LIVERMORE — Jerome A. Collins wrote in his Dec. 21 Maine Voices column that “Maine’s entire court system, not just probate, needs an impartial review.”

I agree that we need a constructive dialogue on our current judicial system. I am not an attorney, so take my positions as mine and as limited.

Also, any discussion of Maine’s court system must take into account the low level of financing for Maine courts over past decades. Chief Justice Leigh Saufley’s annual reports on the Maine judiciary are a good place to start for financing details, along with her article on the workload of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, “Amphibians and Appellate Courts.”

Probate court, like other courts, has many mechanisms for review. I filed a complaint about Oxford County Probate Court years ago. I was stunned by how rapidly the Overseers of the Maine Bar responded. My complaints were fully resolved.

As a point of comparison, when I filed a complaint against a Maine physician in the same time period, the Maine Medical Association took over a year to take action protecting Maine citizens from dangerous practices. Odd, that. You’d think medicine would be quicker than law, but it’s not so.

Maine has procedures for appealing probate decisions that citizens can take all the way to the state supreme court. Depending on the complaint, they also may have access to federal courts.

The Maine Legislature has an excellent, and quite independent, Government Oversight Committee that works wisely with the Office of Program Evaluation & Government Accountability. I’ve observed them for over two years and have yet to find grounds to criticize their methods or results. They are stellar. Their work makes me feel good about paying taxes.

The committee members are all elected, and when they get complaints from their constituents, they talk about the complaints in open meetings. Learn what they do and ask your state representative or senator to consider a review of specific violations or unfair practices that have a negative impact on justice. A review doesn’t violate separation of powers.

Numerous organizations have been reviewing courts all over the country for years: the National Center for State Courts, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, the Federal Judicial Center and Maine’s Access to Justice initiative, among many others. They invite citizens’ suggestions.

An October survey for the National Center for State Courts found that fewer than half of registered voters considered the courts to be unbiased. This appears to validate the F grade given to Maine’s system of judicial accountability by the Center for Public Integrity, as cited in Collins’ column.

The recent survey of 1,000 voters had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent (plus or minus 5.5 percent for 200 African-Americans) at the 95 percent confidence level. (This means that if the survey were repeated, 95 times out of 100 the results would reflect the results within a plus/minus percent margin of error.)

Harvard Law School’s Free the Law Project is scheduled to be finished by early to mid 2017 and will provide free online access to nearly every state, territorial, tribal and federal judicial decision.

The great value in having a collection of individual and grouped data (facts) is to reveal patterns and practices reflecting the courts’ implicit biases. Having machine-readable data of the decisions is equivalent to using the computer as a telescope and a microscope for locating and characterizing bias footprints.

We hate to admit that we have biases of any type, but we, the courts and even the media have biases. Fortunately, in our adversarial system, with our bias-cracking procedures, explicit biases are revealed early and often. It’s the subtle, implicit biases, which work against particular groups, that may become visible when lots of cases are studied.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently acknowledged that in its solid decision in favor of a worker suing UPS for putting her on unpaid leave when she was pregnant: If disparate impact occurs, then your methods are biased.

Although most of us (even wizened lawyers) want special considerations for our court complaints, research has found that people accept decisions that go against them as long as they perceive the procedures as fair.

Finally, write to the Press Herald so others know of like-minded people in Maine who are concerned enough to form a new group, or a subgroup, to better define our courts’ problems. Once the problem is properly defined, it can be solved – a unique American strength is that we solve problems.

In the meantime, it’s only fair to the current justice system to make your complaints known to them quickly and as specific as possible, with supporting documents.

— Special to the Press Herald

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