Peremptory challenges to judges?

Windypundit makes a good case for this idea. See Striking Judges – Another Radical Idea for Criminal Justice Reform.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 8:49 am and is filed under law practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “Peremptory challenges to judges?”

  1. Ken Says:
    May 12, 2008 at 1:37 pm | Reply

    California has a system for striking judges. Under CCP 170.6, any civil or criminal litigant gets to strike one judge based only on an affidavit of prejudice (which amounts, practically, for no reason at all). There are some timeliness issues that occasionally get complicated, but otherwise it’s pretty straightforward.

    It works when bad luck lands you before a bad judge — though because you only get one strike, you can easily escape the judicial frying pan to wind up in the fire. It can also have some interesting tactical and strategic elements (once a judge became “bad” for my clients after the time to strike him had passed; I tricked the plaintiff into amending to sue a new party, and persuaded the new party to exercise their not-yet-waived 170.6 right).

    The biggest negative I’ve seen is that some District Attorney’s Offices will “paper” a judge — strike him or her on all cases as a matter of course. This would be fine if they did it for a respectable reason, but in fact they’ve done it because the judge has granted a motion to suppress or given a sentence the DA thought was too low. 170.6 has therefore become part of the mechanism that law enforcement uses to control the state judiciary.

Leave a Reply