Minnesota judicial elections 2024, Part 1
As always most judicial elections in Minnesota have only the incumbent running. Most, but not all. Here’s the list from the Secretary of State’s website. This has a map of judicial districts.
Minnesota Supreme Court: After a blessed respite during the last go-round, this time there’s a return to the unfortunate Minnesota tradition of a deranged wingnut running for the Minnesota Supreme Court. In fact there are two of them.
Chief Justice Natalie Hudson is being challenged by Stephen Emery. If you look at Emery’s website, he doesn’t come across as some Trumper fanatic. Instead, his rants seem to be a bizarre mix of neo-libertarianism and a sort of twisted left-radicalism. The key point, I suppose, is that he doesn’t seem to even really believe our current judicial system should continue to exist in anything like its current form. And as we’ve seen with right-wingers in general, putting people into a system they want to destroy leads to bad outcomes.
Matthew Hanson is running against Associate Justice Karl Procaccini. Hanson’s website actually has very little about that. But there is this.
I am running against Karl Procaccini, who was appointed to the Minnesota Supreme Court by Governor Walz in 2023. Prior to this appointment, Procaccini served as General Counsel and Deputy Chief of Staff for Governor Walz from 2019 to 2023, where he led the legal team that drafted the governor’s executive orders during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
And there’s also this. He seems to be out to “change the system” as well.
Minnesota Court of Appeals: There’s also a rare contested election for one of these seats. Judge Diane Bratvold is the incumbent.
The challenger is Jonathan Woolsey. His website makes him seem like a regular guy just looking for a big promotion. But I also found this (on a great blog, by the way – Kritzer is a Hugo-winning writer of speculative fiction), and it’s clearly disqualifying. To say the least.
When I looked up Jonathan R. Woolsey, what I found were a whole lot of court cases (and appeals going all the way up to the State Supreme Court) involving a divorce with a child custody case. Woolsey divorced his wife in 2014, when his daughter was an infant. There’s no way to directly link to the stuff in the Minnesota Court Records Online system but I dug through the divorce filings and found that by the fall of 2014, his ex had an order for protection against him and exchanges of their daughter happened at the police department. The OFP presumably ended at some point but he appears to have repeatedly over the last decade filed endless requests to modify one thing or another, dragging his ex back into court over and over. The most recent court decision from this year included things like “[Jonathan Woolsey]’s request to have his daughter communicate with him by text is denied, as she does not own a cell phone” and “Halloween to be removed from the holiday schedule.”
I have known quite a few women who shared custody with a dude who dragged them back into court over petty bullshit, bleeding them of time, money, and energy, extending their abuse and control and forcing the woman to give them attention (by way of showing up in court).
(Naomi Kritzer’s blog)
District Courts: The way district judicial appointments work in Minnesota is that openings are posted, people apply, and a committee reviews the applicants and makes a recommendation to the governor. In my experience, most challenges to district court judges are by people who haven’t been able to get appointed that way. That is, they’re mostly not far-right kooks motivated by extremist political agendas. If it looks like someone is that, I’ll note it.
2nd District Court 3: Judge Timothy Carey is the incumbent. Paul Yang is running.
2nd District Court 29: Winona Yang is running against Judge Timothy Mulrooney.
4th District Court 24: Judge Matthew Frank is the incumbent. He was lead prosecutor in the Derek Chauvin case. Christopher Leckrone is challenging, presumably hoping to take advantage of that. Fat chance.
6th District Court 6: Judge Dale Harris opted not to run for reelection, and there was a very rare primary, with five candidates, won by Gunnar Johnson and Shawn Reed. Both look legitimate and qualified based on their websites.
7th District Court 5: Judge Timothy Churchwell is the incumbent. Joel Novak apparently started a run for Congress, as a Republican in MN-07 in 2020, but dropped out before the primary.
10th District Court 3: Judge Helen Brosnahan is being “challenged” by Nathan Hansen. Hansen’s tweets have been popping up now and then on my Twitter/X feed for years. (I don’t unfollow unless I’m unfollowed, no matter how ridiculous the content.) He’s a wingnut’s wingnut and proud of it.
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A note from Steve: Judicial elections in Minnesota are sleepers because they ought to be. Judges are initially appointed by the governor with the advice of citizens and the bar; they are vetted for intellect and temperament, in other words. In the very, very unusual case where a judge ought to be replaced, chances are you’ve read about why in multiple media stories.
Candidates contesting sitting judges, especially in the appellate courts, are almost always rightwing crazies with an agenda. Take this case, for example, featuring Chief Justice Natalie Hudson and her opponent, the perennial (no longer because she is suspended from the bar) gadfly Michelle MacDonald, and Justice Karl Procaccini, who represented me in a campaign practices case against MacDonald when Procaccini was a practicing lawyer.
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