Know the Judges on the Ballot!

Nearly 300 people gathered on the steps of the Indiana Statehouse Wednesday, many calling for the recall of Indiana Supreme Court Justice Steven H. David. Justice David authored the recent high court ruling that held individuals don’t have the right to resist police who enter their home, even if those entries are illegal.

Justice David spoke about the salaries, which account for about $97 million in the state budget. He told lawmakers how the recently passed Ways and Means Committee budget prohibits judges, prosecutors, state-funded magistrates and deputy prosecutors from receiving any pay adjustments for two years regardless of whether state employees get an increase – a move that specifically reverses a 2005 statutory change to how trial judge compensation is tied to those state worker hikes.

“We seek no special treatment for the men and women who serve as judicial officers and prosecutors across this great state and who administer the people’s business in the local courthouses,” he said. “We only ask that they be treated in the upcoming biennium in the same way that the legislature and governor intended and agreed that they would be treated in the 2005 legislation.”

Justice Rucker testified about the public defense funding, which accounts for about $13 million currently. In the budget proposal submitted last fall, the court asked for a $3.15 million annual increase in public defense funding because of five additional counties – Delaware, Hamilton, Huntington, Lawrence, and Marshall – that will qualify for reimbursement at the start of the next biennium.  The state reimburses some of the defense costs for counties meeting certain standards, and the court says the general fund appropriation needed is $16 million rather than $12.85 million included in the budget passed by the House Ways and Means Committee.

“We were told they would do their best with us,” Dolan said.

Justice Robert Rucker says his four Indiana Supreme Court colleagues have issued a ruling that transforms millions of law-abiding residents into traffic offenders.

The four-justice majority on Thursday decided that state law makes it illegal to display temporary license plates in a vehicle's rear window, and that those paper or cardboard plates must comply with the same statute governing permanent metal plates. That holding came in Kerry L. Meredith v. State of Indiana, 89S04-0808-CR-430, and was echoed in the shorter companion case of Jeffrey Young v. State, 49S02-0905-CR-252.

"A drive down nearly any Indiana street on any given day will reveal Hoosier motorists applying old-fashioned common sense: attaching temporary paper tags to the inside of the back window in order protect them from deterioration by the elements," Justice Rucker wrote in Meredith. "By today's decision the majority has transformed law-abiding citizens into traffic offenders. This is patently wrong in my view; therefore I dissent."

Judge John G. Baker was named to the Court of Appeals in 1989, which makes him the longest-serving member on the current Court. He is Presiding Judge of the Court’s First District, which covers all of southern Indiana, and he served as Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals from 2007-2010

 Judge Nancy H. Vaidik is a judge on the Fifth District Court of Appeals.  As far as I can tell, the question of her retention is statewide on all Indiana ballots.  She was appointed by Governor Frank O’Bannon in 2000, and retained by voters in 2002.