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Diaz not avoiding past in bid to keep post
By Matt Williamson | Enterprise-Journal
Posted: 10/13/08 - 12:40:55 pm CDT
Oliver Diaz doesn’t have a problem facing some candidates in November. He has name recognition.
A high-profile federal judicial bribery case that lasted from 2003 to 2006 made Diaz a headline grabber along with co-defendants former attorney Paul Minor and former chancery judge Wes Teel.
Minor and Teel were convicted and ordered to federal prison.
Diaz was acquitted and allowed to return to his seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court.
Now he’s trying to keep that post and win re-election to a second eight-year term.
Diaz faces Randy “Bubba” Pierce and Paul Newton in the non-partisan judicial race.
The winner will represent Mississippi’s lower 27 counties on the nine-member bench.
Diaz was appointed to the court by former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove to serve an unexpired term and then was elected to a full term in 2000. Before that, he served on the state Appeals Court for five years and was a former lawmaker.
“I’ve written hundreds of opinions as an appellate judge,” he said.
The case that engulfed the middle years of Diaz’ term on the high court and temporarily sidelined him from the bench has injected a precarious element into his campaign.
But Diaz doesn’t shy away when it’s brought up.
“It’s something I talk about, and I don’t think I can hide,” Diaz said in an interview last week with the Enterprise-Journal. “People who understand what happened think a lot of politics were involved.”
By “politics,” Diaz means political prosecution, and he says U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, a former southwest Mississippi district attorney who handled the case, did so for political favor.
Lampton’s name surfaced in a recently released U.S. Department of Justice report detailing the 2006 firings of nine U.S. attorneys. The report concluded the firings were done for political reasons.
Lampton originally was targeted for firing but was granted a reprieve after Monica Goodling, a former Justice Department liaison to the White House, praised his work following Hurricane Katrina, the report said.A House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department are looking into the prosecution of the judicial bribery case to determine if it was done for political reasons.
Minor was a heavy contributor to the Democratic Party. Lampton was appointed to his post by President Bush.
“That is a subject of investigation right now, and I have been contacted by investigators in that case,” Diaz said.
Despite the fact that the judicial race is nonpartisan, its backstory is laced with influences from the left and right.
Ironically, Diaz was a former Republican state representative, who was appointed to the bench by a Democratic governor, and is considered one of the more liberal jurists on the court.
Pierce, considered by many to be his strongest opponent, was a former Democratic state representative who was appointed to a chancery court judgeship by Republican Gov. Haley Barbour and is favored by conservatives.
Diaz acknowledges that he is at times in the minority on the court, and more recently, many of his opinions have been dissents.
“I try to make it interesting for folks to read,” Diaz said of his dissents, noting a recent one quoted a line from Monty Python.
“You’re going to get differences of opinion,” Diaz said. “I think it’s good to have diverse opinions. That’s how I see my role — bringing a unique voice to the court.
“I don’t think everybody wants a monolithic voice on the Supreme Court.”
Diaz also has come under scrutiny from the business sector for generally ruling against corporations, and he acknowledges that criticism.
He’s long been in the crosshairs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which he labeled a special-interest group for corporations that “will pump millions of dollars into state elections.”
He said a review of state Supreme Court decisions by a Jackson-area attorney found that nearly all cases involving corporations that the court reviewed ruled in favor of businesses almost all the time.
“You’ve got the perception that you’re not being fair out there. If you’ve got that perception, that’s a big problem for the court,” he said.
Diaz acknowledged that the tort reform measures passed in the state a few years ago were needed — to an extent. “We did have a problem, and we did need to address it,”he said.
However, he said, some residents from his home of coastal Harrison County are probably finding that those measures aren’t helping their Hurricane Katrina-related litigation with insurance companies.
Politics notwithstanding, Diaz said experiences during his first term — his prosecution and Katrina — have opened his eyes as a judge and a person, and have heightened his sense of impartiality.
“Those sort of experiences you bring as a judge, you bring as a person. ... I know what it’s like when I’m reading those cases,” he said. “It’s a human experience. You want judges who can empathize or understand the lawsuit in detail.
“Everyone wants fairness in a judge, and you want impartiality and a fair hearing, but you’ve got to remember judges are human. It’s the experience that makes us who we are.”who we are.”
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Revatty wrote on Oct 14, 2008 9:03 AM: