The American Justice system: Follow the money

In today’s Albuquerque Journal on the front page there is an excellent column by Thomas J. Cole. He does a great job of uncovering scandals in New Mexico. He writes today about a new study that is out on America’s Justice system. The study examined 2,345 supreme court decisions from all 50 states. from 2010 tom 2012 and 175,000 records of political donations to the justices who made the decisions. “the data confirm a significant relationship between business group contributions to state supreme court justices and the voting of those justices in cases involving business matters,” the study shows.

“The more campaign contributions from business interests justices receive, the more likely they are to vote for business litigants appearing before the court.”

The study focused on the effect of political donations by business groups because such groups, as a whole, are the biggest spenders on judicial races. Lawyers and lobbyists are a close second.

In New Mexico, lawyers and lobbyists have accounted for most of the contributions to the winning candidates for the state Appeals and Supreme courts in recent years.

All this may not surprise some of you, but it is certainly an issue we need to pray on. Today as I write this we have been posting on Leadership, Godly leadership and Character, Integrity. God has called us here today at FGGAM to post on these issues, so God’s people will pray for Godly leaders to be raised up all across America and the world.