‘Trial Judges Should Be Appointed,’ or Should They?

Re “Trial Judges Should Be Appointed” (Commentary, June 1):

What the public really wants and needs is protection through the legal system from dangerous or violent convicted criminals for ourselves and our children. We are interested in results, not excuses.

Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey’s proposals to change the system so that we can only vote to either “retain” or “not retain” our local trial judges would mean that a judge could only attain office by a governor’s appointment. This would eliminate the possibility of a dedicated deputy district attorney with experience as a prosecutor, for example, from challenging a judge that he had observed to be consistently and unreasonably lenient. That check and balance, a voice from the people, would be lost in the Dickey system.

He says, “By eliminating the contested election, the public would be spared the misleading campaign rhetoric, and would then be able to evaluate each judge’s record.” I am troubled reading this from one who first served as a deputy district attorney, and has been on the Municipal and Superior Court benches since 1970, because he knows that for the public to obtain any information about sentencing, we must present the full name of each criminal, and the correct court file number to the county clerk’s office.

Dickey, the presiding judge of the Superior Court, should be urging our county supervisors to activate an inexpensive option to their very expensive computer system to allow the public to obtain over-the-counter printouts of each judge’s complete sentencing record for all his criminal cases, showing what the law allowed him to do and what he did.

Our county is one of the more difficult in the United States for the public to obtain any data with which to evaluate actual sentencing, the only criteria that most of us non-attorneys can reasonably understand and apply to evaluate incumbent judges. I urge voters to press for this improvement with the county supervisors, the district attorney, and the state legislators, all of whom must run for office against challengers (so far!).

Dickey knows it is very difficult for the public to know who is qualified in regard to judgment and procedural questions. We could understand whether a judge’s sentences are a credible deterrent to violent and dangerous criminals if the data were available to us.

GEORGE BROKATE

Newport Beach