From Law.com (thanks to Mike McBride again!):
Michigan’s Supreme Court race has turned into the nation’s nastiest judicial campaign, according to a nonpartisan organization that monitors judicial races.
Bert Brandenburg, executive director of the Justice at Stake Campaign, said recent and numerous television ads in the race between Republican Chief Justice Cliff Taylor and his Democratic challenger, longtime trial judge Diane Hathaway, have created an “orgy of negativity.”
The ads have depicted Taylor as asleep on the bench and a “good soldier” of big business, and Hathaway as a goldbricking, terrorist sympathizer who gives light sentences to sexual predators, according to Brandenburg.
Justice at Stake reported that Michigan is one of a half-dozen fall court races marked by heavy spending and organized attempts by special interests, political parties and an emerging class of “super-donors” to pack courts with judges to their liking.
The organization also cited Mississippi, where an attack ad was pulled off the air by one network after it proved false; Alabama, where special interest spending on court elections has become a central issue; Texas, where state Democrats are mounting an expensive challenge against the state’s all-Republican Supreme Court; Louisiana, where a record was set for television spending in an Oct. 4 preliminary Supreme Court election; and West Virginia, where three candidates seek two seats after a special interest-tainted chief justice was defeated in a primary.
The organization also noted a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice on television advertising in the 2008 judicial races which found that Taylor and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce spent a combined $1,098,330 on TV ads in the two-week period ending October 24 — more than four times what was spent on Hathaway ads.
Brandenburg said his organization has expected a quieter year because three states that broke campaign spending records in their judicial races in recent years (Georgia, Illinois and Washington) had no competitive Supreme Court races this year.
“Unfortunately, the worst is happening again,” Brandenburg said. “The crisis in judicial elections continues to grow. Special interests of all stripes are still fueling a financial arms race, in hopes of claiming court seats as political prizes.”
Nationally, he noted, $165 million was raised for state Supreme Court races in 1999-2007, compared with $62 million in 1993-1998.
Turtle Talk 