Litigation

Dispatches from Judicial Elections Sizzle

By Peter Hardin

A website created by several incumbent Maryland judges to spotlight the raunchy sayings of a judicial hopeful is only one of several sizzling judicial election dispatches from around the country at August’s end.

The website http://www.scottbeckmantherealstory.com highlights candidate T. Scott Beckman, running for Circuit Court judge in Baltimore County, and features such Beckman remarks as his pledge to “hire the hottest clerks,” according to a Baltimore Sun article. Others can not be printed in a family-oriented blog.

Beckman labeled the website ?a hit job? and a ?smear campaign,” and he insisted those and other remarks were not a part of his campaign,  an article at explorebaltimorecounty.com reported.

In other dispatches:

• Circuit Judge Mac Parsons launched his campaign for the Alabama Supreme Court by attacking Republican incumbent Tom Parker as lazy, according to an Associated Press report. Justice Parker fired back that the challenger is “a liberal Democratic judge” who views the court system as a paperwork factory. (Meanwhile, Republican Justice Thomas Woodall gave a $5,000 political donation to Parsons’ campaign, the Gadsden Times said.)
• A justice sitting on the Illinois Supreme Court, where Democrats hold a 4-3 majority, faces a retention vote in what “could be the state’s most vicious of the 2010 election season,” the Progress Illinois website reported. If Democratic Justice Thomas Kilbride is unseated, it would be the first such removal of a state justice by the electorate.

Full post as published by The Gavel on August 31, 2010 (boomark / email).