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Missouri Returns Record $36 Million in Unclaimed Property

Mo. judge: courts face money, political pressures | News Tribune

By DAVID A. LIEB

Associated Press

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — With his term atop Missouri’s judiciary ending, Chief Justice William Ray Price Jr. warned Thursday that the courts are facing increased political and financial pressures that are straining their core functions of dispensing justice and resolving disputes.

Price, Missouri’s longest-serving current Supreme Court member, is to be succeeded Friday as chief justice by Supreme Court Judge Richard Teitelman. Missouri’s top judicial spot rotates every two years among the seven members of the state Supreme Court. Price plans to remain on the court.

In an interview Thursday with media outlets, Price said several years of tight state budgets have caused the court system to cut back on personnel and to sacrifice long-term efforts such court computerization projects to meet the short-term needs of simply running the courts.

For the annual state budget that takes effect Friday, Gov. Jay Nixon already has cut $6 million from the $170 million in general revenues allotted for the courts, which the governor’s budget office said would leave the judiciary with the same level of funding as this past year.

Price said he understands the need for all branches of government to share in budget cuts. But “one challenge is to deal with efficiency without losing the sense of individual justice that people expect when they come to a court,” Price said.

He added: “I have frustration on the level of funding for the courts, for the public defenders, for the prosecutors — for everything we do.”

Price also expressed concern about “political challenges” to the judiciary that “seem to be growing more intense.”

During the past several years, critics of Missouri’s judicial selection process have pushed bills in the Legislature and filed initiative petition proposals that would alter or abolish the current system in which appellate and city trial judges are nominated by special panels and then appointed by the governor.

During Price’s tenure as chief justice, the courts have responded by opening more parts of the selection process to the public. It February 2010, the judiciary began releasing the names of applicants for judicial vacancies. Later that year, Price announced that nominating commissions would allow the public to observe the interviews of prospective judges and to learn the panels’ votes. He said at the time that the changes were driven partly by polls showing public support for a more open nomination process.

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