Former Montana Supreme Court Justice Jim Nelson warns readers to be wary of money spent in judicial elections due to the potential it has to corrupt judges (“Will Montana judges be for sale?” Daily Inter Lake, Sept. 28).

Well, he should know. Nelson was the benefactor of nearly $325,000 spent by a special interest, “dark money” group in his last race in 2004. That group, the Montana Trial Lawyers Association, collected huge contributions from attorneys with cases pending in Nelson’s court and for whom he subsequently ruled in their favor.

Jim Nelson’s 2004 election is the most egregious example of “pay to play” since the days of the Copper Kings. And now he lectures us on judges being for sale?

This is nothing new. For years the Montana Trial Lawyers Association has lavished campaign cash on judges. They even employed their lobbying might to kill legislation that would have made it illegal for judges to sit in cases in which one of the attorneys was a campaign contributor.

There’s a long history of the trial lawyers being the biggest players in Montana Supreme Court races. That shouldn’t be a shocker — they have a lot of money personally at stake in the outcomes. And when examining whom the trial lawyers have thrown their support behind, it’s almost exclusively former Democratic politicians.

It looks like they have their candidate in 2014 as well. Candidate Mike Wheat is a former trial lawyer, former Democratic legislator, former Democratic candidate for attorney general, and was appointed to the Montana Supreme Court by a Democratic governor. Trial lawyers have been lining up in droves to contribute to Wheat’s campaign.  It’s notable that many of these campaign contributors have cases before the court in which Justice Wheat will rule in the future.

I guess it’s no wonder that Jim Nelson failed to mention this glaring conflict of interest for Justice Wheat since he was guilty of it himself.

By making a feint towards the moral high ground Nelson was hoping no one would mention the massive amount of money spent on his behalf by dark money groups. He then has the gall to attempt to paint the involvement of groups other than trial lawyers in judicial elections as having a corrupting effect.

We should strive for a judiciary that’s a place for blind justice, and where financial contributions don’t play a role in legal outcome. But Jim Nelson is in no position to make the claims that he did, and should be embarrassed as this piece does nothing more than perpetuate the political partisanship within our judicial elections that he’s denouncing.

A place to start is by electing judges that don’t have obvious political allegiance — someone that doesn’t have the political baggage that Mike Wheat carries. It would be better to elect judges that have focused their careers on the law, not politics.

And if Nelson were really concerned about maintaining the integrity of our judiciary, then he shouldn’t be focused on how judges are elected, but rather how they judge once they’re on the bench. Our justices need to apply the law as intended by the people or by our democratically elected representatives in the Legislature, and not by their own ideology or the ideology of those who donated to their campaign.

Monforton, a Bozeman attorney, is litigating a case involving First Amendment rights related to Montana judicial elections.