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Friday, September 03, 2010

Ind. Courts - The "capitalization argument" and the "Bid to pull judge from ballot "

Updating this ILB entry from yesterday and this long list of earlier ILB entries on Allen County Judge Scheibenberger and the effort to take him off of this year's ballot, I'd like to comment, NOT on the question of the judge's qualifications, but rather on the argument that his name should not be on the ballot because of a capitalization issue.

The argument is set out in full in this ILB entry from August 5th. To summarize, the argument is that because IC 33-33-2-10 provides:

(a) To qualify as a candidate for Allen superior court judge, a person: * * * (3) may not previously have had any disciplinary sanction imposed upon the person by the supreme court disciplinary commission of Indiana or any similar body in another state;
the phrase "supreme court disciplinary commission of Indiana" means not only the "supreme court disciplinary commission," but "the commission on judicial qualifications."

Why? Because, the argument goes, "supreme court disciplinary commission" is not capitalized.

Really.

Here is the way one of the proponents of the argument put it in a letter that was in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel on about August 16th. Unfortunately, the paper's link to the letter is no longer is operative:

Does the statute refer to the Supreme Court Disciplinary Committee only, or does it refer to all disciplinary committee embodied by the State Supreme Court?

Perhaps the statute may be of some assistance. If someone wants to refer to a specific thing, such as Pearl Buck’s book “The Good Earth,” they capitalize the letters in the name, such as, “I truly enjoy ‘The Good Earth.’ ” If they want to refer to something in general, they use lower case, such as, “I truly enjoy the good earth.”

So which does the statute use, upper or lower case? Unfortunately for the Scheibenites, it explicitly uses lower case.

Hence, it appears to us that the statute includes the Commission on Judicial Qualifications, which metes out discipline on behalf of the Supreme Court.

Here is the problem with the "captialization" argument. NOTHING in the Ind Code is in caps unless it is "Indiana" or "Lake County", or the like. See the capitalization rule on pp. 14-16 of the Form and Style Manual for Legislative Measures of the Indiana General Assembly, available here.

Specifically, from pp. 15-16 of the Style Manual:

Do not capitalize the following: * * * (f) Official titles of state, county, or municipal officers, agencies, commissions, committees, or funds.

Examples: clerk of the circuit court; board of county commissioners; public employees'
retirement fund; commission on the aging and aged; legislative services agency; state general fund

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 3, 2010 02:46 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts