The judge in the Alex Jones case: totally unbiased!
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (40)
sorted by:
I'm going to interject here because I've grappled with this topic a lot (and you can't stop me from replying).
Elected judges are clearly dangerous because of the partisan nature of their decisions. But unelected judges could be as bad, or worse, because they are totally unaccountable beyond the state apparatus.
I think a good compromise would be judges that are elected, but have to maintain high support. We think of "elected" as "judge who got the most votes". So, a judge with 30% public support can be a judge. But what if you had a kind of "confidence minimum". A situation where either the judge gets 60% of the vote at least in the election, or there isn't a judge. It would limit the judiciaries size, and it would also force the judiciary to be less explicitly partisan.
It doesn't super help in Travis County's case, but the problem there is systemic bias, like a black man in 1930's Jackson, MI. I think in most reasonable places, getting that level of approval would require someone to be pretty acceptable to the population in general, and likely not super-partisan.
Sure it wouldn't help in deep blue or deep red states, but I think that at least living among that population, it would be understood that certain things should be considered generally acceptable. It's kind of a "you know better".