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September 4, 2010

The Joplin Globe news@joplinglobe.com The Joplin Globe Sat Sep 04, 2010, 11:34 PM CDT

JOPLIN, Mo. — The Missouri Bar on Wednesday recommended that voters give a St. Louis County judge the heave-ho.

The critical rating may result in the end of Associate Circuit Judge Judy Draper’s days behind the bench. It will be up to voters in that area to decide whether they want to retain Draper.

The evaluation by the Missouri Bar, released last week, focuses only on judges appointed to nonpartisan positions on appeals courts or to trial courts in the St. Louis, Kansas City and Springfield areas. Their names appear periodically on the ballot and voters are asked whether they should get to keep their jobs. We might note this is only the third time the bar has recommended that one of the appointees is not competent to serve. That serves as testament that good appointments are being made.

The bar does a survey of all lawyers and tabulates and provides the information to the Judicial Performance Evaluation Committee. That survey, released last week, includes evaluations for three judges who local voters will make decisions on in November. Those judges are Donald E. Burrell Jr. and Robert S. Barney, both judges in the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Southern District, and Zel M. Fischer, who was appointed to the Missouri Supreme Court in 2008.

Nonpartisan judges are rated according to judicial performance standards and the results of those judicial performance evaluations are available to the public. You can read those on the Missouri Bar website at www.mobar.org. In Draper’s case, she scored on the average a 2.4 on a scale of 1-5. That’s below the 2.85 retention benchmark set by the evaluation committee. Her lowest rating was in the category of whether she was competent in the law.

Burrell, Barney and Fischer all received overall rankings over a 4, meaning the committee believed voters should favorably consider retaining these three men.

We would encourage voters to study these evaluations before heading to the polls in November.

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Joplin City Manager Mark Rohr wants the city to distribute weather radios to all Joplin homes that don’t have one. That’s 11,000 radios. Do you think that’s a good use of $300,440?

Joplin City Manager Mark Rohr wants the city to distribute weather radios to all Joplin homes that don’t have one. That’s 11,000 radios. Do you think that’s a good use of $300,440?

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