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

Heading: The Council's Role in the Retention Process

Text: Alaska's judicial retention process begins with the Alaska Judicial Council. The Council is an independent state agency created by the Alaska Constitution whose primary constitutional charge is to solicit, evaluate, and nominate to the governor applicants for judicial positions. [10] But the constitution also requires the Council to perform other functions upon direction by the legislature. [11] The key duties the legislature assigned to the Council include conducting a preelection evaluation of each justice or judge seeking retention, informing the public about its evaluation, and filing the evaluation with the Director of Elections for inclusion in the Division's Election Pamphlet. [12] To this end, the Election Code specifically directs the Council to evaluate each supreme court justice, court of appeals judge, superior court judge, and district court judge who will be subject to a retention election and to file with the lieutenant governor by August 7 a statement incorporating the Council's evaluation of each candidate. [13] In keeping with this statutory duty, the Council has developed and adopted an intensive public process to evaluate the performance of judges who intend to stand for retention. [14] This process encompasses all aspects of the judge's performance; it collects, compiles, and analyzes data from a broad spectrum of participants in the judicial process; it invites all interested members of the public to participate and comment on the candidates at various stages of the process; and the Council's activities are publicized on an ongoing basis by notice of the Council's hearings, statewide press releases, and a regularly updated, widely advertised website. [15] Because this process is time consuming, the Council must begin its evaluation in the fall of the year preceding the year in which the retention election is to be held-almost a year before the election and nine months before the Council's August 7 deadline for filing its evaluations with the Division. Since the Council's statutory charge is to evaluate those judges who will be subject to the election [16] not all judges eligible to runthe Council begins by sending all judges eligible for retention a memo specifically addressed to Judges Standing for Retention; the memo attaches a questionnaire soliciting information from those judges who consider themselves to be Candidates for Judicial Retention. The questionnaire asks responding judges for various categories of information relevant to their retention:  a statistical breakdown of their workload;  a summary of their participation on court/bar committees and in other administrative activities;  a narrative statement assessing their judicial performance, including satisfaction with their judicial role, contributions to the judiciary or the field of law, and improvements in knowledge and skills;  a description of non-judicial events and activities that could conflict with their judicial responsibilities, such as having tax liens or collection proceedings filed against them, being involved in non-court-related legal proceedings, engaging in the practice of law, or holding any other local, state, federal, or political office;  lists describing case names, numbers, and participants in the three most recent cases handled by the judge involving jury trials, non-jury trials, and dispositions requiring significant work but ending without a trial; and  a list of case names, case numbers, and participants for any other particularly noteworthy cases. Judges who do not intend to run for retention are not expected to return the questionnaires and, in fact, do not return them. Those who do want to stand for retention return the questionnaires; by so doing they provide the Council with the information and authorization needed to trigger its statutorily mandated evaluation. In effect, then, judges who submit completed questionnaires to the Council declare their intent to stand on the ballot. [17] For its part, the Council interprets its statutory duty as obliging it to evaluate each judge standing for retention elections; in keeping with this interpretation, it treats the returned questionnaires as declarations of candidacy. The Council does not evaluate eligible judges who decline to return questionnaires, and throughout the course of its evaluation process it consistently refers to the responding judges as judges who will actually stand[] for retention. After receiving questionnaires from judges who intend to stand for retention, the Council undertakes its investigation and prepares its evaluation. The Council's investigation relies on three broad sources of information: surveys asking various interested groups to evaluate the judge's performance; collection and review of all performance-related materials available concerning the judge, including materials available from other public agencies such as the court system, the Alaska Public Offices Commission, and the Commission on Judicial Conduct; and information obtained through public input actively solicited by the Council. In summarizing its evaluation procedures for the 2004 retention election, the Council emphasized the breadth and openness of the process: The Judicial Council evaluates judges with the help of thousands of Alaska citizens police and probation officers, attorneys, jurors, court employees, social workers and others who appear in court before the judges. In 2004, the Council surveyed these groups, asked for written and oral comments from the public throughout the state, and reviewed records about judges' workloads, conflicts of interest, and other aspects of performance. Upon completing its investigation and compiling all relevant data, the Council's staff prepares the judicial evaluations and circulates the compiled materials to Council members for review. The Council meets in July to consider the information and make retention recommendations. [18] As required by law, the evaluations are then filed with the lieutenant governor for inclusion in the Division's Election Pamphlet. For the 2004 retention election, the Council held its meeting to adopt the evaluations and recommendations on July 12, 2004. On July 15, the Council filed all the judicial evaluations and recommendations, as well as a two-page description of the Council's judicial evaluation process, by transmitting these materials to the Division in the form of Microsoft Word e-mail attachments. In addition, the Council sent a CD and hard copies of the same information as a backup in the event the Division encountered problems with the documents in their e-mailed format. These filings conformed to the Division's regulations, which allow electronic filing. [19] The Council's two-page description of its evaluation process identified the judges covered in its evaluation as judges who were standing for the retention election, stating in relevant part: [S]tate laws require that the Judicial Council evaluate each judge standing for retention elections. Other laws require that the Judicial Council publish its evaluation in the Voters' Pamphlet. The evaluations of judges standing in the November 2004 election appear on the following pages. The individual evaluations for Judges Nolan and Jeffery disclosed the judicial districts in which they were running and summarized the information the Council had evaluated. Specifically, Judges Nolan's and Jeffery's evaluations revealed that the Council had surveyed and received ratings from 2,927 attorneys; 1,495 peace and probation officers; jurors appearing before the judges in 2002 and 2003; court employees; and an independent, community-based, volunteer court-observer organization. In addition, the judges' evaluations noted that the Council had completed a background investigation including a court records check, a disciplinary records check, a review of conflict of interest statements submitted to the court system and a review of financial disclosure statements submitted to the Alaska Public Offices Commission. Attorneys, peace officers, court employees and jurors were asked to submit written comments about the judges. The Council actively encouraged the public to comment, both in writing and in a statewide public hearing teleconference. Based on the totality of this information, the Council recommended that the public vote to retain both judges. On July 26, 2004, the Council issued a statewide press release announcing that, after a comprehensive evaluation of judicial performance, it had found all ten judges standing for retention in the 2004 general election [to be] qualified. The Council also recommended that voters retain each judge. The press release set out a detailed description of the Council's retention process, explained that Alaska law requires the Judicial Council to evaluate every judge standing for retention and to make the evaluations public. The press release also included a 2004 Judicial Evaluation Summary disclosing various survey ratings received by each judge assessing their performance in office.