Take the politics out of judicial races? Never!

When Gov. Dan Moore (1965-69) asked then-state Rep. Jim Exum of Greensboro in 1967 if he’d like to become a Superior Court Judge, Exum had his doubts.
After all, he liked being a politician. He was a promising young legislator who was thinking of a career in politics – “I thought I wanted to be in the Senate, maybe run for governor,” Exum told a forum on judicial selection Wednesday night in Greensboro, sponsored by the N.C. Center for Voter Education. The forum was about alternative methods of selecting judges – appointment versus election, for example.
Leaving the legislature to become a judge, Exum thought, would mean “getting out of the political world altogether – that’s what I thought I was doing.” Exum took the appointment as Superior Court judge and later ran for and won the first of several terms as an associate justice and then chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court.
But in 1986, political competition got tougher “in an unpleasant way,” he said. Challengers wanted to turn him out of office because of his opposition to the death penalty, even though as a justice he had routinely voted to uphold death sentences because that was the penalty state law prescribed for the worst murders.
That campaign and ensuing ones taught him a lesson, he said. There may be ways to change methods of selecting judges, but none of them is likely to take politics out of the process.
“We are never going to remove politics from judicial selection,” said Exum, who retired from the Supreme Court in 1995. “It’s like matter in the universe – it can’t be destroyed, it can only be molded.”