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Judicial Nominating Commission considers changes to judicial applications
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February 14, 2011
Providence, Rhode Island: The Rhode Island Judicial Nominating Commission is currently considering revisions to the application that judicial candidates must fill out in order to be considered for lifetime appointments. The main change, if the revisions are implemented, would be that lawyers who wish to file as candidates would have to disclose much more detailed financial information than what is already done and submit updates on changes to their financial situations up to their actual taking the bench. The idea behind the possible revision, which was authored by E. Colby Cameron, a lawyer who headed a three-member subcommittee charged with revising the application, is that according to Cameron,
| "You don’t want people who are in trouble with the taxing authorities or who haven’t paid their taxes. That’s absurd. ... You want to try to make sure that people, once on the bench, would never have the capacity to be lured into misdeed. ... We want to minimize the chances of someone getting a lifetime judgeship who has financial problems or who finds themselves in a situation where they could be subject to financial inducements as we’ve seen in the past with this judiciary." |
The subcommittee was appointed by the Judicial Nominating Commission as a result of a Sunday Journal story about a recently appointed judge, Karen Lynch Bernard, that revealed that she has a history of being delinquent in paying her federal and state income taxes, and that at the time of her appointment the IRS had a $32,391 lien on her house for back taxes owed for 2004, 2005 and 2007.[1]
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