Two stories crossed my desk this week that reminded me of what is at stake in the upcoming election that is less than two weeks away. While many voters are focused on the presidential race, and perhaps rightly so, most Texas voters are now focused on various races that will ultimately determine the make-up of the Texas legislature. However, in Texas, we also elect our judges, and while those are usually the races with the lowest profiles, they can and do have a huge impact on families.
This week an editorial in the Dallas Morning News laments the fact that many prosecutors get away with abuse of their authority and, when caught, are often given a “slap on the wrist.” This is true in the case of Michael Morton who was href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/10/19/texas-bar-sues-ex-da-says-withheld-evidence-in-187-murder-conviction-since/">wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and spent 25 years in prison — as it is now being alleged — because the prosecutor at the time, who is now a state district judge, withheld evidence that would have cleared him from the charge.
Michael Morton’s attorneys have “a rare court of inquiry that will hear arguments from Morton’s legal team that Anderson broke the law by scheming to conceal case records and block access to DNA tests while Morton sat in prison.”
Judge Ken Anderson, has been a sitting judge for years, and it brings to mind the question of what kind of justice has he dispensed during his time on the bench.
In a case involving the prosecution of home schoolers in Sweden, an appeals court has issued a unanimous ruling that a Jewish family in Gothenburg has the right to teach their children at home according to their faith, in spite of a ban on home schooling adopted last year by the national government of Sweden.
Judges are often the final arbiters of issues regarding families and sometimes issues related to home schooling. In Texas, we are seeing this more and more in relation to cases in which single parents are being challenged by non-parents because the non-parents strongly disagree with a parenting decision of the fit parent. Sometimes this decision is a decision to home school. A parent in this type of situation can face years of litigation and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees simply because a judge does not understand or agree that a fit parent has a fundamental constitutional right to direct the care, control, and upbringing of their child.
In Texas, we are trying to unseat one such judge in this election who has demonstrated a lack of judicial demeanor as well as a bias against a home schooling mom. He removed her children because she home schooled them.
We have less than two weeks before this election, and we need your help in electing people who understand and support the fundamental right of parents to direct the care, control, and upbringing of their children. Please help THSC PAC in the last push to raise the funds we need to make this happen.
About Tim Lambert
Today, our legal system seems so little prepared to deal harshly with official misconduct. In a sense, this is a little surprising: no one in history was more forthright about how common official misconduct is than our nation’s founders. Out of 3,000+ siting judges in Texas we should expect that there will be at least a few every single year who misbehave seriously enough to be removed from office or worse.
Judges, just like lawyers, just like politicians, are human beings. As such, they are predisposed to various forms of sinfulness. Modern politics seems to lack sensitivity to this reality in the form of vigorous, ongoing official investigations of serious allegations of misconduct that result in removal from office or prosecution of public servants that abuse their office and the trust of their bosses (their fellow citizens). This process should be commonplace. It should not surprise us. “Another one bites the dust” ought to be our fairly regular reaction to discovery of official misconduct and appropriate recompense. Unfortunately, The Press no longer takes its responsibility for investigative journalism seriously, which is bound to have diminished an important check on official misbehavior.
Politics is a dirty business. For dirty business to get done, you need dirty business people. We The People would do well to recognize this and take steps since The Press is asleep at the switch.