"It's been chilling," he said of the recent fights in the legislature. "They are shots across the bow, and it has an impact on a judge's freedom to make their decisions."
Some judges said the new system will help soften such exchanges because lawmakers will be less able to make convincing arguments against a judge on partisan grounds if there are assessments showing that over time, the judge has been doing the job well.
"Often the judicial selection process focuses on one high-profile case at the exclusion of the hundreds or thousands of cases a judge will hear over their term," said state Supreme Court Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, whom lawmakers challenged in 2002 over her 1995 dissent arguing against removing a child from a mother's custody solely because the mother was a lesbian.
"The goal here is to provide information on those hundreds and thousands of cases," she said.
Keenan headed up the 27-member task force that developed the new program, and she ran a pilot program last year that tested the system in nearly 20 courts across the state.
The evaluations are among several changes that Republicans have made to the judicial selection and reappointment process since they took control of the legislature in 2000. Those changes include establishment of local citizen commissions to screen nominees for circuit and district court judgeships.
The evaluation forms for reappointment will include opportunities to rate judges on "freedom from bias for or prejudice against any person or group" and "clarity of decisions."
"It really puts on the judge the burden to explain themselves so that people understand what the judge's reasoning is," said Stephen W. Rideout, a retired Alexandria Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court judge.
But Rideout, like others, said there was still a question of whether the partisan bickering will be eliminated.
"It doesn't take all of the politics out of it, but it does gives you a better picture of who are the qualified participants," Rideout said. "If [legislators] want to make it political, they will."
