Legal groups offer information on judicial candidates

AABA. CCBA. DSL. ISBA. WBAI.

The abbreviations of these Illinois legal associations may sound bewildering to the average voter. But the information they provide about the judicial candidates running in Tuesday's primary is clear.

Each organization - the Asian-American Bar Association, Cook County Bar Association, Decalogue Society of Lawyers, Illinois State Bar Association and the Women's Bar Association of Illinois - belongs to the 11-member Alliance of Bar Associations for Judicial Screening. The alliance works with the nonpartisan VoteforJudges.org to compile candidate evaluations for Cook County judicial races and make their recommendations available to voters online. Recommendations also will be reprinted in the Daily Herald on Monday's Opinion Page and are available at dailyherald.com.

However, not every voter takes the time to review the bar associations' recommendations. Representatives say that's a mistake.

"I've heard it said that a bad judge can do more damage to a person's life than a bad senator or congressman," says Bernadette Freeman, co-chair of the Women's Bar Association of Illinois' judicial evaluation committee.

Deanna Blair, WBAI member and co-chair of its committee, agrees.

"Virtually everyone at some point in their lives has something to do with the court system," says Blair, perhaps as a party in a civil matter, traffic incident, divorce or criminal case. "You want a judge making decisions for you who's qualified, capable and will give you a fair shake."

Bar associations make their recommendations based on a candidate's litigation experience (for most associations the minimum is 10 years), legal knowledge, integrity and impartiality, sensitivity to diversity, temperament, punctuality and character.

The Cook County Bar Association, a 95-year-old organization comprised of 800 African American lawyers and judges, also looks at a candidate's community service.

"We feel that a judge is a public servant who should be connected to the community, not just researching the law in an ivory tower," says Marian Perkins-Phillips, the CCBA president.

Bar associations don't make recommendations based on a candidate's race, gender or religious or political affiliation, say representatives. Their goal is to ensure a diverse judiciary, sensitive to minorities, that is comprised of the best qualified candidates, says Sarah Poulimas, co-chair of the Asian-American Bar Association's judicial evaluation committee.

"At the end of the day, we want to elect and appoint judges with multiple viewpoints," she says.

That said, "an unqualified minority candidate who gets on the bench can hurt the chances of other, qualified candidates," she says.

The Illinois State Bar Association, the state's largest with 35,000 members, began evaluating judicial candidates in the early 1970s, says David Anderson, the ISBA's associate executive director.

"As long as we're electing judges we have a duty to share that information with the voters," said Anderson, who estimates that 90 percent or more of judicial candidates (including circuit, appellate and supreme court candidates) participate in the exhaustive process.

It takes several months and begins with the candidate filling out a lengthy application, says Lonny Ogus, former co-chair of the alliance and current the co-chair of DSL's judicial evaluation committee. DSL is a Jewish bar association.

Volunteers from two associations then investigate the candidate's personal and professional background and summarize their findings in a report, Ogus says. The candidate is then invited for a 20-minute interview before a panel of alliance members. The panel includes at least one member from each bar association, Ogus says.

Each bar association is responsible for making its own recommendations which range from highly qualified (HQ) and/or highly recommended (HR) to not qualified (NQ) and/or not recommended (NR). There's also a rating of NE, which means the candidate was not evaluated through no fault of his or her own. Bar associations send letters to candidates informing them of their rating, Ogus says, at which time candidates may appeal the associations' decision. Current evaluations for Cook County judicial candidates are available online at voteforjudges.org. The Northwest Suburban Bar Association elected not to do evaluations for the 2010 primary because there were no contested races in the 12th and 13th subcircuits, which are the ones that cover the Northwest suburbs, a spokeswoman said.

"With the early primary, we couldn't convene the panels necessary to review every judge before the Feb. 2 primary," said Michael Meschino, chairman of the NWSBA's public relations committee. "Of course we will be doing evaluations for the November general and for subsequent elections."

Collecting information on candidates is only one part of the process, Ogus says. The other involves distributing it. "The problem is getting information to the electorate," Ogus says.

Despite the bar associations' efforts, unqualified candidates occasionally prevail. "Sometimes bad candidates win for dogcatcher and sometimes bad candidates win for judge," Ogus says.