A newly improved website gives voters a chance to find out about the performance of the judges who are up for retention in the November general election.
According to the Utah Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission, about 1 in 4 voters does not complete their ballot, with judicial retention choices often going unaddressed. But the executive director of the commission, JPEC for short, said voters who want to know more about the judges have a better than ever resource to get an overview or dive deep into performance evaluations.
The JPEC site, at judges.utah.gov, features details on all 63 Utah judges up for retention this year, including the seven in the 2nd Judicial District, which includes Davis, Weber and Morgan counties. The 13-member commission scores judges on legal ability, integrity and judicial temperament, and administrative skills. The site lists these ratings, along with the commission’s own votes on whether a jurist should be retained.
Judges also are given procedural fairness ratings, and court participants like lawyers, bailiffs, jurors and court staff members are surveyed.
“It’s possible to cast uninformed votes on judges, all yes or all no, but what I really hope is that people will learn and know about this resource and understand that our judiciary is an important part of our government so they can cast an informed, educated vote, however they vote,” said Jennifer Yim, the JPEC director.
Two Ogden district judges, Camille Neider and Reuben Renstrom, and two who sit in Davis County, Michael S. Edwards and David J. Williams, are on this year’s ballot. Also up for retention are Debra Jensen, presiding judge in the 2nd District Juvenile Court, and Bryan J. Memmott, who judges in the South Ogden, South Weber and Woods Cross justice courts. Finally, local voters will be able to choose whether to retain Utah Supreme Court Justice Paige Petersen.
Before the retention evaluations are posted, a lot goes on removed from public view, Yim said. It’s not a surprise that most judges who end up standing for retention have largely solid evaluations on the website, because judges with significant problems usually bow out before that point.
First, at the three-year mark in every six-year term, a judge receives a confidential evaluation report from the commission. “It’s designed to give them kind of a heads up on problem areas that we suggest you work on,” Yim said. “Most of the time, judges do. The most common situation is that they work on the problems and in the next evaluation, just before retention, those problems are no longer seen.”
That second evaluation, just before the retention season, is also given to the judge confidentially. “Before they decide whether to run, if they don’t like what they see, they almost always resign or retire,” Yim said. “If they do that, we keep that retention evaluation as a protected record and they can retire with dignity.”
The commission’s evaluations on the current seven-judge crop are highlighted by unanimous votes on whether the judges meet minimum standards. “But that is not necessarily indicative of the total numbers of negative votes” cast during the entire process, Yim said.
Staff members, attorneys and others who participate in their part of the judge evaluation process are asked whether the judge should be retained. The percentage split is posted on the JPEC site. Those ratings for the seven local judges were Jensen with 99%, followed by Petersen, 98%; Renstrom and Williams, 92%; Edwards, 91%; and envious, 78%. Memmott’s performance was not surveyed because many justice courts’ caseloads are too low to allow surveying.
Members of the public as well are invited by JPEC to leave comments about judges.
Yim said JPEC evaluations do not take into account individual cases. “We don’t want judges to be nervous about the outcry on a single issue necessarily,” Yim said. “We feel like they should show up at work every day and be the best judge they can be.”
She said she thinks Utah has one of the nation’s best systems of judicial selection and retention. A bipartisan nominating commission interviews and selects six nominees for juvenile court, district, Utah Court of Appeals and Supreme Court openings. The governor must choose from among those finalists.
“Then in our evaluations, judges hopefully will fix their problems,” Yim said. “If they don’t or can’t, it goes to the voters, where they get to hold judges accountable.”
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