¶ … campaign financing in the election of judges and cites numerous studies which illustrate correlation between campaign donations and favorable court rulings. The point of the article is to highlight a possibly damaging policy that could be creating a perverse criminal justice system. Skaggs offers a number of solutions to the issue, each of which could conceivably address the problem. The best solution is to make elections dependent upon public financing, which would eliminate Big Money from the process; or it should be necessary for judges to show who has contributed to their election so that bias could be determined by litigants before a case goes to trial. This would ensure that the criminal justice system is kept honorably above board and it would also promote a more Christian sense of propriety on the judiciary's part, as the idea of judges being "bribed" by campaign donors would become obsolete along with the process.
Campaign Financing
Skaggs (2010) lays out the reasons why campaign financing is adversely affecting the judicial system in his analysis of the impact of campaign contributions on the independent judiciary. Skaggs (2010) notes that according to recent studies, "elected judges are more likely to decide in favor of business interests as the amount of campaign contributions that they have received from those interests increases" (p. 3). What this finding indicates is that the elected judiciary is very likely being bribed by special interests, lobbyists, and campaign donors; the financiers provide the funds for the judge's campaign and when the judge wins the election, he/she is beholden to the donors who backed his/her run for election. It is a system of bribery directly condemned by the Old Testament Christian Bible: Deuteronomy 16:19 warns clearly, "Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the innocent." Yet, in modern day politics, it appears that bribery is law so long as it is performed in the name of "campaign financing." Indeed, another study cited by Skaggs (2010) showed that in the state of Ohio, elected judges had ruled "in favor of their campaign contributors...
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