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By most accounts, the judicial arms race was launched in Texas around 1988, when Republican political consultant Karl Rove worked to turn the Texas Supreme Court into a Republican stronghold. He waged a similarly successful campaign in Alabama in 1994. After that, it wasn’t long before the Chamber of Commerce, trial lawyers, insurance companies, political parties, labor unions, and others started pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into judicial campaigns.

The wars escalated in 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court freed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts on elections through the landmark Citizens United ruling. In the 2007-08 general election, outside spenders put $12.8 million into judicial elections. After the Supreme Court extended free-speech rights to corporate money, that number nearly doubled to $24.1 million in the 2011-12 general-election cycle.

Much of this money flows through PACs, super PACs—to which corporations can give unlimited amounts—and “social-welfare nonprofits” that don’t have to disclose their donors. All three make it easier for groups with a financial stake in court rulings to hide behind ads focused on keeping predators in prison.

When coal executive Don Blankenship wanted to unseat an unsympathetic West Virginia justice in 2004, he didn’t run ads in the name of Massey Energy Co. He funneled nearly $2.5 million to a PAC called “And for the Sake of the Kids” to produce commercials alleging the incumbent had freed a child rapist and allowed him to work as a school janitor. In reality, Justice Warren McGraw had voted with the majority that a juvenile sex offender already on probation should have been sent to rehab instead of back to jail when he was caught drinking and smoking pot. The judge Blankenship helped elect reversed a $50-million ruling against Massey Energy, culminating in a landmark Supreme Court ruling that found the campaign contributions constituted “a serious risk of actual bias.” (More recently, Blankenship was indicted in November over a 2010 mine explosion that killed 29 miners.)

Like Blankenship, many of the outside spenders have no particular interest in criminal-justice issues. Several actually support policies that go against the severe sentencing they celebrate in campaign ads.

Less than two weeks before Election Day this year, an organization called the Center for Individual Freedom paid an estimated $468,110 to run a TV commercial in Michigan hailing two Republican-appointed justices for having “thrown the book at violent child predators.”

But the center has little to do with child predators or Michigan. The Virginia-based organization was founded in 1998 by former tobacco-company executives to fend off regulations on smoking. Since then, the center has been sustained by millions of dollars from Rove’s Crossroads GPS and has focused mainly on taxes, Obamacare, and reforming tort law to rein in liability lawsuits. When it has weighed in on criminal justice, the center has decried the kind of messaging being used in their own judicial-election advertisements. “Ancient legal principles go by the wayside when politicians pretend to be ‘tough on crime,’” a senior fellow wrote in 2011. Another post criticized the media for presuming guilt when it comes to “heinous” sexual crimes. The Center for Individual Freedom did not respond to a request for comment.