Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Thursday, March 08, 2007 1:08:03 PM
Representative Terrance Carroll has admitted that he uses his judiciary chairman position to kill legislation. The quote appeared in a May 2005 Coloradopoliticalnews.com aka Colorado Pols interview:
2. What surprised you about being in the majority?
As a committee chair, I was initially surprised by the amount of work required if you want to chair a good committee. It was not simply about reading the bills beforehand. As committee chair, I tried my best to minimize surprises in committee and to make the committee work as efficiently as possible. Since GAVEL, committee chairs do not have the power of the pocket veto so the most important tools at the chair's disposal is the ability to influence committee members before the hearing; controlling debate in committee; influencing legislation before it arrives in committee; control of the committee calendar; and knowledge of the rules.
Readers will say "but that isn't new news. Committee chairs to that all the time."
That's true, but most committee chairs are sophisticated enough not to admit what they are doing in public. This admission places Representative Terrance Carroll in the awkward position of admitting before the fact that he has worked behind the scenes to kill bills that most would find in the public interest and to promote bills that are not. To avoid the appearance of trying to fix the outcome beforehand, he needs get at least one Republican vote.
Take HB 1227, Judicial Performance Commissions, for example. It would have removed the conflict of interest that occurs when the Chief Justice has direct or indirect influence over the lives, livelihood, and appointments of half of the commission members. Reasonable men can infer that it is impossible for very legitimate complaints against a justice to achieve the super majority required for a recommendation of non retention, making the whole process a sham.
The Colorado Bar Association opposes any provision that would make the members of the Supreme Court accountable to the public, and automatically opposed HB 1227 in two minute testimony. Eight citizens, including two lawyers and a former State Senator testified in favor of the bill calling for a retention system whose members were more representative of the public.
The bill failed on a party line vote. As The Colorado Index observed in an essay on the same issue:
Future Claire Levy [ Terrance Carroll and Isaacson Rosenbaum ] clients must wonder how a jury will react to her pleas of fair treatment for her client when she is so obviously unwilling to allow a fair hearing before an unbiased commission.
There is concern in the legal community about the possibility that potential jurors will be doing Internet searches on lawyers who are trying cases before them. It is expected to happen despite admonitions from judges to jurors not to do it. In the final analysis, it can't be prevented, and as long as a juror doesn't admit that he did it, either to the judge or to his fellow jurors, it can't be detected.
In effect, as the testimony made clear, Claire Levy's vote was a vote to allow the current fraudulent legal ethics system to remain in place by keeping the authors and administrators of that system (Supreme Court Justices) free of oversight by unbiased commissioners.
Note: The original purpose of this essay was to preserve a damaging quote by a legislator. Somehow it developed into a full scale thought piece on two Democratic legislators.