Yes, yes, I know. You’re going to say that we already have such a procedure and it’s called “elections.” But here’s the problem with that – the way judicial elections are structured in this state, we’ve got a real difficulty filling judicial seats with non-morons.

WBRZ-TV in Baton Rouge had a story last night about Eboni Johnson Rose, who’s the poster child for why what we’re doing doesn’t work and why we need a backstop to elected judges.

This month during a bench trial, Rose convicted a former Baton Rouge Police officer of a crime that doesn’t exist, then three weeks later declared him innocent.

Donald Steele was accused of groping a motorist after a traffic stop. She declared him guilty of misdemeanor malfeasance, which isn’t on the books. After the state asked her to find Steele guilty of a felony, she declared him innocent

District Attorney Hillar Moore called her unprecedented action “procedurally improper.”

It’s not the first time one of Rose’s decisions have been questioned.

In November 2021, as a brand new judge, Rose ordered Billy Pettice‘s ankle monitor removed while he was out on bond for murdering his girlfriend. While unmonitored, he attacked another woman and their kids.

In February 2022, she released Luke Simmons on bond for a homicide on Spanish Town Road. He was later picked up for a drive-by shooting on North 19th street.

In February 2023, Rose set a third bond for prolific drug dealer Frank Beauchamp.

During the same month, a jury found a Broadmoor Elementary teacher guilty of aggravated assault after pointing a gun at people driving a car on a flooded street. Judge Rose reversed on procedural grounds and sent jury back to deliberate more. Ultimately, the woman was freed. Thirteen minutes later, Rose called the woman back in and said the jury hadn’t intended to fully free her, so she found her guilty of misdemeanors.

An appeals court agreed with Rose’s ultimate decision to declare a mistrial.

She deserves to get picked on, because in four years on the bench Rose has shown herself to be utterly and completely incompetent, but the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge is full of clowns disguised as judges. It’s an unacceptably horrific court which is reversed by appellate courts over and over again.

And the 19th isn’t even the worst court in the state. Not by a long shot. Nothing beats the abject foolishness that goes on in New Orleans, and in Shreveport they’re hardly conceding anything where it comes to black-robed morons.

This isn’t just a diatribe against hug-a-thug leftists on the judicial bench. That’s certainly part of the problem, but in these places you have people who can’t understand contract law judging commercial disputes, not to mention turning tort law into a system of jackpots for plaintiff lawyers and their scam-artist “victim” clients. It’s a virtually endemic problem.

At the federal level, Congress has the power to do something about corrupt and/or incompetent judges. Congress can impeach and remove a judge. Our older readers will remember that a federal judge on the bench in New Orleans, Thomas Porteous, was impeached and removed by Congress in 2010.

But to the best of our research, the Louisiana Legislature doesn’t have the power to impeach a state judge in the same way Congress can impeach a federal judge. In fact, Article V, Section 21 of the Louisiana Constitution provides that “The term of office, retirement benefits, and compensation of a judge shall not be decreased during the term for which he is elected.”

Which would seem to say that once a judge is elected there is no getting rid of him unless the voters do it.

And there is no means of recalling a judge in Louisiana, either.

There is something to be said for the idea that judges are less accountable to the public than are other public officials. Doing that isolates them from public pressure, and so you get less risk that they’ll issue verdicts directed by the mob, and so forth.

And that works really well when you’re installing competent, reasonable, and honest people on the bench.

But when you’re dealing with crooks and morons? Maybe you need more accountability.

What we would suggest are a couple of things that should be kept in mind in the event the Legislature begins a constitutional convention next month.

First, allow an impeachment and removal process by which the Louisiana Legislature can get rid of judges for a “pattern of gross incompetence, corruption or bias,” requiring a two-thirds vote for impeachment in the House and a two-thirds vote for removal in the Senate.

Second, do something Nathan Koenig talked about back in February here at the site, which is to eliminate the geographical limitations on judicial voting. When Nathan wrote about that, it was in the context of a bill by Sen. Alan Seabaugh that would make the state Supreme Court districts subject to statewide elections. That’s smart, because a Supreme Court seat is a statewide seat. You don’t just handle cases from your district, you handle things from all over the state. So there isn’t any real reason why you should only be accountable to the people of, say, Lafayette and Lake Charles for those decisions.

We think that’s a very smart way to handle things, but we also think it’s a good idea to extend that principle all the way down to the district court level.

Eboni Johnson Rose got elected with 64 percent of the vote against Quintillus K. Lawrence back in November of 2020. The electorate which put her on the bench was 83 percent black, which is absurd considering that the 19th Judicial District is nearly a 50-50 white/black split.

The argument for having districts and sub-districts for judges based on geography isn’t a terrible one; it means there is some degree of geographical representation going on. You wouldn’t want the whole state supreme court to be a bunch of lawyers from New Orleans, for example. But that argument largely disappears when it comes to the electorate. If all of Baton Rouge had a chance to vote in that judicial race back in 2020, maybe there would have been some better options than Rose and Lawrence. And since all of Baton Rouge is affected by Rose’s decisions there’s a problem here.

You get judges like this when you do racial set-asides. We should be trying for more of a colorblind society, not a DEI society – which we’re finding out is a Didn’t Earn It society.

Just some things to think about as we try to save our judicial system from rotting into a Third World disaster.