From the St. Louis Post Distpatch

Both campaigns strip off gloves, civility in TV ads
By Paul Hampel
Of the Post-Dispatch
10/17/2004
The campaign for Illinois Supreme Court in Southern Illinois has taken a mean turn.
According to dueling television ads paid for by the state's Republican and Democratic parties, the next Supreme Court justice out of the 5th Judicial District will be either a judge who gave a break to a pedophile or one who gave probation to torturers of an elderly woman.
The spots began running this month.
Washington County Circuit Judge Lloyd Karmeier, a Republican, and his Democratic opponent, 5th District Appellate Judge Gordon Maag, approved their parties' respective ads.
The Supreme Court now has a 5-2 Democratic majority. The race has drawn national attention due to the high stakes involved, including the court's upcoming decision in the appeal of the mammoth Philip Morris judgment out of Madison County. And down the road, the court could be called on to decide on medical malpractice legislation.
The 37-county 5th Judicial Circuit spans the bottom third of the state, from the Mississippi River to the Indiana border, and from the Kentucky border to Christian County, the northernmost county in the circuit. It includes Madison, St. Clair, Bond, Calhoun, Macoupin, Jersey and Monroe counties.
The Supreme Court race in the district has been heated from the beginning, with Democrats slamming Karmeier as a lackey for insurance companies trying to shift blame for rising premiums, and Republicans painting Maag as a puppet for trial lawyers.
But those aspersions are tame compared with the more recent television spots.
The latest anti-Karmeier ad states, in part, that the judge "caused outrage when he gave only probation to kidnappers who tortured and nearly beat a 92-year-old grandmother to death."
Maag's detractors portray him in their latest ad as having "voted to overturn the conviction of a man who sexually assaulted a 6-year-old girl."
Each campaign contends that the other side's ads distort the truth.
Steve Tomaszewski, a spokesman for Karmeier, noted that the judge had accepted a plea agreement arranged by a St. Clair County prosecutor when he gave probation to a woman who had agreed to testify against two fellow suspects in the beating and robbery of an elderly Centreville resident in 1999.
A spokesman for Maag, Brendan Hostetler, said his candidate had concurred with a unanimous appellate court decision in 2000 that the constitutional rights of a pedophile defendant had been violated at trial. The justices remanded the case for retrial, and the suspect was found guilty and got a prison sentence.
The rancorous election reflects a trend in judicial races nationwide that, critics say, may drive away potential judges who don't want their names dragged through political muck.
The campaigns of both Maag and Karmeier promised at a news conference in August not to run negative campaigns and to disavow any such advertisements paid for by third parties. The news conference was arranged by the Task Force on Judicial Elections of the Illinois State Bar Association.
But on Friday, both camps seemed more inclined to blame the other than to tone down their own caustic ads.
At a news conference last week, Maag tried to distance himself from the ads, blaming them on "outside groups" that he said he "wished would go home."
Hostetler, his spokesman, said Friday that his candidate "could have rejected the (anti-Karmeier) ad, yes, but we knew what they (the Karmeier campaign) were going to do."
Tomaszewski countered that Karmeier "was warned that this election was going to get down and dirty, and knew his cases would be discussed, but they (Maag's campaign) are portraying Judge Karmeier not as who he is."
Illinois State Bar Association spokesman David N. Anderson said he had been "hopeful until a week ago" that the candidates would stand by their pledges to avoid negative ads.
He described the current tone of the campaign as unfortunate.
"We formed our committee to protect the integrity of the judicial system," he said, referring to the Task Force on Judicial Elections. "We stand ready to consider any complaints about negative ads, but so far we have not been asked."
Reporter Paul Hampel
E-mail: paulh@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 618-659-3639