Parson offered familiar faces for Supreme Court pick

Gov. Mike Parson named all three finalists for the Missouri Supreme Court to their current judgeships. Now he must decide which of the three should sit on the state’s highest court.

The Appellate Judicial Commission on Aug. 22 nominated Judges Kelly C. Broniec, Michael E. Gardner and Ginger K. Gooch to succeed Judge George W. Draper III on the Missouri Supreme Court. Parson appointed both Broniec and Gardner to the Court of Appeals Eastern District in 2020; he named Gooch to the Southern District last year.

All three nominees would fill arguable gaps in the geographic or gender diversity on the court. If selected, Gardner would be the first person from southeastern Missouri to sit on the court since Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr. retired in 2008. Broniec’s selection would, at least briefly, make the Supreme Court majority female. Gooch could play a similar transformative role — and she would be the first person from the Southern District on the court since Judge John C. Holstein, who served from 1989 to 2002.

Parson has 60 days to make the appointment. Another will soon follow, as Judge Patricia Breckenridge is scheduled to retire in October. That will prompt another panel of finalists, offering a possible second chance for the two finalists who aren’t selected and the 20 other applicants who interviewed for the position on Aug. 21 and 22. The commission said its choices, which came after approximately three hours of deliberations and eight rounds of balloting, were unanimous.

Broniec

Broniec joined the Eastern District in 2020 after serving for 14 years as the elected associate circuit judge for Montgomery County. She was that county’s prosecutor from 1999 to 2006.

In her interview with the commission, Broniec spoke of her transition from the trial bench to the appellate court, where cases are dealt with collaboratively and the written opinion is key.

“Writing a judgment is different from writing a judicial opinion,” she said.

Broniec cited U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s book “A Republic, If You Can Keep It,” as a model of her judicial philosophy.

“Judges have a difficult job, we have responsibilities to uphold, and we don’t always get to rule the way our personal preferences would want us to,” she said. She also pointed to the central role that adherence to precedent plays in the legal system.

“Without it, we would have chaos, and there would be no predictability for the parties,” she said.

She served as a special judge with the Supreme Court on two cases in 2022. She said the court’s tradition of allowing the newest judge or guest judge to speak first during the conference following arguments was nerve-wracking, if ultimately rewarding. Both cases were decided unanimously

“I’m not saying I was the cause of that by any means, but it was comforting to know that I was analyzing the cases the way the other judges of the court were analyzing them as well,” she said.

Broniec is currently the chief judge of the Eastern District. She earned her law degree in 1996 from the University of Missouri.

Gardner

Gardner is Broniec’s immediate predecessor in the one-year role as the Eastern District’s top administrator.

He cited that experience as a reason for his candidacy, as well as his experience on the trial bench and as a Supreme Court law clerk. He worked from 2004 to 2005 under Judge Limbaugh, for whose family law firm he interned while in law school.

“In some ways I still feel like a law clerk sitting in the back row,” he said.

Gardner said being a judge requires one to “put your personal beliefs, your religious beliefs, your moral beliefs to the side and follow the law.” He stressed the need for judges, particularly on the Supreme Court, to get out in the community and to write strong opinions that demonstrate the rule of the law to the public.

“There’s unfortunately a growing misconception out there that judges have either red robes or blue robes, and that’s just wrong,” he said.

Prior to his appointment to the appeals court in 2020, he was an elected judge in the 32nd Circuit and was in private practice before that. Gardner lives in Cape Girardeau, which is at the southern end of the Eastern District. Limbaugh, named to the court in 1992, was the last Supreme Court judge from that region.

Gardner earned his law degree from the University of Missouri in 2004.

Gooch

Of the three candidates, Gooch has the shortest tenure on the Court of Appeals; she took office last December. Yet she brings more than two decades of trial and appellate experience as an attorney with Husch Blackwell’s Springfield office. She urged the commission to concentrate on that work, rather than the boxes her appointment might check off.

“I never would want to be a token Southern District person or a token woman or a token anything else,” she said. “I want to be because you think I have the merit to be here.”

Like Gardner, Gooch is a former Supreme Court clerk: She was the last to work under Judge Ann Covington prior to her retirement from the bench in 2001.

If Gooch is appointed, her career arc will follow that of her mentor’s. Covington, who in 1988 became the first woman on the Supreme Court, had previously served a short time on the Western District, where she had been the first woman appellate judge in the state. Gooch’s appointment to the Southern District last year gave that seven-member court a female majority for the first time in its history.

Gooch said that, having seen how Covington conducted herself as a judge, she knows how the job should be done.

“I have long known I’ll never be the smartest person in the room. I’ll never be the prettiest, I’ll never be the funniest, I’ll never be the life of the party,” said Gooch, whose self-deprecation the commission clearly didn’t buy. “I’m focused on hard work.”

Gooch earned her law degree in 2000 from the University of Missouri.