![Representatives of the bar associations that make up the Judicial Candidates Rating Coalition during Monday's press conference. [Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association]](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cc93595/2147483647/strip/true/crop/890x500+0+0/resize/840x472!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Flegacy%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F1%2F27%2Fjudgeforyourself_web.jpg)
The legal organization that rates Cuyahoga County judicial candidates on Monday unveiled its ratings for the March primaries, the first set of ratings under new policies meant to address complaints about fairness and transparency.
The Judicial Candidates Rating Coalition has evaluated judicial candidates since 2002, releasing findings for the public at Judge4Yourself.com. In 2018, a group of pastors criticized the rankings as biased against African American candidates. At the time, only two of the 34 judges on the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court bench were African American.
“At the end of the day, we want to make sure that candidates feel comfortable that they can come before Judge4Yourself and be honestly and fairly rated,” said Darrell Clay, co-chair of Judge4Yourself and a member of the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association.
The site now releases the list of participants from each of the member organizations evaluating the candidates. A fifth member group – the Asian-American Bar Association – joined the coalition last year.
The coalition no longer releases a numerical rating. Instead, the site offers expanded definitions of four possible ratings, which range from ‘Excellent’ to ‘Not Recommended.’ Candidates can request more information from the coalition on how a rating was determined.
“We spent about 12 months with members from each of the five organizations, reviewing everything from top to bottom, front to back, A to Z, and changing the process with the goal toward achieving fairness, objectivity, transparency and respect,” Clay said.
The materials considered when making the rating recommendations, such as interviews, the reasoning of the individual members of Judge4Yourself and confidential disciplinary records will not be released. Keeping those materials confidential will make it easier for candidates to be open with Judge4Yourself, according to the coalition.
For the ratings released Monday, Clay said 15 of the 16 judicial candidates running in Cuyahoga County participated in the evaluation process.
