago by the president of Houston’s defense bar association over the punishment meted out by the state commission on judicial conduct to former Judge Woody Denson. “Nothing ever happens, no one is ever disciplined and there’s no accountability back to anyone for anything,” he protested also adding “And it’s very secretive if anything ever does happen.”
It’s not just a Texas problem either. In 2015, St. Louis Public Radio ran a story about the alleged ineffectiveness of Missouri’s judicial watchdogs, “Missouri’s code of conduct for judges rarely leads to disciplinary action.” According to the report, “About 240 complaints are made against judges in the state of Missouri each year. When complaints are filed—and they can be, by citizens, city officials and other judges–they rarely result in disciplinary action.” Quoting St. Louis University Law professor Brendan Roediger, “The process is very secretive. Sometimes there were rumors around courthouses but that was about it.”
And according to a USA Today report, “Troubling trend: When judges need disciplining.” “The Center for Judicial Ethics at the National Center for State Courts serves as a clearinghouse for judicial discipline and tracks misdeeds nationwide. Their records show that removing a judge from the bench is rare. In 2013, only five judges were removed from the bench nationwide, and 17 resigned or retired in lieu of removal.“ Also see Wisconsin’s Post-Current investigation, “Judges never evaluated, rarely challenged” and “Disciplinary Panel Rarely Takes Action Against Idaho Judges.”
Wikimedia Commons, public domain
To be clear, Judge Persky did not violate any canons of judicial ethics in People v Turner. Moreover, the state commission on judicial performance concluded in its 12-page report “that there is not clear and convincing evidence of bias, abuse of authority, or other basis to conclude that Judge Persky engaged in judicial misconduct warranting discipline.”
Just the same, those campaigning against Judge Persky took exception calling the report:
a one-sided, closed-door proceeding that resulted in an error-ridden report (the “Persky Report”) by an agency with a long history of protecting judges. The Commission only imposes discipline in approximately 3% of cases, even though one study showed that similar states impose discipline at three to four times that rate. At the same time, the Commission refuses to provide any information about why it disciplines judges at such a low rate. In 2016, the Commission sued to block the State Auditor from completing a performance review ordered by the state legislature. As a result of this lack of transparency and oversight, the respected Center for Public Integrity recently gave California an “F” for judicial accountability in a detailed state study.
Recall proponents justified their campaign because, “It’s clear we need judges who understand sexual assault and violence against women and take it seriously. It’s up to us, the voters, to make a difference.”
In other words, when elected officials are found wanting and oversight watchdogs are napping under a tree, it’s left to the people to act as a final check. Long ago in his 1801 letter to Benjamin Waring Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The will of the people. . . is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.”