Candidate for
Justice; Ohio State Supreme Court; 6 Year Term Starting 1/1/09

I aspire to become a Supreme Court Justice because it is the highest position attainable within my chosen profession as Judge. I believe that every individual should strive to attain the best position in their field. I have enjoyed and still enjoy my current position of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge. However, when I was contacted by a group of highly respected attorneys, and later the Ohio Democratic Party, and asked to consider this position, I was honored and excited about the prospect of bringing my perspective to the Ohio Supreme Court. For the first time in thirty-eight years, the Court is composed of seven Justices from one political party. I believe it is incumbent upon us to have balance on the Court both politically, as in a Democratic and Republican balance and philosophically. I truly believe that embracing ideas from different points of view make for more balanced opinions.

I ultimately decided to run for the Ohio Supreme Court because of some deep felt concerns that I have about current perceptions of our profession. I view my candidacy as an opportunity to have a serious intellectual debate about the future of our legal system and it's most visible embodiment, our esteemed judiciary.

While I am aware that we may not all agree on what reforms we should institute to protect the integrity of our legal system, I am confident that we share a sincere desire to protect and promote the sanctity of the profession. In particular, I wish to address growing public concerns about the influence of campaign contributions on the integrity of judicial decision making.

I am currently a member of the Ohio Judicial College Judicial Ethics and Professionalism Committee. My membership on the Ethics and Professionalism Committee has spurred my interest and concerns about public perceptions of our judiciary. Through my candidacy I hope to initiate a vigorous debate about the future of the Ohio judiciary. Specifically, I am very concerned by public surveys that find that 83% of voters believe campaign contributions influence the decisions of the Ohio Supreme Court.

I am very concerned about the numerous newspaper articles that point to a correlation between campaign contributions and the votes of members of the Court. For example:

The New York Times in the article "Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court's Rulings" points to a correlation between campaign contributions and individual Ohio Supreme Court Justice's votes in judicial decisions in Ohio. In that article, the Times states that Ohio Supreme Court Justices "routinely sat on cases after receiving campaign contributions from the parties involved" and "on average . . . voted in favor of contributors 70 percent of the time."

In a follow up article, "Judges for Sale, published on December 12, 2006, the New York Times goes to great lengths to discuss how judicial campaigns have been taken over by "spending by special interests" that has soared "into the stratosphere."

These types of characterizations lead to perceptions of impropriety. One of the central motivations for my decision to run for this office is my concern over this perception. As a member of the Ethics and Professionalism Committee we are currently at a crossroads on this issue, and have an excellent opportunity to immediately and decisively correct this situation as we redraft our Code of Judicial Conduct to bring it in line with the suggestions made by the American Bar Association.

In conjunction with my work on the Committee, I have recently introduced a new recusal rule or disqualification rule as it now will be called, that is intended to overhaul the current recusal rules on all Ohio courts, including the Ohio Supreme Court. The first draft of the proposed new Code of Judicial Conduct simply removed the disqualification paragraph which tied disqualification directly to monetary contributions to a judge's campaign. This disqualification provision was specifically listed in the model rules proposed by the ABA. My proposal places that section squarely back in the new Disqualification Rule and gives it teeth designed to immediately remove any doubt about the impartiality of our Ohio judiciary. That proposal passed the Ethics and Professionalism Committee and now stands before the Supreme Court Task Force currently rewriting the Rules of Judicial Conduct.

Obviously, if a Judge cannot perform his or her duties impartially and diligently, they must recuse. Since Ohio voters have spoken with regard to the method of selection of our state Judges, and that method requires the raising and spending of large amounts of capital, it becomes incumbent upon the Ohio Supreme Court to fashion a set of recusal rules that make sense, set the highest moral and ethical standards, and insure that justice is always impartial and cannot be bought by the highest bidder.

Much has been said by the current members of the Ohio Supreme Court regarding the need for change, but to date, no meaningful change has been undertaken. My campaign has introduced this comprehensive system for disqualification. In addition, and hand-in-hand with the disqualification rule, my campaign will introduce a method for financing judicial elections based upon a public financing model so that the days of raising millions of dollars in judicial races will end.

But make no mistake about my position on this crucial issue. Both a disqualification rule designed to rid us of our present issues, and a public financing model, to protect us in the future, must be passed in order to protect Ohio from ever again being referred to as "rogue state" as one Georgetown law professor recently stated about our judiciary and how judicial races are financed.

In addition, I believe that Criminal Discovery rules should be open, subject to protection of a witness in the event of the threat of intimidation. I believe that the records of our public agencies should be as open as possible, subject only to protection of personal records that could place someone in danger of identity theft. Finally, I believe that the racial diversity statistics from all of our courts should be tracked and publicly released immediately.