An Independent Candidate For Texas Supreme Court?

Carole Four Names and Kinky Friedman will have some company running around the state gathering signatures this spring, via the Austin Chronicle:

Lockhart attorney Bill McNeal has announced that he will run as an independent candidate for the Texas Supreme Court Place 6 seat, currently occupied by Nathan Hecht. McNeal, who graduated from UT Law in 1964 and is certified in civil trial and personal injury trial law, says he decided to run as an independent because he believes that party politics should play no role in judicial elections. He points out that two former Texas high court judges – including, notably, former Chief Justice Tom Phillips – have called for an end to partisan selection of judges. Instead, he says, victors in Texas’ judicial races – especially at the statewide level – tend to be “the judges that get all the money and all the TV coverage. That’s not the way we should elect judges.” To make his point, McNeal has pledged to spend no more than $500 on his campaign and is refusing to accept campaign contributions. Instead, McNeal (whose main opponent, Hecht, has already raised nearly $300,000) will use his Web site – www.billmcnealforjustice.com – to get the word out about his campaign and is encouraging voters to contact him, either by e-mail at billmcnealforjustice@earthlink.net, or at 800/299-4534, to talk about his positions and/or to ask questions about his candidacy.

I’m curious if the other ex-justice they are talking about is none other than Bob Gammage.

A while back, I did some Web-based research on he and Chris Bell, just for kicks, and of the things I found when searching only for .pdf files were two reports on judicial selection, which included quotes from Gammage after he left the Texas Suprme Court.

A report (.pdf) from the American Judicature Society noted the following in a footnote, complete with cite:

Hill was not alone in leaving the supreme court because he hoped for a move away from judicial elections. In 1995, Justice Bob Gammage retired a year before his term ended, describing Texas’s judicial selection process as one that “erode[d] public confidence and corrupt[ed] the courts.” Gammage said that he hoped his resignation would draw attention to the need for reform. George Kuempel, Retiring Justice Slams Texas System, THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, Aug. 25, 1995, at 22A.

An American Bar Association report (.pdf) by its Commission on Public Financing of Judicial Campaigns included the following:

In some cases, judges have been so troubled by the compromising position in which they find themselves after accepting funds from interested contributors that they have declined to seek reelection. Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Bob Gammage was reported to have “quit after
one term because contributions were corrupting the system.” Said Gammage, “people don’t go pour money into contributions because they want fair and impartial treatment.. . . They pump money into campaigns because they want things to go their way.”

That was cited as being from a 1999 article in Gambit Weekly.

Of course, Gammage is in no way alone in saying that judicial selection in Texas needs to be reformed. It was one of the hallmarks of Jim Parson’s campaign for Texas Supreme Court in 2002. That said, it is, of course, judicial selection in Texas remains a controversial idea with no easy answers.

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