Keep the Focus on Justice

Politics and justice make a volatile mix. It doesn’t take much of the former to taint the latter.

Both factions in the current feud over judicial endorsements need to take a deep breath and focus on what’s really at stake here.

With two eminently qualified candidates in a runoff election for one vacant seat on the Superior Court, a central issue has become the widely held perception that the Ventura County courthouse is a private club in which only alumni of the district attorney’s office are welcome on the bench.

Unusually active campaigning by current and former judges on behalf of Chief Assistant Dist. Atty. Kevin McGee has reinforced that perception.

McGee is a veteran prosecutor, as are about three-fourths of the court’s current judges. Opponent Gary Windom, whom The Times endorsed, is a veteran public defender and law professor. Both have fine credentials and impeccable integrity.

The difference is that one is an insider and one is an outsider.

McGee is deeply rooted in Ventura County’s law enforcement establishment. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, or with the decision of the sheriff, the district attorney and numerous police agencies and prosecutors to endorse his campaign.

There is nothing wrong with judges endorsing McGee, either. Judges are citizens, too, with a right to voice their opinion about issues of public concern.

But 13 judges and one retired judge took an extra step and wrote a letter to local newspapers in support of McGee’s candidacy. Judge Charles W. Campbell took an even bigger step and recorded a radio ad urging voters to join him and the other judges in supporting McGee to “preserve” the quality of the bench.

Even if one or both of those steps crossed the line of propriety, it hardly justifies a counterattack by public defenders seeking to switch their cases out of the courtrooms of judges who endorsed McGee. We don’t buy the defenders’ reasoning that a judge who endorses a prosecutor can only run a courtroom in which all defendants are guilty until proved innocent.

It’s time to get this campaign out of the courtroom, where it does not belong, and to get politics and justice back into their delicate balance. Neither candidate is benefiting and the biggest loser will be the public’s faith in the justice system.