Letters.

Merit Selection v. Elections

The Board of Governors of the Florida Bar has voted "to recommend that Florida voters adopt merit selection and retention for trial judges." Presumably, the board has taken this action, at least in part, to remove politics from the equation. What merit selection does is remove the politics of judicial elections from the public eye and the clear light of day, and move it to the back corridors and smoke-filled rooms where the elite few make all the decisions.

Florida lawyers are supposed to be about protecting rights. What about the basic American right to vote in free, open elections? What about the right to decide, on a county-by-county basis, whether the citizens want elections or merit selection? When did the Florida Bar Board of Governors decide that the citizens were too stupid to be trusted with participatory democracy?

Now our Bar annual fees are headed for another committee, and another round of freewheeling spending in an effort to convince the public to adopt a position that many members of The Florida Bar oppose. The Bar should be fighting the perception, widely held by the public, that lawyers, judges, and the law are a "closed club." Instead, we are going out of our way to enhance that perception and foster mistrust of the profession.

Don A. Paradiso

West Palm Beach

I found the argument presented in the News for merit selection to be quite amusing, especially when the article states "the JNC selects the most qualified candidates and submits their names to the Governor...." My experience has been that every Governor has an agenda and that agenda controls who is going to be appointed judge. Typically this is based on race and gender criteria to the exclusion of male white candidates who have served their communities and their bar associations and who have the potential to be great jurists but are denied that opportunity in the same way that minorities have been denied access in years past.

The present Governor's initial rejection of the judges submitted by the JNC for the vacancy on the Fifth District Court of Appeal is typical of the considerations involved in the appointment process.

Surely electing judges could be no worse than the politics involved in the appointment of judges by political appointees versus the relatively mild combat of an election campaign. The elected judges in my county certainly are the equal of the appointed judges. Limiting judges to those chosen by the appointment process...