I receive a lot of e-mails from the Arnold Schwarzenegger camppaign.
A lot.
It started right aftert the primary election, as if some e-mail spigot was cranked wide open, and it hasn’t stopped since. Even better, I get them in triplicate, since the Arnold campaign seems to have all of my e-mail addresses.
After a while, it’s hard to keep up with them or even bother to read them all. However, three I recieved yesterday and the day before caught my eye. It must have been Message Of The Day is: Public Safety! over at AS HQ, because they were all about how tough Arnold is on the bad guys.
Which reminded me of Senior Public Defender Teresa Snodgrass-Bennett, whom the Governor appointed this January to be a San Bernardino County Superior Court judge (see my previous posts on the subject here, here and here). First, there’s the questionable wisdom of giving judicial robes to someone who has spent her career defending the scum of humanity — most recently a child rapist/murderer Dean Eric Dunlap, whom Snodgrass defended as merely being a wrongly-accused pedophile necrophiliac.
But why would you appoint to the bench someone who cites as among their proudest accomplishments the fact they are qualified to defend Yugoslav war criminals at the International Court at the Hague? How did this get through the Governor’s judicial vetting process? Who on the Governor’s judicial appointments staff looked at Snodgrass resume and case history and thought, "Man — she would make an outstanding addition to the bench! It’s lacks in someone who can see the judicial process from the murderous thug’s perspective."
Not surprisingly, no one in the Administration , to my knowlegde, has uttered a peep about this appointment. I made several attempts to obtain comment from my friend Adam Mendelsohn, the Governor’s communications director. For guy who’s supposedly addicted to his Crackberry, Adam never seems to get my e-mails on this topic.
Even when Teresa Snodgrass is taken out of the equation, the Governor has accumulated a dubious judicial appointment record — at least from a Republican perspective. But whenever I see a Schwarzenegger campaign press release extolling his public safety credentials, I think of Teresa Snodgrass and the Administration’s guilty silence on her appointment, before rolling my eyes and clicking "delete."