How are judges selected for individual cases?

[KidCharlemagne]

I’m guessing (and hoping) by random draw, but do judges with fuller dockets get taken out of the pool? Assuming it’s by random process, what is the actual mechanism?

[Procrustus]

@KidCharlemagne

I’m guessing (and hoping) by random draw, but do judges with fuller dockets get taken out of the pool? Assuming it’s by random process, what is the actual mechanism?

It varies by jurisdiction. It’s random in most places. (Some counties only have one judge, so that makes it easy) If you asking about the Federal Court in Seattle, it’s pure “who’s next in line.” I assume the clerk has a list of judges and as each case is filed, they assign them in rotating order. Some cases are reassigned, but it’s rare in the federal system. Typically, the judge first assigned will remain with the case until it’s over. (It’s more common in state court in Seattle, if anyone cares. They shuffle the criminal and civil judges every year and most cases get reassigned, again, randomly.)

[DSYoungEsq]

In the case of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, here’s what the rules say:

GR 8 ASSIGNMENT OF CASES
(a) All actions, causes, and proceedings, civil and criminal, shall be assigned by the clerk to the respective judges of the court.

So it’s not clear what mechanism is used, but presumably there is some mechanism by which the cases are assigned upon filing in a randomized fashion.

[DSYoungEsq]

@Procrustus

It varies by jurisdiction. It’s random in most places. (Some counties only have one judge, so that makes it easy) If you asking about the Federal Court in Seattle, it’s pure “who’s next in line.” I assume the clerk has a list of judges and as each case is filed, they assign them in rotating order. Some cases are reassigned, but it’s rare in the federal system. Typically, the judge first assigned will remain with the case until it’s over. (It’s more common in state court in Seattle, if anyone cares. They shuffle the criminal and civil judges every year and most cases get reassigned, again, randomly.)

Astute attorneys can manipulate this by waiting to file until they know which judge is next, I expect… :rolleyes:

[mhendo]

I recently read a book called Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse. It follows the people and the crimes and the trials in the Cook County (Chicago area) criminal courthouse.

The system of judge selection described in the book is one of random assignment, carried out by a court clerk. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 5:

On weekday mornings a clerk named Marcus Ferguson can be found in front of an old IBM computer in a dingy first-floor office. An assistant state’s attorney standing near him pulls a manila folder from a stack on a desk and calls out a case number and a court date. Ferguson’s meaty fingers then race over the keyboard, the two hefty gold rings on his right hand glinting. He’s proud of how quickly he can enter the data—in eight seconds or less. When he jabs the enter key with his middle finger, the name of a judge appears on his monitor. He announces the name to the state’s attorney, who prints it in black marker on the folder.

Thus are new cases parceled out to judges here by a computer program called the Randomizer. With that poke of Ferguson’s middle finger, the Randomizer blesses a defendant with a benevolent judge or consigns him to a banger; it sends him to a courtroom with reasonable prosecutors or cutthroats, with energetic PDs or mopes.

The book also, in Chapter 13, talks about investigations into corruption in the court system:

Greylord [a report on corruption] showed that a key to corruption was the ability to get a case assigned to a corruptible judge, which defense lawyers accomplished by bribing clerks in the presiding judge’s office. The clerks would ignore the results of the Randomizer—the computer program that determines which trial judge gets a particular case—and assign the case to the judge chosen by the bribing lawyer.

After the Greylord revelations, a commission was formed to recommend anticorruption measures for the court system. One of the recommendations was that the random assignment system “be routinely audited to ensure that the cases assigned through the computer are, indeed, assigned on a random basis.” But no audit has ever been instituted. And Marcus Ferguson, the clerk who’s been running the Randomizer at 26th Street since 1996, says a dishonest clerk could still “easily” subvert the system. No one looks over the clerk’s shoulder to make sure the judge’s name that appears on his monitor after he runs the Randomizer is the name he calls out to the prosecutor assisting him with the process.

Ferguson says it would be even easier for a prosecutor to direct a case to a preferred judge (as defense lawyers here have long suspected prosecutors sometimes do). On occasion the assistant state’s attorney working with Ferguson instructs him to send a case to a certain judge. There are valid reasons to bypass the Randomizer; if the defendant is already on probation, for instance, his new case is supposed to be sent to the judge who gave him probation. But there’s no one checking to ensure that the reason given by the assistant state’s attorney is bona-fide. “They can make it sound official and I would never know,” Ferguson says. Although defense lawyers can watch the randomizing process that’s conducted every weekday, he says they never do.

The book is well worth reading, for people interested in politics, the law, criminal justice, and sheer human interest.

[Procrustus]

@DSYoungEsq

Astute attorneys can manipulate this by waiting to file until they know which judge is next, I expect… :rolleyes:

I don’t think so. You have no way to know when your filing will hit the system. Especially in a busy court like the WD WA. I suppose you could try to determine the order by looking at cases that were filed on any given day, and then seeing what was filed on the day you were going to start your lawsuit. However, there is a delay of several hours between filing and getting assigned to a judge. You wouldn’t know how many cases are ahead of you. And maybe they don’t follow a predictable pattern. I really don’t know the mechanics.

[KidCharlemagne]

@DSYoungEsq

Astute attorneys can manipulate this by waiting to file until they know which judge is next, I expect… :rolleyes:

This is exactly why I asked.

And thanks mhendo, that was a great answer