Voters should put Judge Pamela Goodwine on Kentucky Court of Appeals

We criticized one of her decisions, but heartily recommend Judge Pamela R. Goodwine to voters in the Nov. 6 election for a seat on the Kentucky Court of Appeals.

Goodwine, who started out as a court steonographer, has presided over every kind of criminal trial and civil dispute in her 19 years on the bench, proving herself in district court then moving to Fayette Circuit Court in 2003 when she won a race for an open judgeship.

The breadth and depth of her experience and her proven ability to juggle a case load are impressive. So are her life story and strength of character. To achieve her dream of studying law and becoming a judge, Goodwine had to overcome the traumas of both her mother’s murder and a life-threatening illness.

In 2010 we criticized her for sentencing Blue Grass Airport executives to probation not prison after they pleaded guilty to corruption. When one of the defendants violated release terms, she came down hard, though, sentencing him to 12 months in prison.

In one area of the law – capital cases – Goodwine has more experience than any Kentucky judge, in part because of the former commonwealth’s attorney’s indiscriminate pursuit of the death penalty in every possible instance.

In 2015 Goodwine issued a ruling in favor of taxpayers and common sense by excluding the death penalty as an option in a murder case. Her meticulously researched opinion noted that not once in Kentucky had a death sentence been upheld “in a case involving actual or suspected drug trafficking." Death penalty cases are extremely expensive to the public. Almost never do juries in Fayette County return a death verdict. Goodwine was overturned on appeal, but succeeded in a larger sense by bringing scrutiny and accountability to the justice system and hastening the end of the wasteful blanket pursuit of the death penalty in Lexington.

Incumbent appeals judge Rob Johnson, appointed by Gov. Matt Bevin in 2017, was a circuit judge in Scott, Bourbon and Woodford counties for 12 years and before that a Georgetown council member.

As a new circuit judge, Johnson quickly cleared a big backlog of cases. But it’s troubling that his campaign site claims that as a circuit judge he was never overturned on appeal. On June 29, in a published opinion, a three-judge panel unanimously overturned one of Johnson’s rulings as a circuit judge. Johnson had ruled in favor of Republican state Sen. Ralph Alvarado in a defamation and “false light” case against a Democratic opponent for a TV ad that aired in 2014. It’s possible the Supreme Court will uphold Johnson’s ruling. But for him to say he’s never been overturned is inaccurate, and it’s not too much to ask for accuracy in a judge’s campaign claims.

The district includes Anderson, Bourbon, Boyle, Clark, Fayette, Franklin, Jessamine, Madison, Mercer, Scott and Woodford counties. The seat became vacant when Laurance B. VanMeter was elected to the Supreme Court two years ago.

This story was originally published October 9, 2018 at 8:14 PM.