Jim Jones faces no race for court seat

BOISE – The last time Jim Jones was in office, his stern letter to major oil companies caused gas prices to drop across Idaho by 14 cents a gallon – in one day.

When then-Idaho Attorney General Jones ran for re-election in 1986, he got all the votes – no one ran against him.

Now, Jones is running for an open seat on the Idaho Supreme Court, and he’s unopposed. It’s a reversal of a trend that for the past decade has seen increasingly bitter and partisan contested races for seats on Idaho’s highest court.

“This is a surprise,” said Jim Weatherby, Boise State University political scientist and longtime Idaho political watcher. “In this case, I think it says a lot about Jim Jones.”

Jones is a Republican, but his backers come from both parties. He’s a two-term attorney general, unsuccessful congressional candidate, decorated Vietnam combat veteran and longtime lawyer. He’s known for everything from a legislative and rhetorical crusade against white supremacists that helped win him a major human rights award, to forcing oil companies to charge no more for unleaded gas than for leaded.

“We pointed out to the major oil companies that there was no basis for the variance,” Jones recalled. “It didn’t cost any more to make unleaded – in fact, we had understood that it might be cheaper to do unleaded. It wasn’t long after that that the price equalized.”

That run-in with big oil, during Jones’ second term as attorney general in the late 1980s, was a second round. In the first, Jones, as attorney general, had been chatting with “a fella from out at the veterans’ home, Bill Rawlings. He used to call our office on one thing and another.”

When Rawlings mentioned in a phone call to Jones that gas prices were much higher in Boise than the surrounding area, the attorney general started to suspect price-fixing. He wrote a letter to gas companies and released it to the press.

“The next day, when the story appeared in the paper, gas prices dropped almost 14 cents a gallon throughout the state,” Jones recalled. “And a day later, they dropped another 7 cents a gallon over in Idaho Falls and eastern Idaho. So I was an instant celebrity.”

He went on to sue gasoline dealers in southeastern Idaho on behalf of consumers, and won more than $100,000 in damages that he distributed to highway districts in the region.

Jones also helped work on Idaho’s landmark anti-malicious harassment legislation, along with then-legislative leader Phil Batt, who later served as governor.

“We had white supremacists running around making all kinds of statements that were not very helpful to, y’know, keeping peace in the community and guaranteeing everybody the rights to which they’re entitled,” Jones said. “I took a pretty strong stand against ‘em, and made a lot of statements about how Idahoans respected one another.”

His efforts won him the Torch of Liberty award from the B’nai Brith in 1987.

Jones, raised on a southern Idaho farm, earned his law degree from Northwestern University, then volunteered for combat in Vietnam. After his service, he went to work for then-Idaho Sen. Len B. Jordan, a Republican, in Washington, D.C., for three years.

“I learned when I was working for Sen. Jordan that there’s two sides on every issue, or maybe even more than that,” Jones said. “You had people from all kinds of perspectives and walks of life coming in to lobby, and y’know, if you listen to them, you’ll find out that a lot of people that you didn’t necessarily think would have a valid point, often did present some good points on an issue.”

“The same thing happens in court,” he said. “The main thing you need to do is listen, and to keep an open mind.”

Freeman Duncan, Post Falls attorney and former Republican state legislator, is among those backing Jones. “He’s well known and well respected, and I think he was wise to get out of the box early,” Duncan said. “I’m guessing that probably caused others to think how much effort the race was going to take.”

Duncan said he hasn’t always agreed with Jones on legal issues, but thought he was “a very fine attorney general.” Plus, he said Jones has “a judge’s demeanor.”

“He’s a legal purist, in my experience,” Duncan said. “He’s very law-oriented – a law is a law. He’s going to figure out what the law is and apply it. Not every lawyer has that quality – I’ve practiced for 31 years, and I’m probably not qualified to be a judge.”

Norm Gissel, Coeur d’Alene attorney and human rights activist, said the legal community considers Jones an outstanding candidate; “Everybody has a lot of respect for him.”

Gissel said Jones has “a first-class mind. He’s a very decent human being, and that shows up right away when you talk to him.”

He added, “He’ll look at the facts, and see what the facts have to say about the law. He won’t be like (Justice Antonin) Scalia at the U.S. Supreme Court, whose philosophy is obvious in his decisions. … The facts will compel the decision, not ideology.”

Jones said he figures he’s qualified to serve on the court because of his broad range of legal experience. “I’ve probably practiced as broad a range of law as anyone in the state,” he said. He’s gone from a small-town private practice, where he “did just about anything that walked in the door,” to serving as the state’s chief attorney and handling major public issues, to a private practice in Boise that’s included extensive work in business law.

“I’m pretty familiar with just about every area of law except for admiralty – law of the sea. You don’t get a lot of that in Idaho,” he said with a chuckle.

He’s also experienced at campaigning, experience he won’t need for this race. In addition to his two successful runs for attorney general, he ran against then-Congressman George Hansen in 1978 and got 44 percent of the vote, even though he’d just announced 30 days before the election. Two years later, he lost to Hansen again. After serving as attorney general, when then-Idaho Sen. Jim McClure retired, Jones ran against Larry Craig for the U.S. Senate seat. “Of course he won, and I’ve just been practicing law in Boise ever since,” he said.

His ambition on the court, he said, is to be a justice “who will be fair-minded.”

One occupied seat on the court also is up for election this month – the primary election is the final election for Supreme Court justices unless a lack of majority forces a run-off in the general election. That seat also is uncontested.

The incumbent in that seat is Justice Roger Burdick, who has experience both as a prosecutor and a public defender, has been an Idaho judge since 1981 and was appointed to the high court in August of 2003.

Gissel said, “Again, here is a case where the people who might reasonably want to run for that office decided that he’s done a pretty good job, and don’t see much of an opportunity to be elected themselves.”

Added Duncan, “Both judges and lawyers find campaigning distasteful. They’ve been around here, they watched the attack on (former Justice) Cathy Silak, they definitely watched the attack that was lodged against (current Chief) Justice (Linda Copple) Trout.”

Gissel said, “There seemed to be a lot of ideology in recent elections, and that was very unsettling for a lot of people. I think people want to keep the judges as much as possible on an un-ideological basis, a basis of competency and fairness and temperament. Those are the big issues for judges, not ideology.”