Cuyahoga Common Pleas Ct: Blum (D) Meets the Bloggers

Last Friday I attended a Meet the Bloggers interview with Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas candidate Suzanne Bretz Blum (D-Cleveland) at the new MTB Suite in Cleveland's hip Tower Press Building. Tim and Gloria Ferris, Jill Miller Zimon, and the redoubtable George "Cool Cleveland" Nemeth were also there. The audio (or a transcript) can be obtained here.

Blum (rhymes with thumb, as in "Thumbs Up!") is a newcomer to politics and her path to this point has been unusual. Blum is guided by a team of friends, relatives, and volunteers that she calls her "kitchen cabinet." They meet monthly to talk over her campaign. The team developed her "Thumbs Up!" logo and "Get Justice Done" slogan in order to combine a positive message with an clue as to the correct pronunciation of her surname.

It was a blow for Blum to lose the county party endorsement to primary opponent Edele Passalacqua but Blum persevered, talking to activists before and after Democratic club meetings when she or her representative wasn't allowed to address the group directly. In the end she won the primary, but only by a relative handful of the many thousands of votes cast. Afterward, her primary opponent called and offered to help Blum with her campaign.

Blum said that her civil litigation and diplomacy skills are her biggest strengths as a judicial candidate. Lack of criminal litigation experience is her weakness. However, she now serves as a magistrate in charge of the Juvenile Diversion Program of the Shaker Heights Municipal Court, where she deals with misdemeanor offenders daily. The goal of that program is to impose community service and other alternative sanctions on juvenile first offenders instead of putting them into the regular juvenile justice system.

In fact, restorative justice, a theory of justice that emphasizes repairing the harm caused or revealed by criminal behavior, is a big part of Blum's judicial philosophy and a cornerstone of her campaign, and we talked about it quite a bit. Restorative justice brings a community focus to punishment, with the offender required to be personally involved in repairing the damage done to the victim. It should include both community service and education. Blum would like to bring restorative justice concepts to the Court of Common Pleas, including greater use of community sanctions, which Blum said costs less than incarceration and leads to less repeat offending. She said that city council members have told her that community service is in fact helpful and of value. However, she is quick to acknowledge that many felons are dangerous or otherwise deserving of harsher punishment than community service.

I asked Blum her view on electing judges as opposed to appointing them, as is done in some other states. She said that her experience of winning the primary without the party endorsement strengthened her belief in the ability of the voting public to make good decisions about judges, despite such well-known difficulties as surname confusion. On that score, it is worth noting that her opponent, Judge Kathleen Sutula (R-Cleveland), has the same last name as her cousin who is a Democratic judge. Kathleen Sutula has been criticized for treating people in her courtroom with something less than courtesy and respect, a failing that Blum pledges to avoid.

This candidate made a very good impression on me. She is somewhat soft-spoken but firm, very serious and thoughtful, and is highly knowledgeable about litigation and theories of justice. I think she has an appropriate temperament and demeanor for the job, and she has displayed admirable creativity and determination in her campaign.