Bradbury announces candidacy for Idaho Supreme Court
District Judge John Bradbury has announced his candidacy for the Idaho Supreme Court. He knows it will be an uphill battle. He is opposing an incumbent justice and an entrenched court system bureaucracy that views suggestion as personal affronts and change as a threat.
Judge Bradbury ran for district judge five years ago as a reform candidate. Since he won citizens have started using the court system again. Parties and lawyers are treated with respect.
Technology and planning have reduced the costs of litigation in some instances by a factor of ten. Court imposed deadlines move cases through the system expeditiously.
Constitutional rights are protected. Criminals are sentenced based on jury verdicts instead of court pressured plea bargains. And finally, as the result of Judge Bradbury’s persistent efforts, Clearwater, Idaho and Lewis Counties have the first rural mental health court in Idaho.
Judge Bradbury is running for the Supreme Court because he has learned the hard way that making the court system affordable and accountable has to start at the top. The transcendent issue is voter sovereignty, which is allowing citizens to decide for themselves who their judges will be.
That will require restoring judicial elections, opening judicial discipline to public scrutiny and eliminating the right of unelected lawyers and parties to remove elected judges from their cases as a matter of whim. The court system will become independent of the executive and legislative branches and accountable to the public only when it has to answer in this way to the people it was created to serve.
Judge Bradbury does not know Justice Joel Horton and is not running against him as a person or as a judge. Rather he is running against him, as a representative of the insider court system that Judge Bradbury thinks badly needs an overhaul. He looks forward to discussing these and other critical issues during the upcoming campaign.