THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 8, 1996 TAG: 9605080377
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: AH10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long : 114 lines
The first study of President Clinton's court appointments contradicts Republican Bob Dole's charge that Clinton has filled the federal bench with lenient, liberal judges who are soft on crime.
Three political scientists from different universities said their data showed that Clinton-appointed judges ``exhibit moderate decisional tendencies.'' Other scholars supported those findings.
Clinton judges are not as liberal as judges appointed by Democratic President Carter or as conservative as jurists named by Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush, the researchers said.
In fact, the proportion of liberal decisions made by Clinton trial judges in criminal cases did not differ significantly from those handed down by appointees of Republican President Ford.
The research was first presented to a political science association in Houston in March, about a month before Dole launched his assault on Clinton's court nominees. The researchers described the study as ``a first empirical look'' at the voting patterns of Clinton-appointed judges.
Dole, who is virtually certain to become the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, charged that Clinton populated the federal bench with ``an all-star team of liberal leniency.''
Clinton appointees ``demonstrated an outright hostility to law enforcement'' and are ``dismantling those guardrails that protect society from the predatory, the violent and the anti-social elements in our midst,'' Dole said.
Dole made his charges even though federal courts handle only a small fraction of the nation's violent crimes and more than 60 percent of all current federal judges were appointed by Republican presidents.
In addition, the Supreme Court is dominated by Reagan-Bush nominees, relatively few liberal activists remain on the federal bench, and Dole himself voted against only two of Clinton's 184 Senate-confirmed appointments to the federal courts.
Dole, whose campaign office did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the study, supported his accusations by citing cases in which seven Clinton appointees ruled for criminal defendants.
For example, Dole put U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson of Norfolk on his judicial ``Hall of Shame'' for dismissing armed robbery charges against a youthful defendant.
But a different impression would have emerged from another criminal case in which Judge Jackson sentenced a defendant to 15 years in prison - nearly four times the length of the maximum term prescribed by federal sentencing guidelines.
``It's almost a cheap shot to pick out isolated decisions,'' observed political scientist Robert Carp, one of the three researchers.
``It would be easy to select Reagan and Bush judges and show they're liberal. Many Clinton judges issue conservative opinions,'' Carp said.
``We looked at the aggregate . . . and there is nothing to indicate the Clinton judges are anything other than slightly more liberal than Republican appointees,'' said Carp, who is associate dean for research at the University of Houston's social sciences college.
He said neither he nor his colleagues - Ronald Stidham of Appalachian State University in North Carolina and Donald Songer of the University of South Carolina - are active in any political party.
They compared opinions of judges appointed by Presidents Nixon through Clinton in criminal, civil rights-liberties, and labor and economic regulation cases.
Decisions were called ``liberal'' if they sided with criminal defendants, expanded civil rights or individual liberties, supported labor unions or backed the government in regulatory cases.
David O'Brien, a University of Virginia law professor who studies the federal judiciary, said Dole's charge of ``stealth liberalism'' in the courts indicates he is ``living in 1968.'' That was the year Republicans successfully targeted the liberalism of the federal court system, led by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren.
``The fact of the matter is that we no longer have a liberal federal judiciary,'' O'Brien said. ``It is moderately conservative, self-restraining and not crusading the way they were in the 1960s in a quest for equality.''
``And the bottom line on Clinton's appointments is their diversity, professional qualifications and confirmability - not liberalism,'' O'Brien said.
Sheldon Goldman, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said Dole ``will have to strain a great deal to make this a campaign issue in view of all the mainstream appointments Clinton has made.''
Goldman, who has studied the Clinton administration's methods of choosing judges, said Clinton ``stayed away from controversial nominations and stayed away from liberal activists.''
While Clinton dropped a few troubled nominations and Republican senators stalled some others, only three Clinton selections provoked open Senate fights, ultimately winning confirmation.
Republican senators, including Dole of Kansas, voted for the overwhelming majority of Clinton's court appointees.
Clinton was the first president to fill most court vacancies during his term with women and ethnic or racial minorities, Goldman noted.
``Even so,'' he added, ``white males still dominate the judiciary and probably will continue to do so even with a second Clinton presidency.''
But Dole has warned that a second term for Clinton could produce a federal bench with a majority of Clinton-appointed judges who ``could lock in liberal judicial activism for the next generation, and the social landscape could be dramatically changed.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Dole put U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson of Norfolk on his
``Hall of Shame'' for dismissing armed robbery charges against a
youthful defendant. But in another case, Jackson sentenced a
defendant to four times the prescribed maximum.
Chart by KRT
Liberal Court Decisions
by CNB