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Under this system, the Governor Of Tennessee fills vacancies occurring on the Tennessee Supreme Court , the State Court of Appeals and the State Court of Criminal Appeals due to the death, resignation, and theorhetically, the Impeachment and removal of a member of any of these bodies. These appointments are not made from persons strictly of the governor's choosing, however – the selections are instead made from a list of three potential nominees chosen by a commission, currently comprised of 17 members, the makeup of which guarantees it to be bipartisan and representative of Minorities , with members representing both the legal community and the citizenry at large. If the governor finds none of the persons selected to be to meet his approval, he can then order the commission to prepare a new list of three other prospective nominees; in practice this seldom occurs. The person chosen by the governor then begins service on the court; at the first statewide General Election the person's name is placed before the public on the ballot on a simple yes-no basis, i.e., "Shall Jon R. Smith be elected and retained as Judge, Court of Criminal Appeals, for Middle Tennessee?" If a majority of voters decides this question in the negative, the process outlined above starts over. Every eight years, 2006 being such a year, all members of all of the appelate courts of Tennessee are subjected to this process as well. All appellate judges are subjected to this process on a statewide basis, not just in the "Grand Division" from which they are appointed. Proponents of this system laud it as placing the judiciary above politics and freeing judges of the need to raise vast campaign funds currently necessary in statewide political races; opponents state that it in fact leads to a self-perpetuating system of selection in which the public at large is in effect shut out of meaningful decision-making and note that since the Plan began to be implemented in the 1970s only one judge (State Supreme Court Justice Penny White ) has ever been removed under its provisions despite the presence on the courts in question of what they feel to be several persons of limited judicial ability and questional judicial temperment who would in their opinion be far more likely to be removed from office were they subject to the traditional partisan electoral process. Some opponents have felt that the process in fact violates the Tennessee State Constitution in that the yes-no balloting it calls for does not truly constitute an " Election " in the sense intended by the document's framers; this question was adjudicated by a special Supreme Court in a case filed by political Gadfly John Jay Hooker , the regular members having recused themselves as being interested parties as they were selected under the provisions in question. The special court found the process to be fully compliant with applicable provisions of the state constitution. This process was adopted as a compromise between Democrats in the Tennessee General Assembly and Republicans from East Tennessee . Many Democrats favored the process as a way of limiting the power of then newly-elected Republican governor Winfield Dunn . Republicans from East Tennessee who favored the creation of a Medical School at East Tennessee State University , which Dunn opposed, agreed to support the Modified Missouri plan in exchange for support by the Democrats for the medical school, which was subsequently created as the James Quillen School of Medicine. Since its adoption, it has subsequently been "unadopted" and readopted with regard to the Tennessee Supreme Court, but has remained in effect consistently with regard to the lower appellate courts. While remaining somewhat controversial, opponents have had difficulty in outlining any plan which has received widespread aggrement as being superior to the existing one. |
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