Texas Voters Get a Re-Do in Important Judicial Election
No, the governor of Wisconsin is NOT running for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
In a recent series of posts (here, here, here, and here), on Bench Memos and elsewhere, I discussed the various candidates running in the March 1 Republican primary for the Texas Supreme Court. In Texas, all judges are selected in partisan elections, and in recent decades all statewide elected officials (including judges) have been Republicans, so the GOP primary is the election that matters. By way of an update, all three incumbent Texas Supreme Court justices won re-nomination, and will likely defeat their Democratic challengers in November. (Interestingly, two of the races were fairly close, decided by less than 100,000 votes out of two million cast.) I did not previously report on the races for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the nine-judge appellate court with ultimate jurisdiction over criminal cases in Texas. Texas is one of a few states that have a bifurcated appellate structure: The Texas Supreme Court hears only civil cases, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA for short) hears only criminal cases. The CCA is a very important court, deciding death-penalty appeals and also delivering hard-fought vindication to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and former governor Rick Perry, both Republican elected officials who faced baseless charges in Texas state courts brought by politically motivated prosecutors. Three seats on the CCA were on the ballot on March 1, and two of them will proceed to a runoff on May 24 because none of the multiple candidates won a majority.
Read more at National Review
