From the Belleville News Democrat

Oct. 19, 2004
Panel monitoring ad hopes to decide this week
BY BRIAN BRUEGGEMANN
A committee monitoring advertisements in the race for an Illinois Supreme Court seat from downstate Illinois hopes to make a decision this week on whether one candidate's ads are inappropriate.
State Sen. David Luechtefeld, campaign manager for candidate Lloyd Karmeier, has asked the Illinois State Bar Association's Election Campaign Tone and Conduct Committee to quickly review a commercial being aired on behalf of candidate Gordon Maag.
Luechtefeld, in a letter sent to the committee during the weekend, said if the committee waited even a few days to make a decision, "irreparable damage will have already been done to Judge Karmeier's reputation and election chances."
The commercial, paid for by the Democratic Party of Illinois and approved by Maag, a Democrat, assails Karmeier as being soft on crime for giving probation in 1993 to a child molester from Belleville who was mentally impaired.
Karmeier, a Republican circuit judge from Washington County, originally imposed a six-year prison sentence after finding that defendant Bryan Watters was not eligible for probation. However, an appeals court overturned the sentence and ordered Karmeier to issue a new sentence.
Luechtefeld, R-Okawville, said the commercial is inaccurate.
"Judge Karmeier's stricter sentence was overruled and the appellate case laid a dramatic new landscape for cases in which defendants are mentally ill," Luechtefeld wrote to the committee.
Maag spokesman Brendan Hostetler said Karmeier's campaign should "pull down his negative ads." Hostetler said ads from third-party groups on behalf of Karmeier have been misleading.
Luechtefeld also complained about a commercial that mentions the Watters case along with the case of an East St. Louis woman who got probation for being an accomplice in the robbery and beating of an elderly Centreville woman.
The Bar Association, concerned that high-profile judicial elections have been tarnishing the image of the judiciary, formed the committee this summer to review, when requested, campaign advertisements that "impugn the dignity, integrity or independence of a candidate ... or which erode public trust and confidence in the dignity, integrity or independence of the judiciary."
David Anderson, a spokes man for the Bar Association, said Monday he expects a decision on Luechtefeld's complaint to be made by the end of the week.
"We started the process first thing this morning with our committee," Anderson said.
A couple of weeks ago, the national headquarters of Shriners Hospitals for Children asked the Maag campaign to stop airing a commercial in which Maag mentioned the group's hospital in St. Louis. Maag's campaign agreed to do so, but the commercial continued airing for several days while Maag's campaign said the spot was being "rotated out."
Karmeier's spokesman, Steve Tomaszewski, said: "As we saw with the Shriners ad, that took about a week. One day they said they were pulling it, but it continued to run for about a week."
Also on Monday, the political action committees of the Illinois Hospital Association and the Illinois State Medical Society issued a statement saying Maag advertisements regarding medical care and malpractice insurance for doctors are misleading.
The groups said Maag, a judge on the 5th District Appellate Court in Mount Vernon, participated in 12 published decisions regarding medical malpractice, and in 10 of those, he ruled against doctors and hospital. In six of those cases, the groups said, a trial court had already found in favor of the doctor or hospital, but Maag voted to reverse that finding.
"While Gordon Maag claims he cares about health care, the facts -- his record on the appellate court -- tell a much different story," said Dr. Jere E. Freidheim, chairman of the Medical Society's political action committee.
Hostetler said Maag is "still the only candidate who has defended a doctor in a medical malpractice claim." Maag worked as a defense attorney before joining a personal-injury firm in Madison County, then became a judge.