As a judge, D. Gregory Baker got a close look at politics in judicial appointments, a force that helped land him on the bench and, he believes, take him down.
A politically well-connected lawyer, Baker was appointed as a judge in 1999, only to resign four years into his term when allegations surfaced that he had not disclosed a misdemeanor conviction prior to taking the bench.
"There is little doubt that politics played a role in my being appointed to the bench – as has been the case in selecting judges in Virginia for 100 years," Baker, now a law professor at the College of William & Mary, said in a February telephone interview.
"I would also say that there is little doubt politics played a role in my leaving the bench," he said.
The Virginia way of picking judges – by the legislature – can raise questions about the appearance of judicial independence, scholars say, with the caveat that appearances do not necessarily translate into reality.
But to Baker, a man who experienced the influence of politics as both beneficiary and victim, the appearances are very real.
A decade ago, when Baker had his eye on a vacant judgeship in the 30th Judicial District, the deck was stacked in his favor.
Beyond his 13 years of experience as an attorney and four years as a substitute judge, his law partner was state Delegate Terry G. Kilgore – a friend from college who sat on the committee charged with interviewing judicial candidates and whose party was newly dominant in the General Assembly.
Baker’s father, Clintwood, Va., Mayor Don Baker, had donated $4,500 between 1996 and 1998 to Kilgore and his twin brother, Jerry – who was staging an ultimately successful run for state attorney general – and continued to contribute to the Kilgores during and after his son’s stint on the bench.
Baker was appointed in January 1999 to a six-year term as a juvenile and domestic relations court judge. To many, it was a transparently political appointment, and one that flew in the face of the Scott County Bar Association’s vote against him.
He displaced Melanie Jorgensen, whom circuit court judges had appointed on an interim basis to fill an earlier vacancy.
"Because of politics, I wasn’t kept on the bench," Jorgensen said. "No one had more experience than I did."
She said in a recent telephone interview that she was not even invited to Richmond to interview for the position.
"It was clear that Delegate Kilgore wanted his law partner as judge," she said. "I think it was clear that it was all so political."
Kilgore, who later would urge Baker to resign, defended his support for his friend and former law partner.
"He did a good job as a judge," Kilgore said. "All appointments are political because they go through the political process. He made some mistakes, and that’s about all I have to say."
Jorgensen, a Democrat, also had strong political connections that might have helped her land a judgeship in a different political climate. She had been a partner in a law firm with Ford Quillen, a former Democratic state delegate and one of the circuit court judges who appointed Jorgensen as an interim judge. Her husband had been a Democratic commonwealth’s attorney in Lee County.
A judge undone
In a state where judges depend on legislative support to get onto the bench, the integrity of the system largely hinges on two key principles – that having close ties to a legislator and judicial independence are not mutually exclusive, and that legislators will appoint good people.
At first glance, Baker’s tenure appears to vindicate the system.
As judge, Baker founded the state’s first drug treatment court for juvenile offenders and won the approval of attorneys who initially were rankled by his appointment.
"I think that even though he began very inexperienced, he did a very competent job," said Jorgensen, who went on to practice in Baker’s courtroom.
"He was a quick study, I think," said Sherry Lee Wilson, an attorney who had been president of the Scott County Bar that "anti-endorsed" Baker.
"When he first took the bench, he had not done a lot of juvenile work. Jorgensen was the best qualified," Wilson said in a recent telephone interview. "Towards the end, we were all happy with him. He was moving the docket and making good decisions.
"Unfortunately, he didn’t make a good decision when he applied."
In December 2002, Baker learned that the Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission was investigating his responses to a questionnaire he had submitted to legislators in applying for a judgeship.
Baker told Kilgore and Sen. William C. Wampler Jr. that he had omitted a misdemeanor from 1994, when he was convicted of soliciting a prostitute in Richmond. The legislators urged him to resign in statements to the Daily Press of Newport News, Va., in January 2003.
Complaints to the JIRC are confidential, and it remains unclear how Baker’s omission was uncovered and why it was not reported until four years into his term.
When first contacted by the Herald Courier, Baker declined to talk about the circumstances surrounding his resignation. "It’s something I’ve worked hard to put behind me," he said.
But in a second interview in February, he said he believed he was the victim of a political attack, which he described in general terms.
It had to do, Baker said, "with information being leaked and becoming public. Whether I was being used in a way to trade off for something else, who knows? I do believe politics contributed, at least to some extent, in a way that I may have become the proverbial sacrificial lamb."
Baker declined to elaborate on what he thought he was being sacrificed for, saying only that the motive was "vicious, with little regard to the merits of the work that I was actually doing."
What is clear is that Baker’s conviction would have surfaced when he came up for reappointment because of a bill passed in March 2001, which requires criminal history checks for all judicial candidates.
In finding Baker guilty of judicial misconduct, the Virginia State Bar suspended his license for 2½ years. The order offered this mitigating sentence: "Baker enjoyed a reputation as an exemplary jurist, an opinion shared both by members of the legal profession and laypersons."
No critical mass
Though Baker’s experience soured him on the judicial-selection process, his example – and that of others who have resigned or been removed from judgeships – has not produced a corresponding effect on lawmakers.
Though a system in which the legislature does not elect judges may be "cleaner and more attractive," the burden is on the reformers to prove that there is a "problem that needs solving," said A.E. Dick Howard, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School.
"My impression is that [Virginia] judges, by national standards, are quite good," he said, noting that quality is notoriously difficult to document.
Neither the National Center for State Courts nor The American Judicature Society, which track opinion polls and studies on judicial selection, could point to any recent reports in Virginia.
Jesse Rutledge, deputy executive director of Justice At Stake – a Washington, D.C.-based group advocating judicial independence – has not studied Virginia’s method of selection, but noted that it gave its legislature the strongest input of any state in the country.
"My initial feeling," Rutledge said by phone, "is that it would dispose the system to more behind-the-scenes politics and patronage."
But his organization focuses its research exclusively on states that choose their judges by popular election, where it is easier to track whether donations to judicial campaigns influence rulings from the bench.
A 2007 telephone survey conducted by the Supreme Court of Virginia indicated that the influence of politics in the judiciary is at least on citizens’ minds.
Out of various aspects of the court system, the 1,100 residents surveyed expressed the greatest amount of confidence that "everyone is treated fairly," and the least confidence that "courts are not influenced by political considerations."
Anecdotally – by talking to judges and lawyers and attending judicial conferences – Howard believes Virginia judges "have a good reputation."
He added: "You don’t pick up the newspaper and find that some judge was charged with a corrupt practice."
Just two judges in the state have been removed from the bench by Virginia’s Supreme Court, according to the Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission, the body charged with investigating complaints of judicial misconduct.
The most recent case, from last year, involved a judge from Southwest Virginia, James Michael Shull, who in an ironic twist occupied the same juvenile and domestic relations court seat from which Baker had resigned in the 30th Judicial District.
The commission charged Shull with deciding child-visitation rights by flipping a coin, and in a separate case, asking a woman not represented by an attorney to drop her pants in the courtroom to allow him to inspect an alleged wound. The Supreme Court voted to remove Shull from the bench in November.
Out of the hundreds of inquiries and complaints it receives, the JIRC generally opens about 30 cases a year, according to annual reports the commission files with the General Assembly. Of those, only about a handful result in suspensions or formal charges each year.
The Shull case was a black eye to the judicial-selection system, particularly in Southwest Virginia, attorneys and lawmakers concede. But despite what many admit as the potential for the system to go awry, such cases have not reached a critical mass that would erode the public’s faith.
"The system, in my opinion, works in spite of the possibility that it will go astray," said Steve Minor, a Bristol attorney who has practiced in the area since 1990.
Emmitt Yeary, a longtime attorney based in Abingdon, favors reforming Virginia’s method to selection by a merit-based committee. But though he has issues with the process, he’s found little fault with the judges.
"As a general rule, we have very good judges, more in spite of the system rather than because of it," he said.
dgilbert@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2558
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