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Citizens
for Better Government
Blount
County Tennessee
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Why the Blount County Political Machine is attacking Judge Meares
The Political Machine is pulling out all the stops to try to defeat Judge Meares in the August 7th election.
To understand why, you just have to follow the money. For years the Machine’s judges have controlled the civil cases in the county, while allocating the criminal cases to the one judge from the opposition party. The civil cases are where the big money decisions are made, where hundreds of thousands of dollars are often at stake. Some of the big time lawyers in town contribute generously to Machine candidates, especially the judges who hear civil cases. The Machine judges know well who these contributors are, but claim their court decisions are unaffected by all the money that came into their campaigns. Many lawyers and citizens are not so sure.
After being appointed by the governor last year, Judge Meares worked feverishly to bring some efficiency and fairness to criminal justice in the county. He found hundreds of cases, some dating back to the 80’s, where the DA and the Sheriff had never gotten around to serving the necessary paperwork on the accused. He issued orders that these cases be dealt with immediately. He set firm dates for actions in his court, and demanded that lawyers adhere to them. He started to make good on the often-neglected promise of swift, sure and fair justice. Most important he reduced the backlog of cases in his court to the point where he dared to suggest that he might take on some civil cases. Clearly, this threatened to disrupt all those cozy Machine relationships and the associated money flows.
On top of everything else, Judge Meares started his campaign by announcing that he would not accept contributions from lawyers. A unique concept, a judge who could not be bought, threatened the comfortable world of the county Political Machine.
Something had to be done. The machine acted. First we saw a flood of self-righteous letters to the editor claiming that it was an insult for anyone to conclude lawyers expected anything from the big contributions to the Machine judges campaigns. Next, came the letter from a Judge Young, using data from Circuit Court Clerk Tom Hatcher which has proved to be highly questionable, attacking Judge Meares record of cleaning up his court’s backlog. Bottom line, the machine was questioning Meares ability to handle “their” precious civil cases (where the money is).
Judge Meares called the Circuit Court Clerk on the carpet to explain why his numbers on the number of cases handled by Judge Meares were different from the official numbers produced by the State Administrative Office of the Courts. Hatcher immediately hired a lawyer, paid for by the taxpayers, to do his talking for him. But finally Hatcher had to answer some of the questions posed by Judge Meares. Hatcher produced three sets of numbers and none of them agreed. (It seems Hatcher counts cases using the same ‘new math’ that the Sheriff uses to count cars). Hatcher explained the discrepancies by using the ‘Enron defense’ – he blamed his staff for all the confusion. Hatcher also blamed bugs in the software program he uses. Hatcher later admitted that he had been using this program (with the ‘bugs’) for more than ten years.
You can see it all for yourself. The entire 1.5 hour hearing is on this link. If you don’t have that much time to watch the capers of the political machine, you may want to take a look at the highlights on this link.
You can stop these highly questionable lawyer – judge relationships by voting for Judge Meares on August 7th.