Lege should send constitutional amendment to voters on Judicial Conduct Commission

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The State Commission on Judicial Conduct receives about 1,200 complaints per year against Texas judges, executive director Seana Willing told a House Appropriations Subcommittee today. About half of those are people who don't understand the system and are improperly trying to use the commission as a sort of appellate process. Of the other 600 or so, most complaints are dismissed. Last year the commission gave 49 sanctions to Texas judges, she said,  down from a high of 79 or 80 several years ago. Almost all of the sanctions were "private" and the public may never know about them.

Sunset Commission staff complained at the hearing that the commission's confidentiality provisions wouldn't let them adequately evaluate the process, recommending the agency be evaluated again in six years instead of twelve. Moreover, Sunset implied that there really wasn't a good reason for so many informal findings to be secret, and one legislator pointed out that their own foibles were instantly public.

Though she never mentioned her by name, Willing raised the conundrum that caused Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller's misconduct finding to be overturned: The commission has access to a complete range of punishments in its secret proceedings, but in its public proceedings the range of punishments they can give are inexplicably limited. Sharon Kellers' misconduct trial was one of the commission's rare public proceedings (they've had 12 in 10 years) and their ruling was overturned because they chose to "warn" Keller instead of "censure" her. From any perspective it was an absurd and unsatisfying outcome, with the punishment deleted but the misconduct findings remaining intact. To fix the problem would require a constitutional amendment, said Sunset staff, that would require a one-time cost of $105,000 to hold an election.

I hope the Lege does send such a constitutional amendment to the voters. Sharon Keller's misconduct trial demonstrated there's massive confusion over conflicts between the state constitution, the statutes, and Texas Supreme Court rules governing judicial oversight. And Grits surely agrees with Sunset there's no good reason judicial misconduct findings should be secret.