News
John Council nearly kills Supreme Court justice
I nabbed a front seat at the Dallas Bar Association forum at the Belo Mansion today, which hosted all six Texas Supreme Court candidates on the November 2008 ballot. Apologies to Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, who almost ended up in the front seat of my Mustang as I was quickly exiting the parking garage so I could blog this. But the question-and-answer format hit most of the campaign-issue high points, including case backlog, long disposition times and the perceived defense bias at the high court. Here are some of the main points made by the Republican incumbents --- Jefferson, Justice Dale Wainwright and Justice Phil Johnson --- and their corresponding Democratic challengers --- 160th District Court Judge Jim Jordan; Sam Houston, a partner in Cruse, Scott, Henderson & Allen in Houston; and 13th Court of Appeals Justice Linda Yanez. On the long disposition time, Jefferson says that although the court had a huge hand-down last week, it could have issued 10 more opinions. “I had one,” he says. “I pulled it, because I thought I could do a better job. If you want us to work hard and want us to get cases right, you have to give us time.” Jordan says a way to speed up opinion production would be to return the court to a weekly conference schedule and change an internal court rule that allows individual judges to hold up opinions. “Don’t let individual judges pull a case because they’re not ready to vote on it and sit on it,” Jordan says. Johnson says the solution to the backlog is easy: “I have said one of the immediate solutions is to stop taking so many cases.” Wainwright says he finds a recent law review article written by University of Texas Law School professor David Anderson, which found the high court rules for defendants most of the time, “interesting.” Wainwright says, “I found part of his methodology concerning.” He points out Anderson’s report failed to mention that tort reform legislation has been going on for more than 20 years in Texas --- not just in the 2003 H.B. 4 bill, which put serious limitations on medical malpractice litigation and was the focus of Anderson’s article and a reason for the defense-leaning opinions. Houston says Anderson’s article “codified what lawyers have been saying for the past few years. The court is leaning toward defendants.” Yanez agrees: “It shouldn’t be dismissed,” Yanez says. “It was pretty stunning for me, because it reflected what we already knew.” We have some video of all of but two candidates’ final comments; we don’t have Johnston and Yanez, because we were changing videotapes when they spoke. But Johnson plugs his 23 years of practice as trial lawyer, his four years on Amarillo’s 7th Court of Appeals and his five years on the high court. “I stand on the record of the opinions I’ve written and the judgments I have issued,” Johnson says. Yanez stands on her career experience, which includes time spent as an elementary school teacher, legal aid lawyer, Chicago regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and finally a justice on Corpus Christi’s 13th Court of Appeals for the past 14 years. “We bring who we are to the table,” Yanez says.
-- John Council
