The Dowd we deserve
The anger over Shawnee County District Court Judge Matthew Dowd’s wrist-slap sentencing of child rapists is finally beginning to subside.
Now people are looking for who they can blame for putting such a clearly incompetent man on the bench.
We’d all do well to remember Joseph de Maistre’s famous observation that in a democracy, the voters always get the government they deserve.
You know the story: an election is as close as we can get to a gauge of the collective wisdom of the citizenry—vox populi and all that. In Kansas, for example, Kathleen Sebelius is governor because most Kansans thought about it and decided they wanted her to run the state, just as they wanted Paul Morrison to replace Phill Kline.
Do most Kansans therefore deserve Sebelius? Absolutely. And did they deserve Morrison? Well, yes.
But maybe after six years of Sebelius and one romance-packed year of Morrison, voters have learned their lesson. One can only hope.
But in fact, de Maistre’s little maxim is at work everywhere in evidence in Kansas. For example, there’s Paula Martin, the Douglas County district court judge who gave a pass to two men who raped a 13-year-old. In 2004, a group was formed to express the outrage people felt. The trouble is, not many people felt it. The result: two-thirds of the voters in Douglas County said she was the judge they and their kids deserve. So they got her. A group called "Citizens for Reasonable Judges" has been formed to try again to vote her out.
In 2004, Shawnee County voters insisted they deserved four more years of Franklin Theis, another soft touch for child molesters, and Matthew Dowd. They got them both. Theis barely won his retention after a watchdog group, PROTECT, explained to voters what kind of a judge Theis is.
As for Dowd, he got 73 percent of the vote last time out.
It would be nice to blame somebody else for the judicial Dowds in Kansas - the Democrats, the Kansas City Star, anybody. But that would be wrong. Because of the absurdly elitist way in which many district court judges and all supreme court justices are chosen in Kansas—that is, by little covens of lawyers without any public scrutiny of nominees at all—voting to retain any of them is to accept blame for all of their judicial mischief. Kansas has more than its share of odd judges. Yet so far there has only been one judge tossed out by voters this way.
Want to send a message to the other Dowds on the Kansas bench? Get behind that effort to vote out Martin. Want to do something about the failure to enforce Kansas' laws and the runaway spending in Topeka? Vote out those cockamamie supreme court justices. In Kansas, you may not get exactly the judiciary you deserve, but you certainly deserve the judges you retain.
The idea of self-inflicted collective punishment seems to fit here. Shawnee Countians, other than the tiny minority who voted against retaining Dowd, felt they deserved a judge like him, and they voted to retain him time after time.
But what about the most recent child rapist to whom Dowd gave probation instead of life in jail? And what about the children he raped? What did those people deserve?
The perp escaped justice, thanks to the judge. He deserved to be sentenced according to state sentencing guidelines, and he certainly deserved a rougher punishment than the one Dowd gave him.
And the children who had their childhoods violently, traumatically stolen from them? They’re the only ones who didn’t deserve Dowd.
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