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Show Questions judge selection process To the Editor: Upon reading the numerous "honeyed" pronouecmcnLs appearing in the columns of your publication commenting on the various aspects relating to the nomination of three area attorneys for appointment to the newly created Judgeship of the Reorganized Seventh District Court, I am unable to resist an impulse to be a little satricial and sardonic in rendering comment upon such observations. For it appears strange to me that in all this apparent euphoria generated over the prospects of the appointment, the political implications that surround the nomination and the appointment are blithely overlooked and disregarded. And this fact become obvious when one mulls over the manipulation that went on between our State Representative and the Governor, members of opposing political parties, in consumating the deal that brought forth the new Judgeship in a first place, it is further accented as a result of deliberations of the Judicial Nominating Commission, supposedly an "elite" group of citizens whose deliberations will spare the public of the consequences of their own errors by making the selection for them, in naming three otherwise nondescript lawyers from the area as candidates for the appointment, and it is finanally confirmed by the palpably ridiculous and hypocritical statements made to the media by each of these candidates in response to the nomination. And while I don't like to appear cynical in aiming snide comments at the professed efforts of a group of citizens performing a duty without compensation, considering the results of their deliberations, it would appear to me that we would have fared just as well if all the names of the attorneys in the District were placed in a hat and the Governor at an appointed place and time, amid speculation, publicity and fanfare, have drawn one of them out and made the appointment. At least such a procedure would be wholly inexpensive, and would have relieved the public of the misapprehension and disappointment that are bound to insue when following all this formality the appointment if finally made. And what further disgusts me about the whole proceed is the fact that the citizens at large are completely excluded from the selection process. They are not even heard by the Nominating Commission making the appointments, they are denied the right of expressing their approval or disapproval of the appointment when made until election time 1984, a period of more than two years away by which time all of the reservations and questions relating to the appointment will have been dwarfed by the obvious, an incumbent installed in office. And if the past is any criteria for the future, one can be sure that it is almost impossible to move a judge, even an incompetant one when he is installed in office. And finally, I am left to speculate upon the following irritating suggestion relating to this nomination. First I am wondering what kind of "political coupe" will be staged by the clique that controls the dominent party in the County when its nominee for County Attorney, in the event that he is chosen, withdraws from that contest. Reflect upon that matter and a whole unsavory series of speculations emerges. And again, reflecting somewhat nostalgically, I along with many others recall the time when Judges along with other officers of the State and county were chosen on a partisian ballot like all other elected officials, and contrasting affairs in that supposedly "unlightened era" with those of today, I am unable to discern where justice suffered from the system. Indeed, as I recall, we got better justice and better judges under that system than the one that succeeded it. And in the meantime we were spared of the snobbish arrogance that has been displayed by some members of the bar in sanctimoniously implying that Judicial selection is a process to be reserved for lawyers, one that is not to be tainted by allowing "the rabble" to participate in the process. As an unregenerate and unreformed admirer of the older system, I cannot concur with this sort of snobbery. Respectfully, ALVIN G. NASH |