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Unless youve spent a significant amount of time in a trial courtroom, your understanding of judges power likely remains little more than a vague set of impressions drawn from episodes of "Judge Judy" and "Law & Order." But for those who have spent time in a courtroom especially as a criminal defendant that power is all too real.

The thing with judges power it's like oxygen, right? Youre not really conscious of oxygen until youre deprived of it, Holbrook said. And with judges, youre not conscious of their power until youre in their courtroom or you see them obstructing your interest through the judicial system.

When it comes to many criminal proceedings, it is not an exaggeration to say that judges decisions can be a matter of life and death. In some jurisdictions, state legislatures have adopted mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines and other provisions to constrain judges discretion. But in many cases, judges are afforded fairly broad discretion to apply a states rules of criminal procedure, rules of evidence, and sentencing guidelines. In practice, that means that judges frequently have the power to decide whether a defendant is held on pre-trial bail, what sort of plea bargain prosecutors can negotiate between defendants and victims, what the ultimate terms of a sentencing agreement look like, and how long a person must remain on parole or probation after serving his sentence. In family and housing courts, judges can steer cases toward less punitive outcomes by opting against lengthy probation periods for minors convicted of nonviolent offenses, for example, or by granting more lenient stays in eviction disputes between tenants and landlords.

In part because of the wide array of judges responsibilities, Americans have never agreed on the best way to select judges to the bench, and our collective indecision is reflected in the complex patchwork of state laws that govern judicial selection. Although public debates surrounding the optimal method of judicial selection tend to divide the approaches into two distinct categories those that rely on popular election versus those that rely on some sort of appointment the reality of judicial selection defies simple categorization.

When it comes to many criminal proceedings, it is not an exaggeration to say that judges decisions can be a matter of life and death.

In practice, most states deploy hybrid models that mix and match different selection methodologies, often depending on the type of court in question. In Kansas, for example, some judicial districts empower a commission to appoint judges to the district court a system known as merit selection while others use partisan elections, where candidates are required to list their party affiliation. Meanwhile, judges on the Kansas Court of Appeal are appointed by the governor, confirmed by the state senate, and then subject to face a yes-no retention election after one year at which point they are allowed to serve a four-year term before facing another retention election. In the case of the state Supreme Court, Kansas uses a commission-based appointment without legislative confirmation, followed by retention elections. By contrast, Alabama selects all state judges across all levels of the judiciary through partisan elections. Multiply this complexity across all fifty states and the truly byzantine nature of judicial selection in America begins to come into focus.

Notwithstanding this complexity, nearly all state judges face some sort of electoral scrutiny. According to a 2015 study by the Brennan Center, roughly 87 percent of judges will face at least one election during their careers on the bench. The nature of this scrutiny varies from race to race some judges run in hotly-contested partisan elections, while others merely face up-down retention votes but historically, one dynamic has united most judicial elections: They favor hard-line, tough-on-crime candidates.

Tough on crime messaging has been overwhelmingly the dominant message in judicial elections across the country, said Alicia Bannon, the managing director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Thats true both in terms of professional backgrounds, where it is very unusual, for example, to see judges come from public defender backgrounds or civil rights backgrounds, as well as in the kind of messaging you see in campaigns, where its so much more common for judicial candidates to be targeted [for being] soft on crime and praised as tough on crime.

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How Progressives Are Knocking Out Local Judges Across the Country - POLITICO