The new Texas Supreme Court chief justice wants state lawmakers to give judges their first pay raise in 12 years, pass restrictions on who can get bail and provide more protections against child removal for families involved in custody cases.
In his first-ever State of the Judiciary address to the Texas Legislature Wednesday, Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock called it “absolutely essential” that lawmakers raise the base pay for state judges — not only to keep up with inflation, but to attract judges who are qualified to make life-changing decisions in Texans’ lives.
“Who do we want wielding all of that power and influence?” he asked. “Surely we want the most serious, most qualified, hardest working judges we can get. And the bottom line is this: You'll get what you pay for.”
The pay for Texas intermediate appellate judges and high court justices is based on district judges’ salaries in a tiered system. The base pay for district judges is $140,000 a year. Appeals court judges make a certain percentage more than that, while Texas Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals judges make an even higher percentage of what district judges receive.
Lawmakers haven’t raised the base pay for judges since 2013. Texas ranks 49th in the country in salary for judges at the district court level, according to a report by the Texas Judicial Compensation Commission.
The commission, tasked with evaluating the proper pay for judges, is recommending a 30% pay increase. A proposal by Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, that would give judges only half of that raise is set for a hearing by a Senate committee next week.
And in thanking law enforcement, he also commended a Senate resolution that would change the state constitution to allow judges to deny bail for people accused of certain violent and sexual offenses. Blacklock thanked Huffman for leading the passage of bail reform measures in the Senate, named an emergency item this session by Gov. Greg Abbott.
"I want to ask you to do everything you can to defend the thin blue line," Blacklock told lawmakers. "Support their families. Give them the tools they need to win the fight against crime and chaos and drugs."
Blacklock also said judges and the state wield too much power to terminate a parent’s rights over their kids in child custody cases. Blacklock suggested repealing a part of the state’s family code that allows a court to terminate someone’s parental rights if they failed to comply with a court order dictating what the parent must do to maintain contact with their child.
It's too easy for a court to terminate a parent’s right to see and be around a child taken by the Department of Family and Protective Services if the parent doesn’t follow “a long list of things the state wants them to do to get their child back,” Blacklock said. The chief justice supports House Bill 3281, filed by Houston Democratic Rep. Harold V. Dutton Jr., which would repeal that part of the family code, among other changes.
“Termination of parental rights is the civil death penalty when the state goes to court to take somebody's children,” Blacklock said. “It's not opening up a collaborative therapy session. It's initiating adversarial litigation of the highest stakes imaginable. And we need to do more to ensure that the desperate parents in these cases have vigorous legal representation.”
It comes after the Texas Supreme Court heard a case late last year in which a trial court imposed a lifetime protective order against a Houston mother accused of beating her children, preventing her from seeing or directly contacting her kids indefinitely. That order, her attorneys argued, was effectively the same as the termination of parental rights.
Blacklock said at the time that he’d rather go to prison for two or three years than be prohibited from seeing his children for that long. He has three daughters.
Abbott appointed Blacklock, 44, to the highest civil judicial position in the state this year shortly after former Chief Justice Nathan Hecht retired from the court at age 75, as required by the Texas Constitution.
The younger justice echoed some of the same calls for change in the Texas judiciary as his predecessor. In the last major development under Hecht’s tenure, the Texas Supreme Court allowed non-lawyers in the legal field to help people in certain parts of the legal process.
Continuing that process is necessary to help not just the poor, Blacklock said, but the vast majority of Texans who have trouble affording lawyers.
Blacklock also promised constitutional originalism, a pillar of conservative jurists’ approach to the law that encourages staunch adherence to interpreting the state constitution and other law exactly as written.
Huffman and other lawmakers have been hesitant to push for judicial pay raises because of judges they accuse of contributing to backlogs in the court system or who let people accused of crimes out on bail too often.
But the request for judicial pay raises isn’t to award any judge’s incompetence, Blacklock said — and he added there are administrative methods of holding incompetent judges accountable.
“Instead of holding down the salaries of 98% of judges because 2% of them aren't doing their job,” he said, “we should use the power the Constitution gives us to make the 2% find another job, and we should pay all our judges a salary that is commensurate with the extraordinary responsibility that our Constitution asks them to bear.”
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