Opinion ID: 2600337
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Council's Evaluations Amounted to Timely and Statutorily Authorized Filings of Declarations of Candidacy Made by the Judges.

Text: Here, applying its own interpretation of what a minimally acceptable declaration must contain, the Division contends that the Council's retention evaluationsfiled with the Division by e-mail on July 15, 2004were not minimally acceptable as declarations of candidacy. Though acknowledging that the legislature provided little guidance . . . as to whether a given communication qualifies as a `declaration of candidacy,' today's opinion reasons that this ambiguity gave the Division a certain degree of discretion in deciding what to accept as a proper disclosure. [31] Deferring to the Division's expertise, today's opinion accepts its interpretation, finding that it is supported by the facts and has a reasonable basis in law. [32] But the opinion and the state both mistakenly treat the judicial retention process as essentially a one-agency ship with the Division alone at the helm. As shown in the description above, the process in fact requires the participation and cooperation of three separate state agencies; and the legislature has assigned the initial, and in many respects the primary, responsibility for steering the course of the process to the Council, not the Division. While the law undeniably requires judges seeking retention to declare their candidacy to the Division, it independently empowers the Council to determine for itself which judges have declared their intent to run for retention. When the Council determines that a judge does intend to run, the law further requires it to investigate and evaluate the judge and to file its evaluation and recommendation with the Division. When viewed as a whole, it seems apparent that this legislatively mandated process gives both the Council and the Division independent authority to elicit, receive, and act on declarations of candidacy from eligible judges who are seeking retention. Yet nowhere does the law empower either agency to restrict, ignore, or override a determination formally made by the other in performing its part of the process. As noted above, when the Council sends a retention questionnaire to a judge eligible for retention, the questionnaire is expressly directed to Judges Standing for Retention and Candidates for Judicial Retention. A judge who completes and returns the questionnaire thus unequivocally declares the intent to stand for retention; and in so doing, the judge provides the Council with the information it needs to investigate and evaluate the judge's performance. The completed questionnaire thus enables and authorizes the Council to undertake its investigation which the Council would otherwise have no authority to conduct. By returning the retention questionnaire, then, the judge initiates a formal administrative process that treats the judge as a declared candidate; announces the judge to be running for retention; investigates the judge's qualifications and performance; and ultimately leads to the filing of a statutorily mandated report with the Division that evaluates the judge as a candidate standing for retention and recommends how the public should vote. Furthermore, the evaluation communicates to the Division all the information the Division requires to be included in a declaration of candidacy for judicial retention. It follows that, when the Council files its evaluation with the Division on or before the August 1 deadline for declaring candidacy, the filing actually complies with all statutory prerequisites for a timely and properly filed declaration of candidacy. Just as a final judgment issued by a court stands as evidence that the underlying facts and law necessary to support the judgment have been determined and are no longer in question, so the Council's evaluation, upon being filed with the Division, establishes the Council's formal determination that the evaluated judge has in fact declared the intent to stand on the ballot and qualifies as a candidate for retention. The Division has no more authority to disregard or reinterpret the Council's formal determination that a judge is standing for retention than it does to disregard or reinterpret the Council's evaluation of the judge's performance.