‘Wake-up call’ drives Amaro
Rami Amaro said her decision to take on sitting 1st District Judge John Mitchell is based on principle.
“It’s a wake-up call,” said the 37-year-old Coeur d’Alene attorney. “A wake-up call in the sense you weren’t appointed for life. You should pay attention to your record. If you are making errors, you should correct those.”
Amaro said she’s never been one to shy away from a challenge, and her attempt to unseat Mitchell is about “an important challenge that needs to be confronted.”
Before she decided to run, Amaro said, attorneys told her “they’d like to run, win and quit just to remove him and get somebody new.”
Throughout the campaign, Amaro has focused on Mitchell’s record as the most-often disqualified judge in the district. While he’s been disqualified from hearing criminal cases more than 400 times, the four other judges in the district combined haven’t been disqualified nearly as many times as Mitchell.
She said her opponent has been reversed by the Idaho Supreme Court more than other judges, and she also questions his sentencing of sex offenders.
“I would be stronger in terms of judicial accountability, making sure I get the legal decisions right and not being reversed so much that the end result is I’m being removed,” she said.
Judges must follow the law as written, Amaro said, and not legislate from the bench.
“In my opponent’s court, frequently I and other attorneys walk out of the courtroom after a decision is made, and we can find no legal basis for the court’s decision,” Amaro said. “We rack our brains. We try to explain it to our clients and we can’t.”
She said she believes Mitchell either doesn’t understand the law, or some sort of personal bias plays into his decisions.
Of two dozen cases Mitchell has ruled on that were appealed to the state Supreme Court, 14 were affirmed and the rest were reversed.
“When you have multiple decisions having to go to the appellate level and people are going to waste years and tens of thousands of dollars and then we send it right back to start all over, it’s a waste of judicial resources,” Amaro said.
She said her first priority as judge would be to get an answering machine. Mitchell didn’t have an answering machine for some time, she said, and later had one that simply said the judge was unavailable but didn’t accept messages.
Amaro said she and other attorneys had a hard time contacting Mitchell in time to schedule hearings or file motions when other judges return calls within 48 hours.
Though Mitchell now has voicemail, Amaro said he still doesn’t call back “for a long time.”
She said she has a better understanding of the law than Mitchell and can analyze the law more quickly with greater comprehension.
“I have a very natural ability,” Amaro said. “I don’t think 10 years experience or 30 years experience makes you good at what you do.”
When making sentencing decisions, she said, she would place the most emphasis on protection of society. She said Mitchell focuses too much on rehabilitation.
“If rehabilitation is available for an offender who I think is a serious risk to society, I will only use it if it’s available in prison,” she said.
Amaro said judges need to put their personal agendas aside, and she believes Mitchell has a hard time doing that when it comes to rehabilitation and treatment for criminals.
“Sometimes it looks like he”s fighting himself on the bench,” she said. “It looks like (the movie) ‘Me, Myself and Irene’ and he’s trying hard to make the decision he knows he legally has to make versus the decision he really wants to make.”
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