Raheem Mullins, the nominee for chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, addressing the Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing in September. (Photo by Mark Pazniokas/CT Mirror)
This article first appeared on CT Mirror and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Gov. Ned Lamont plans Monday to nominate William H. Bright Jr. as an associate justice of the Supreme Court and 13 others as judges of the Superior Court, the start of the public portion of an otherwise opaque path to becoming a jurist in Connecticut.
That path has not always been smooth for Lamont, his predecessors or the men and women they have chosen.
Bright, the well-regarded chief judge of the intermediate Appellate Court, would make the Supreme Court, the highest step in Connecticut’s three-level judiciary, a demographic outlier — the only court where white men would be the majority, albeit narrowly.
Connecticut’s judiciary reached an unheralded milestone last spring. For the first time, more women than men wore the black robes of a Superior Court trial judge, 85 to 84, and women outnumbered men, 93 to 92, when tally included the Appellate and Supreme courts.
What the governor’s general counsel, Natalie Braswell, calls a “silver tsunami” of retirements over Lamont’s six years in office has given the governor the opportunity to deliver on a promise to create a judiciary that “looks like Connecticut.”
Judges put on the bench by Lamont are more than half of the current roster of 179 active judges. According to data provided by the Judicial Department, the system has 201 authorized positions, with 22 vacancies as of Jan. 9.
By the administration’s count, Lamont gave 98 of the 179 judges their jobs. They include 51 women and 47 men, with diverse racial backgrounds: 63 white, 14 Black, 13 Latino or Hispanic, five Asian, two multiracial and one other.
With the arrival of gender parity, and a racial makeup that generally reflects the state’s population, the definition of diversity has expanded beyond race and gender to professional backgrounds.
Are there too many former prosecutors and other government attorneys on the bench? Why the dearth of legal aid lawyers and solo practitioners? Those are questions increasingly posed over the past two years, changing the meaning of diversity in the context of judicial nominations.
“When people use that word, unless they’re specific, they don’t always mean the same thing,” said Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, the co-chair of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee. “I think there’s always going to be a concern about the issue of diversity.”
Since 2022, Lamont nominated three people who withdrew from consideration after failing to clear the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, where the private vetting of candidates goes public. One was the Supreme Court nomination in 2023 of Sandra Slack Glover, a high-ranking federal prosecutor.
Winfield and Rep. Steve Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, the other Judiciary co-chair, say the governor and his administration have made efforts to include them in the informal confidential vetting. Braswell said, “There are lessons learned from getting slapped by the Sandy Glover nomination.”
“I will credit the current staff in the governor’s office for being more engaged with Judiciary Committee leadership on the nomination process. I think there is a better line of communication now than maybe there was a few years ago,” Stafstrom said.
“We’re talking about things before they become a problem. And in the past, I don’t think it was by intention, that didn’t happen,” Winfield said.
Glover was unable to overcome legislative questions about her commitment to upholding Connecticut’s strong reproductive rights laws and complaints that her long experience in the federal courts left her unfamiliar with the state’s courts.
Two others were rejected as judges of the Superior Court. One was a state prosecutor accused of being overly harsh on defendants, including a claim that he had increased the charges against a defendant who had refused a plea deal.
A governor can only choose nominees from a pool of candidates who have been approved confidentially by the Judicial Selection Commission, a panel of lawyers and non-lawyers chosen by the governor and legislative leaders of both parties. A state police background check then follows on possible nominees.
Rep. Tom O’Dea, R-New Canaan, a former chair of the Judicial Selection Commission, said he believes the panel is not as rigorous in screening candidates since its makeup was revised to give it a majority of non-lawyers. Only one trial lawyer is currently on the commission, he said.
“I’m looking forward to working with the [Judiciary Committee] chairs on, frankly, fixing the process so that the first opportunity that candidates have facing tough questions isn’t here,” O’Dea said after a committee meeting Wednesday.
Rep. Craig Fishbein of Wallingford, the ranking House Republican on the committee, said the commission inexplicably approved a lawyer who had extensive experience as a federal prosecutor but was not currently licensed to practice law in Connecticut.
“She was rammed through,” Fishbein said.
The House passed a bill last year that would have, among other things, required a majority of practicing lawyers on the commission. It did not come to a vote in the Senate.
Fishbein said the new era of communication from the governor’s office on judicial nominations has not extended to the GOP, though he acknowledged Lamont telling him weeks ago about his choice of Bright for the Supreme Court.
“As a Republican in the minority, I can tell you there’s very little communication between our side of the aisle and the governor’s office with regard to nominees. And I’ll tell you, a glaring example is that we don’t get the list. I know the other side of the aisle gets the list.”
By the list, he was referring to the names of lawyers who have been cleared by the Judicial Selection Commission. Stafstrom said the Democratic co-chairs are not privy to the list, though the governor’s office will share who is eligible and under consideration.
On Wednesday, the committee voted 38-1 to endorse the nomination of Associate Justice Raheem Mullins as chief justice of the Supreme Court, a position he’s held on an interim basis since September.
Mullins, who has previously gone through confirmation hearings for the Superior and Appellate courts, is expected to be overwhelmingly confirmed Tuesday by the House and Senate.
Mullins would be the second Black chief justice. His predecessor, Richard A. Robinson, was the first.
Bright is being nominated to succeed Mullins as an associate justice. Bright had been a judge for 16 years, nominated to the Superior Court in 2008 by Gov. M. Jodi Rell and to the Appellate Court by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in 2017.
Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, who leads the Governors Council on Women and Girls, said Bright’s qualifications are stellar, and his move to the Supreme Court will open a vacancy on the Appellate Court that others say is certain to go to a woman already chosen by Lamont.
To her, the longer path to gender parity is both long overdue and worth celebrating.
As a new lawmaker in 1993, Bysiewicz sought a seat on the Judiciary Committee with a goal of pushing for diversity. There were classes of judicial nominees that were all white and, occasionally, all male.
“This has been a passion project of mine to try to get more people on the bench at every step that look like our state, so that when people walk into a courtroom, they can see themselves in the judges who preside,” Bysiewicz said. “I say, Hallelujah.”
This article first appeared on CT Mirror and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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