Which judge should i vote for

Sabatina Jr. Before that, he served as the assistant district attorney under D. Lynne Abraham. Daniel Sulman , Democrat. Sulman has served in various capacities in the courts, including as a Master, where he says he presided over 10, child and spousal support hearings. Wolf appointed him as a judge in Three years later, he returned to private practice, focusing on representing low- and middle-income clients in family law cases, until again being appointed in late as a Common Pleas Court judge.

During the pandemic, Sulman served as a judge for emergency child custody and protection from abuse cases. Betsy Wahl , Democrat. I am running for judge to enable me to do more of what I do now. I would certainly bring the qualities I use as a Hearing Officer to a Judgeship. I have the energy and passion to do more, and would welcome the opportunity. There are five vacancies on the Philadelphia Municipal Court, which is responsible for determining whether serious criminal cases go to the Court of Common Pleas; preliminary arraignments and hearings; and setting and accepting bail, except in murder or voluntary manslaughter cases.

Some sample court cases include traffic tickets, landlord-tenant disputes, underage drinking. Christian A. DiCicco , Democrat. DiCicco opened his own law office in Philadelphia in , where he specializes in bankruptcy law. Michael Lambert , Democrat. After law school at Temple University, Lambert worked as a public defender, before opening his own firm specializing in personal injury, family, and criminal litigation. He has been practicing law for about 20 years.

More importantly, as a Jamaican-American male my life experience will bring the necessary common-sense yet compassionate and insightful life experiences to be able to fashion equitable solutions to a myriad of situations. Fran McCloskey , Democrat. George Twardy , Democrat. He has also served as a custody hearing officer and truancy hearing officer in the First Judicial Court.

Gregory Yorgey-Girdy , Democrat. I am committed to working toward a transparent and fair court system that celebrates diverse judges and staff and that inspires trust among those the court intends to serve.

There are two vacancies on the Commonwealth Court, which hears civil cases involving state or local government. It also hears appeals and sometimes sits as a trial court in certain cases brought by or against the Commonwealth, such as a constitutional challenge to a state law or a tax dispute. Pennsylvania has the only court like it in the country.

There is one vacancy open in on the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, which serves as the appeals court for most citizens and businesses.

It is one of the busiest intermediate appellate courts in the country, receiving hundreds of thousands of filings per year and deciding more than 8, individual cases. At the top of the pyramid sits the Supreme Court, the highest court in the Commonwealth and the oldest appellate court in the nation. You can find an explainer about retention votes in Pennsylvania here. Not sure?

Following the Pennsylvania and Philadelphia bar association recommendations should help. Each candidate is thoroughly vetted by each organization. In this case, all below judges are recommended for retention by the Philadelphia Bar Association, except where noted.

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As in any other election, there are various organizations that provide endorsements or recommendations for judicial elections. Some of these organizations—such as newspapers and local or state bar associations—are relatively neutral as to the ideology or judicial philosophy of the candidate.

Others are specifically issue-oriented, such as the chamber of commerce, various labor groups, or political associations trying to elect judges with certain values. Endorsements by bar associations have a number of benefits. These organizations are able to spend time researching and interviewing the candidates; thus, they will know much more about each candidate than an average voter or even an extraordinarily diligent voter. A local bar association, for example, will typically send multi-page questionnaires to the candidates, conduct interviews of each candidate, and survey other attorneys about the candidate.

The resulting endorsements or recommendations, however, tend to be so objective that they border on unhelpful. In the end, bar associations can play an important role in screening candidates—so that if a clearly unqualified candidate seeks to become a judge, or a patently incompetent judge attempts to retain his or her seat, the bar association can alert voters to the fact. Newspaper endorsements are more useful, of course, because they will invariably recommend one candidate over another.

But the true problem with recommendations from these neutral organizations is not that they offer too little help, but rather that they have the potential to offer too much help. Instead, it would be more efficient to have a merit selection system as some states do where the state bar association recommends candidates directly to the governor.

States that choose to have lay voters select their judges obviously believe that voter participation adds something of value to the selection process, and that must mean that voters are meant to do more than simply check with the experts and vote along with their recommendations. Other, more partisan organizations also offer endorsements and recommendations in judicial elections. Some of these, like the chamber of commerce or the AFL-CIO, are groups whose primary purposes have nothing to do with judicial elections, but who will lend their name to support a specific candidate in a specific election.

For the most part, these endorsements follow the expected party line: pro-business groups tend to endorse Republican judges, while pro-labor groups tend to endorse Democratic judges. More intriguing are the groups whose sole purpose is to provide recommendations in elections, including—and sometimes exclusively—judicial elections.

As a judge, how would you go about determining how to rule? These policy-oriented recommendations are transparently political—they see judges as policymakers, and they seek to educate their audience as to which judges are more likely to vote in the way that is favorable to their political ideology.

However, they are only useful to a voter who shares the same ideology as the recommending organization. These issue-oriented endorsers make a significant assumption which the neutral endorsers do not make: they treat judges—especially appellate judges—as policymakers, not just neutral interpreters of the law. This is a somewhat controversial view of judges—many judges will argue that their job is merely to interpret the law, and not to make policy judgments. But most scholars and lay people would accept this assumption, and it is borne out by quite a bit of data showing that most judges vote in predictable patterns on given issues.

The issue-oriented endorsers lose credibility by pushing their own agenda when gathering and presenting data, but their underlying assumption is still valid: judges on the bench do indeed make predictable policy choices, and these policy choices can guide voters who are trying to choose between two judicial candidates.

We will consider these in the next two sections. If judges are seen as policymakers, it is somewhat easier to see what voters might add to the selection process. Voters in a certain jurisdiction may prefer a certain type of judge—conservative voters may want a certain type of judge, while liberal voters may want a different type of judge. Many voters will follow this impulse by voting as they do in other elections in which they know little or nothing about the candidates—by voting along party lines.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has become a lightning rod in the last several years. The current state of partisan tension dates back to , when Republicans lost control of the high court during a tumultuous period involving revelations that several judges had been exchanging offensive emails.

The move ultimately made Democrats much more competitive in congressional elections. Before the change Republicans held a advantage in the Pennsylvania congressional delegation. Since the new map went into effect just ahead of the midterm, there has been a partisan balance. GOP Sen. Pat Toomey said during a rare visit to Harrisburg after the decision that year. After the election, state judges — some Democrats, some Republicans — handed down near-universal dismissals of the flood of lawsuits by the Trump campaign and other Republicans that made baseless allegations of widespread election fraud and sought to get the results reconsidered or overturned.

These Pa. Cook Political Report, which is tracking Senate races around the country, says the outcome in Pennsylvania is genuinely unpredictable — but critically important. In a forum hosted by Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts during the primary, both Brobson and McLaughlin said the system can be fraught.

WHYY thanks our sponsors — become a WHYY sponsor In one case, he took a measured approach to a GOP attempt to invalidate ballots that had been fixed by voters, ordering them not to be immediately thrown out, but to be segregated from other ballots.

In a subsequent case, he ruled in favor of Republicans who wanted to toss out more than 2, mail ballots that had been submitted without dates. But along with two other judges, she did preside over a recent, high-profile case that echoes a national conversation about sexual assault. McLaughlin dissented. Why else would he create a record to protect himself? With their chances of retaking the court virtually zero until at least , when Democratic justices face retention elections, Republicans in the state legislature have launched a plan to totally remake the court through electing judges by region.

Their proposed constitutional amendment could force more than one Democrat off the court by requiring justices — who are currently concentrated in cities — to run in geographic districts drawn by the legislature. If it passes both chambers again without changes, it will go directly to voters for a referendum vote. The Pennsylvania Superior Court: What is it? Whoever wins a year term to fill the lone vacancy on the Pennsylvania Superior Court may not get a lot of press coverage, but they will play a huge part in how justice is carried out across the commonwealth.

In , for example, a unanimous Superior Court ruling tossed out a drug- and gun-related conviction of Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill , due to concerns about the reliability of a police officer involved in making the case. That same year, a Superior Court panel opened the door to extending the statute of limitations in some years-old cases of alleged sexual abuse by Catholic priests. That opinion is being reviewed by state Supreme Court justices. Pennsylvania is one of only a handful of states that has two separate intermediate-level appeals courts, with the Commonwealth Court operating alongside the Superior.

This nine-judge body decides civil disputes involving the state itself and hears appeals against decisions made by state agencies. Cases usually come before a three-judge panel in either Harrisburg, Philadelphia, or Pittsburgh, and as in the other appellate courts, judges are elected to year terms.