11/03/2000 By John Greiner Capitol Bureau

A judicial evaluation commission's effort to rate judges before Tuesday's election has been foiled by the state court's computer system. Because the computer couldn't produce the data for the evaluation, the Oklahoma Judicial Evaluation Commission couldn't rate the appellate judges on Tuesday's ballot.

The commission was trying to use the computer to obtain the names of attorneys who had practiced before the judges.

The commission wanted to send questionnaires to those attorneys, asking them to rate the jurists on such things as knowledge of the law, decisions based on law and facts and fairness and impartiality, said Ben Blackstock, commission member and retired manager of the Oklahoma Press Association.

"We didn't get the list because the computer screwed up. It didn't turn out the names," Blackstock said.

The commission wanted separate lists of 400 attorneys who had practiced before the Supreme Court, the Court of Criminal Appeals and the Court of Civil Appeals, said Professor Bob Darcy, a member of the commission and an Oklahoma State University regents professor of political science and statistics.

Chief Justice Hardy Summers said the computer gave the commission a large number of lawyers' names, but it also included other names.

"They would have had to do a lot of hand deletion, and they weren't comfortable doing that," he said of the commission.

Blackstock said the list included names of clients in lawsuits.

William Baker, Stillwater attorney and chairman of the evaluation commission, said the computer problems were unexpected.

"We were unable to retrieve the information, and time did not permit someone doing it manually," Baker said.

Baker said the commission received great cooperation from the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court clerk's staff.

"It just became a monumental task in a short period of time," Baker said.

When the commission was created two years ago, the names of the lawyers for the survey were obtained by hand.

All trial and appellate judges were on the ballot in 1998, compared with just 10 appellate judges this year.

"They've changed the computer system since then. I guess everyone assumed it would be easily retrieved. It wasn't," Baker said.

Kevin King, director of the Supreme Court's management information services, said the computer problem stemmed from older data files that were transferred from another system.

In the older files, "the (new) computer was not able to identify the information we wanted. It was confusing attorneys, judges, and plaintiffs with each other," Darcy said.

Blackstock said he's unhappy that the commission could not evaluate the judges on the ballot this year.

"I think it's needed. I think it's wanted. I think the public is confused," Blackstock said. "They don't have any way of knowing whether a judge is doing the job."

The court's computer system has come under fire before.

Monday, state Auditor and Inspector Clifton Scott said the computer's financial accountability functions are flawed.

He said he's been unsuccessful in solving problems facing the court clerks who began using the court computer system in December.

When the Judicial Evaluation Commission was created in 1998, another group -- Oklahomans for Judicial Excellence -- was rating state judges from trial to appellate levels on the effect of their decisions on the economy.

That information was being used against some judges by a third group, Oklahomans for Jobs and Economic Growth, which called for voters to reject some judges who rated poorly on the decisions involving the economy.

This year, the only group that was planning to evaluate judges was the Judicial Evaluation Commission.

While it now will sit out this election, the Judicial Evaluation Commission won't disappear. Its members have asked legislators if there's interest in legislation to enable the commission to operate, Baker said.

"I would like to see this commission institutionalized by statute. Now it's just volunteers," Summers said.

"The question becomes, how can that be funded and how can that be supervised?" Darcy said.

http://www.oklahoman.com/cgi-bin/show_article?ID=579561&pic=none&TP=getarticle

-- Doris (reaper@pacifier.com), November 03, 2000