This week’s Rose Cafe featured Ithaca City Judge Scott Miller- an alum of both Cornell undergrad and law school! It was a fascinating talk that discussed a variety of extremely diverse, controversial and incredibly interesting topics, from the debate over free injection centers for drug users, to the emotions of a judge when sentencing.
An interesting topic discussed that I had never given much thought to was the debate over if judges should be elected or appointed. I honestly had never even thought about how judges come into their position, let alone debated which method would be better, and hearing the Judge’s opinion on this was really interesting. I really agreed with the Judge that “judges should be separate from the political process” and that Judges should not be worrying about pleasing voters, but be focusing on maintaining integrity in the judicial system.
Another area we talked about was whether cities should have centers to provide drug addicts with free, clean needles and a space with nurses and medical care to inject themselves with drugs. While at first this sounded absurd to me, what the Judge said definitely changed my mind a lot, about how such a center would help with harm addiction and that you can’t change an addict overnight, so you may as well save the lives of people who are still addicts. After all, the drug wars showed us that simply incarcerating people and leaving them to die in jail isn’t a solution either. In my opinion, such centers should exist, provided that the drug users are also in a rehabilitation program and that the needles are just being used so that users don’t go cold turkey and instead start slowly reducing their consumption (while consuming in a medically safe space) and slowly recovering from their addiction.
I think another really interesting take away I got out of the talk was that it is better than 9 guilty people go free, than one innocent person be sentenced. I thought the Judge’s story about an innocent, mentally disabled woman being convicted of murder was truly heartbreaking and really illustrated his point.
In general, this was a fascinating talk which brought out a lot of really interesting debates and discussions.
This seems like it was a great talk, and I think I would have really enjoyed hearing Judge Miller speak. When I first heard about electing judges, I thought it was a crazy idea, perhaps because it’s portrayed as an often corruptible process in TV shows. I think the clean needle debate is interesting, because it could potentially be misused to enable bad behavior, but you’re also promoting safer behavior at a lower cost than incarceration. The last point about the decisions and missentencing people is definitely hard, and I’m glad to hear that judges don’t want innocent people to be hurt and it should be innocent until proven guilty.