4 October 2016
National Republicans bankrolled ugly anti-Sandefur ad
The money behind Jake Eaton’s stopsetemfreesandefur.com political action committee comes from the Judicial Fairness Initiative project of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which is headed by former Florida attorney general and congressman Bill McCollum. The RSLC has ties to Bush 43 operative Karl Rove.
stopsetemfreesandefur’s C-6 financial disclosure form, received by Montana’s Commissioner of Political Practices on 1 October, reports two contributions from RSLC: (1) a $43,000 inkind contribution for research and polling, and (2) $50,000 in cash. Eaton contributed $50, and Scott Aspenlieder of Laural, MT, chipped in with $35. That allows the PAC to claim some (0.09 percent) of its money comes from Montana.
Slightly more than half of the Eaton PAC’s $21,361 of expenditures went to the Rising Tide Media Group, LLC, in Alexandria, VA, to produce the the ad. Another $2,520 went to Acquire Digital, LLC, in Nashville, TN, for the PAC’s (overpriced) one-page website. The rest went to Strategic Media Services of Arlington, VA, for placing television ads.
As of 26 September, Eaton’s PAC had $28,724 in the bank, which means more mud may be slung at Sandefur.
Mud slinging wins judicial elections
Eaton’s ad essentially accuses Sandefur, a three-term sitting district judge who’s been endorsed by more than four dozen judges, of coddling child molesters. The charge is reminiscent of the scurrilous, and false, accusation that he had helped free a rapist that brought down sitting Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Louis Butler in 2008:
In answer to a question about his qualifications in an online forum on The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Web site, [Gableman] acknowledged that he had no appellate court experience but said he had argued a case, concerning zoning, before the state Supreme Court.
In the recent election, Judge Gableman’s campaign ran a television advertisement juxtaposing the images of his opponent, Justice Louis B. Butler Jr., in judicial robes, with a photograph of Ruben Lee Mitchell, who had raped an 11-year-old girl. Both the judge and the rapist are black.
“Butler found a loophole,” the advertisement said. “Mitchell went on to molest another child. Can Wisconsin families feel safe with Louis Butler on the Supreme Court?”
Justice Butler had represented Mr. Mitchell as a lawyer 20 years before and had persuaded two appeals courts that his rape trial had been flawed. But the state Supreme Court ruled that the error was harmless, and it did not release the defendant, as the advertisement implied. Instead, Mr. Mitchell served out his full term and only then went on to commit another crime. New York Times.
Electing judges encourages this kind of campaigning. It also leads to sitting judges hanging them higher and higher as the election approaches to prove they’re tough on crime:
“Proximity to re-election makes judges more punitive — more likely to impose longer sentences, affirm death sentences and even override life sentences to impose death,” a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law concluded last year.
Sandefur is no coddler of criminals. He’s a former police officer and deputy county attorney as well as a sitting district judge. I don’t worry that supreme court justices with that kind of background will loose murderers and rapists upon our womenfolk. I worry that such justices might try to be so tough on crime that they trample civil liberties.