INDIANAPOLIS - Gov. Mitch Daniels has had two opportunities in the past two years to appoint a woman to the all-male Indiana Supreme Court, and twice he has declined. Now he has a third chance.
A judicial nominating commission selected one female judge and two men, a judge and a lawyer, as the three finalists to replace Justice Frank Sullivan, who is stepping down after 19 years on the court. The trio was selected by the Indiana Judicial Nominating Commission after it interviewed 10 candidates late Wednesday.
Daniels has 60 days to select one of the three: Tippecanoe County Judge Loretta Rush, Hamilton County Judge Steven Nation or Indianapolis attorney Geoffrey Slaughter. Sixteen women and six men applied for the vacancy, and the commission chose the finalists in a public 6-1 vote following a closed discussion.
Daniels has said it would be gratifying to appoint a woman but that gender can't be the controlling factor, and that he makes his selections based on qualifications and judicial outlook. Daniels' spokesman, Jake Oakman, said Thursday that the governor's viewpoint hasn't changed.
Court spokesman David J. Remondini said the commission made its selections based on applications and interviews.
If Rush were selected as the court's 108th justice, she would be the first female justice since Myra Selby stepped down in 1999 after five years on the court.
Only three states - Idaho, Indiana, and Iowa - currently have no women on their court of last resort, National Center for State Courts analyst Deborah Saunders said in an email. Out of 349 seats, 120 are held by women, and 18 states have a female chief justice, Saunders said. Women have served on state high courts
since 1922.
Attorney Karen Celestino-Horseman, an Indianapolis attorney, said Daniels had urged women to apply for the Supreme Court opening. Yet despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of applicants were female, two-thirds of the finalists were men.
"That does give one pause," she said. "If the Supreme Court is supposed to be representative of all the people in the state of Indiana, and given that the state is more than 50 percent women, the court is incomplete without a female justice."
A law professor who studies the state appellate courts said he understood why some people were disappointed when only a handful of the female applicants advanced.
"I worry that it will discourage women from applying in the future. I certainly hope it does not," said Joel Schumm, a professor at Indiana University's Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis.
The nominating commission's only no vote was cast by James McDonald, a Terre Haute lawyer. He would not say Thursday why he voted against the motion to submit the group of three nominees to the governor, though he did say that gender diversity was a factor in the panel's deliberations - but not the deciding factor.
"I believe it is important that you have that diversity, including gender and race," McDonald said. "But I'm not willing to see a female or an African American or any minority put on the court because that's the only factor that distinguishes them. It's an important factor, but not the only factor."
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