10/22/02

Columbus - As two Ohio Supreme Court candidates sharpened their political rhetoric yesterday, the Ohio State Bar Association asked two independent campaigns to yank misleading ads off the air.

The bar's advertising monitoring committee asked Citizens for an Independent Court and Competition Ohio to immediately pull their television commercials. The committee compared the ads to those run in 2000 by an Ohio Chamber of Commerce-backed group that accused Democratic Justice Alice Robie Resnick of trading votes for campaign dollars.

"Our committee unanimously determined that both ads impugn the integrity of the Supreme Court, the integrity of the judicial system and the integrity of all four Supreme Court candidates," said David Crago, committee chairman and dean of the Ohio Northern Law School.

The Competition commercial ended last week, but the Citizens ad will continue the rest of the week, spokesmen for the groups said.

The Citizens group, a political action committee of labor and trial attorneys, has been running a spot linking the Republican candidates, Lt. Gov. Maureen O'Connor and incumbent Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton, to corporate interests. Their Democratic opponents respectively, Tim Black, a Hamilton County Municipal judge, and Janet Burnside, a Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge, are portrayed as supporters of working families.

Competition Ohio's ads, paid for by AT&T, which is in a fight with Ameritech over the local phone market, links pictures of O'Connor and Stratton with lower phone rates.

The bar committee asked all four candidates to publicly disavow both ads, a step O'Connor and Stratton have already taken.

Without mentioning the specific ads, Burnside issued a statement yesterday saying that on Oct. 1 she had called on everyone to avoid smear tactics and that she was glad the bar association had now joined her.

Black's campaign issued a statement yesterday condemning the independent ads, saying such commercials should focus on a judge's experience, temperament and qualifications or lack thereof.

Black's first commercial hit the air yesterday, noting that O'Connor has run for seven offices in 15 years and has not yet finished an elected term. The remainder of the ad reflects on Black's nine years on the bench.

O'Connor's spokesman Mark Weaver called Black's commercial an attack ad.

"Now that he has attacked her, she may have to respond," Weaver said. In her current commercial, O'Connor is posed in a judge's robe. A small disclaimer runs with the ad noting her court service was in the 1980s and 1990s.

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