River News: Our View

In Wisconsin, voters are tasked with the major responsibility of electing judges whom we depend upon to make sure that citizens’ constitutional rights are protected, that laws are applied as the legislature has written them, and that citizens are held appropriately accountable when they violate those laws.

Yes, judges perform critical tasks in a democratic republic; and so the position demands candidates who have the utmost understanding of the law, who have the compassion within them to help the afflicted and to hold accountable those who afflict, and who can apply the written law without fear of consequence or retribution.

Judgeships require those with a special dedication to serve those in their community fairly and with transparency, in the name of due process and justice for all.

In the real world, few candidates ever match the ideal, but, as election day approaches on Tuesday, Oneida County is fortunate to have one candidate and one candidate only who qualifies using those standards: Oneida County assistant district attorney Mary Sowinski.

In no uncertain terms and with the most assertive endorsement we can give, we urge voters across Oneida County to elect Mary Sowinski as judge on Tuesday.

With Mary Sowinski, voters will have a judge who as a prosecutor already has a track record of holding criminals accountable. With Mary Sowinski, who was born and raised in Oneida County, citizens will have a judge who both understands our communities and deeply cares for all the county’s residents, rather than one who kowtows to appease a special interest bully.

With Mary Sowinski, Oneida County will have a judge who cares deeply about individual rights. With Mary Sowinski, Oneida County will have a judge who can separate her role in the courtroom, where the law must be applied fairly to all, based on the facts in front of her, from her role as an advocate for reforms within the judicial system to better serve the people.

Most of all, with Mary Sowinski as judge, when disagreements arise — and we no doubt will have a number of them with her (see below) — we can be sure that she has made her determinations based on a reasonable interpretation of the law, and indeed knows the law so that such an interpretation can be made in the first place.

The times call for a judge who can be tough, who can punish predatory behavior, and in that role too we believe Sowinski is the only candidate for the job.

More specifically, let us tally the positives for the assistant district attorney. First, Sowinski hails from a family and community that believes in personal responsibility and hard work and accountability, a family with strong civic traditions and sense of duty to contribute to community.

Her actual experience builds on that strong civil and familial foundation. From working as an intern at the Supreme Court and in the Milwaukee district attorney’s office, Sowinski moved up the ladder, leading the county’s foster care unit before returning home and accumulating many more years of legal experience, especially in the Oneida County district attorney’s office.

Sowinski remains the only candidate for judge in the race who has ever prosecuted a criminal case, period, and ever handled a criminal case in Oneida County. She understands how important it is to make sure first-time drug users have access to diversion programs; but she equally understands how critical it is that a judge be able to recognize predatory behavior when it develops and to protect the public from it.

On more than one occasion, Sowinski says, she has said to the courts that community options for certain offenders have been exhausted.

“That we have no choice but to go to a prison sentence because we cannot keep the public safe with this person in the community,” she told us in an interview. “And so I don’t think there’s any question that I have a record of doing that with drug offenders, sexual assault defendants, burglary defendants.”

We believe her.

Some have quibbled that maybe Sowinski is not as conservative as she should be for Oneida County, and on certain issues she may not be. In our interview, she refused to say she supports or opposes red flag laws, for instance, taking no firm position without seeing actual language but suggesting that taking someone’s guns away temporarily based on concrete evidence from family and friends or law enforcement — without necessarily giving the person their due process right to defend themselves in a hearing — could be less invasive than chapter 51 detentions that do involve due process hearings.

She did say that a judge must be careful to consider the implications for the individual — could the guns be stored safely without taking them? How temporary would the order be and how permanent would the record be?

We reject the premise of that thinking, that a court can ever answer those questions without hearing from the targeted person. Nothing is more invasive that the government’s application of power without due process. Seizing firearms even temporarily by government fiat is far worse than a hearing where self-defense is a cornerstone. Indeed, temporary government fiats that sacrifice due process in the name of safety soon become permanent government fiats that sacrifice liberty in the name of the infallible state.

Still, it’s a quibble in the larger context of this election. Overall, Sowinski demonstrates a libertarian-ish streak and a respect for individual rights that we find refreshing, and she understands the critical need for a true separation of powers. Her favorite state Supreme Court case is one that established that state agencies cannot breach the role of a judge by filing complaints and leveraging fines over sentencing, in that case on behalf of crime victims, correctly pointing out that incentivizing or discouraging sentencing through fines would sacrifice judicial independence and violate separation of powers. 

And while she says she will always follow the law of the land — even if that means she is compelled to award agencies due deference in their arguments — she also believes very strongly that protection of the individual is a basic tenet of the judicial system and that the rights of individuals will be respected in her courtroom.

With search warrants, for example, Sowinski believes a strict probable cause standard must exist for them to be issued — that they must be specific and substantial — and that the law does not allow them to be used for fishing expeditions.

Finally, she is committed to transparency. “If citizens can’t vote, they can’t advocate with their policymakers,” she said. “They can’t do anything if they don’t have information. And it shouldn’t cost them a fortune to get it.”

She dovetails that commitment to transparency with an equal concern for the privacy of victims: “I don’t think the general public needs to know every intimate detail of the family’s life to understand what crime was committed and whether it was committed, for example.”

As election day approaches. Sowinski says she wants to emphasize her 25 years of experience — more than 20 as a prosecutor and eight years of experience as a prosecutor in Oneida County — and her lifelong connections to the county. 

We agree that’s a strong resume all on its own. Add in her knowledge and her passion for the rule of law, and that’s why we urge her election on Tuesday.

As strong a candidate and as worthy of a judgeship as Sowinski is on her own, we would be remiss if we did not address the serious shortcomings of her opponent, Oneida County corporation counsel Michael Fugle, and how unworthy he is of the position.

Let us be blunt, for once: Fugle does not belong on the Oneida County bench, or on any other bench. The corporation counsel does not even belong on a park bench, presiding over a court of pigeons.

For starters, while Sowinski demonstrates a wide range of expertise and knowledge, indicating that she actually knows the laws she is pledging to apply as written to her decision making, Fugle is as clueless as Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther series. 

No better case better demonstrates Fugle’s ineptness and incompetence than his performance during a conditional use permit hearing for Kirk Bangstad, when he advised the zoning committee to illegally adjourn the hearing during a vote that appeared to be heading toward a denial of the permit, ostensibly because “a group” suddenly needed to use the room.

Clearly, Fugle had no clue that the county’s parliamentary procedures, which are written into the county code, forbid such a maneuver, and rightly so because the ability to adjourn in the middle of voting obvious invites all sorts of mischief. One can imagine how many times committee heads would adjourn meetings during voting when they suddenly realized they were about to lose.

Meeting adjourned!

Mind you, this is the person the county board counts on to guide them legally through board meetings, and yet he does not know even the most rudimentary parliamentary procedures. Sadly, even without such knowledge, common sense should have told Fugle that he was out of bounds, but the corporation counsel apparently lacks as much in common sense as he does in his knowledge of the law. 

Is this the person you want presiding over a courtroom?

Fugle’s bad advice set off a chain reaction of clownish events that would make Clouseau look competent.

While Sowinski views the separation of powers as critical, and cites cases to back up her intellectual foundation on the issue, this past year Fugle demonstrated that he has no knowledge about the separation of powers at all.

After he advised the zoning committee to illegally adjourn, Fugle reportedly argued that no one could be cited because of separation of powers, that is to say, the procedures for conducting meetings amounted to internal rules that other branches of government could not interfere with or enforce, much like the attorney general could not prosecute the legislature if it violated its own internal procedures.

Unfortunately, that’s an apples and oranges comparison, for the legislature never codified its rules of procedure into state law. Their rules of procedure are policy only, and executive interference would be a true violation of separation of powers.

However, in Oneida County, the county board did embed in the ordinance its rules of procedure. Thus, violating the county’s rules of procedure was not just a violation of internal policies but an ordinance violation that the sheriff is empowered to enforce.

Inspector Fugle had no clue. Should we trust this person to know judicial boundaries?

What about independence? After the county had illegally adjourned the Bangstad CUP to the next meeting, where the vote should have continued, Fugle met privately — so much for transparency — with Bangstad’s attorney to try and work out a compromise and subvert the public hearing’s previous deliberations and the upcoming final vote. 

How many average citizens get such a benefit? How many citizens will have the corporation counsel illegally shut down a vote to spare the citizen the denial of a permit and then meet privately with them to see how he could help move things along with a “compromise”?

The answer is, not many that we have seen. In Inspector Fugle’s mind, special treatment is reserved for special interests.

Just ask downtown Minocqua businesses. Not long after Fugle tried his best to get a CUP for Bangstad despite a truckload of citations and repeated violations of the county code, the zoning department went after downtown Minocqua businesses with a vengeance, threatening multiple owners with citations if they didn’t get with the program.

Their crime? They had provided benches and such things outside their stores so the public could rest.

Does anyone think Mike Fugle stood up in defense of these business owners? Nope. Instead he doubled down on a double standard. We heard not a peep of protest from the corporation counsel about these stormtrooper tactics.

That’s the kind of fairness small business owners could expect if inspector Fugle became judge. What about transparency? You might think that meeting behind closed doors to work out “a compromise” with a special interest was bad enough, but there was Fugle interfering with an open records request by us to a county supervisor, revealing the continued existence of a policy to have the corporation counsel review and redact all records requests sent to county officials.

The problem is, inspector Fugle wasn’t the custodian of those records. Even worse, the policy of automatic review by the corporation counsel, which had served as convenient roadblocks to legitimate records requests, was supposed to have ended. Rather than point that out, Fugle happily participated in a policy the county had officially tossed on the trash heap. 

We could go on, but the point is clear. In the past, for all the reasons mentioned, we have called for the county to fire Fugle from his position as corporation counsel. He’s incompetent in that position, too.

His departure would be a blessing. But that would quickly turn into a nightmare if his reason for leaving was to ascend to the Oneida County circuit court. That would throw our citizens from the frying pan directly into the fire.

We can do way better. On Tuesday, let’s not quibble. Vote not for incompetence and elitism; vote for fairness, independence, due process, and the rule of law.

Elect Mary Sowinski judge in Oneida County.