Story Published: Mar 18, 2010 at 7:53 AM PST
Story Updated: Apr 21, 2010 at 12:03 PM PST
He says in part, his decision to run again, as he did in 2008, losing by just over 250 votes, is in reaction to a Supreme Court decision requiring him to live full-time in Idaho County, instead of spending part of his time in Lewiston so he can better serve Clearwater County, one of the three counties in his jurisdiction.
"Now we're back to a judge going there just twice a month. And for the past seven years I've been going there twice a week," said Bradbury, during an interview Tuesday. "I have twice the number of cases in Clearwater County that I have in Lewis and Idaho County combined. I'm talking about trials and even more than that I'm talking about other kinds of work. All the habeas corpus petitions, all the civil rights cases coming out of the prison have to be filed through Clearwater County. That's in addition to all the trials I had. It's a huge workload."
Bradbury says the high court went too far in interpreting the law regarding his residency and that they've ignored the advice of administrative judges on the matter.
"The administrative conference, which is all the administrative judges in Idaho, there's seven of them, voted unanimously three years in a row to change it so I could live in any one of the three counties where I preside. The Supreme Court vetoed it three years in a row. After I said I wasn't going to run again (for the district judge's position he currently holds) and went down to try to get it changed, they are deposing it. So if anybody thinks that decision was about residence, instead of about Bradbury, they don't understand the dynamics at work."
Bradbury said the Supreme Court opinion on his residency has had an impact on the direction he has decided to take.
"The fact is, if they didn't let me do my job, the job that I was doing, a job that everybody thought was working fine, I probably wouldn't be running for this. I've learned they're more interested in themselves than they are in service. It's common with bureaucracy, any bureaucracy, where institutional comfort trumps service and that is at work with a vengeance in the Idaho Supreme Court," said Bradbury.
