State Senator Pete Kelly has introduced legislation which would increase the number of Governor-appointed members of the Alaska Judicial Council, making a total of 6 non-attorney members and 3 attorney members.
The Council selects applicants for judgeships around Alaska and provides voter information when judges are up for retention.
Susanne DiPietro is the Executive Director of the Council. She was in Kenai yesterday to speak about their process.
DiPietro: Alaska’s judicial selection process is among the most public and transparent in the country. Members of the judicial council research the qualifications very extensively and thoroughly of all the people who apply and during that process solicit constant public input and also hold a public hearing and can have interviews either in public or in private, depending on the applicant’s preference, and take a public vote on the nominees whose names will be forwarded to the Governor.”
Anchorage attorney Don McClintock helped form “Justice Not Politics” in order to fight Senator Kelly’s SJR 3.
McClintock: “We firmly believe that our current judicial merit-based system has worked very well since statehood. It actually is a system that nationwide has been advocated as a progressive way of selecting judges and we believe SJR 3 has the danger of politicizing the judicial selection process, which we’d like to avoid.”
Senator Kelly said he introduced SJR 3 because he’s concerned that currently we have a cycle of lawyers choosing other lawyers for judicial positions without any public oversight.