Editorials

Perhaps the most damning indictment of Alabama's pay-to-play system of judicial elections is by a famous novelist.

John Grisham's The Appeal is a work of fiction, yet the judicial election system it portrays is all too real.

In the book, big money flows into appellate court races. What flows out are decisions friendly to contributors.

We see it in Alabama, where $54 million was spent from 1993 through 2006 to elect judges to the state Supreme Court. It's a sure thing this year's race between Republican Greg Shaw and Democrat Deborah Bell Paseur won't come any cheaper than the norm.

The Appeal tells the story of a corporate honcho's attempt to reverse the verdict of a lawsuit. A jury said his company owed $41 million to a woman who lost her husband and son due to cancer. It seems Krane Chemical, the book's fictional company with a plant in south Mississippi, had been carelessly dumping toxic chemicals. The result was something known as a "cancer cluster," creating hundreds of sick and dying victims, most of whom were poor.

Krane's CEO discovers a way to make the multi-million-dollar judgment go away — by buying a friendly vote on the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Just another page-turner from a famous novelist's imagination, right? Not so, says Grisham, an attorney and former Mississippi state legislator. A system of court seats going to the highest bidder is very real.

Grisham told PBS' Bill Moyers earlier this year, "You got corporate people throwing money in. You got big individuals. You got, you know, cash coming in to elect a judge who may hear your case. Think about that. You've got a case pending before the court and you want to reshape the structure of the court, well, just to get your guy elected. And that's happened in several states. Big money comes in, take out a bad judge, or an unsympathetic judge. Replace him with someone who may be more friendly to you. And he gets to rule in your case without a conflict."

And where did Grisham see the worst cases of this abuse?

"You can read the Supreme Court decisions in Mississippi, and Alabama," he said, "and both states have a hard-right majority. And so people with legitimate claims are, not always, but generally out of luck."

Also out of luck are Alabama voters caught in the middle of the fight. Full disclosure: We favor Paseur because we hope she will bring much needed balance to a very business-friendly state Supreme Court. However, we wish her bid, like so many over the past dozen-plus years, did not resort to the same old script.

This year's race is another clear sign that Grisham is right. Our way of selecting judges is deeply flawed, and needs to change.