Chief justice: Give judges a raise

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Chief Justice John Roberts apparently made a resolution to tone down his rhetoric when making his annual plea for higher judicial salaries, saying Tuesday that progress has been made to address the issue.

The chief justice noted in his year-end report that both the House and Senate Judiciary committees have considered restoring judicial pay to the same relative level other federal employees have enjoyed for nearly 20 years through annual cost-of-living increases.

The House committee passed a bill 28-5 earlier this year, and the Senate panel was considering similar legislation just before the holiday recess.

Federal judges are among the highest paid government employees, but many have left the bench in recent years for the more lucrative private sector.

Roberts called the current measures a "reasonable compromise."

"This salary restoration legislation is vital now that the denial of annual increases over the years has left federal trial judges -- the backbone of our system of justice -- earning about the same as (and in some cases less than) first-year lawyers at firms in major cities, where many of the judges are located," Roberts wrote.

The remarks came in Roberts' 2007 Year-End Report on the federal court system, which he heads as chief justice of the United States.

His predecessor, William Rehnquist, first raised the issue of judges' pay in 1986, when he began the tradition of issuing year-end reports.

Current figures prepared by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts show federal judicial pay -- adjusted for inflation -- declined approximately 25 percent from 1969 to 2006. During the same time, the real pay of the average American worker increased by about 19 percent.

Roberts' remarks were a sharp contrast from a year ago, when he used his entire year-end report to lament lagging pay for judges, calling it "grievously unfair."

"The issue has been ignored far too long and has now reached the level of a constitutional crisis that threatens to undermine the strength and independence of the federal judiciary," he wrote then.

Democrats have since regained control of Congress, and both chairmen of the Judiciary committees -- Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Rep. John Conyers of Michigan -- promised to address the pay issue.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for 2006, federal appeals court judges had salaries of $175,100; district court judges had salaries of $165,200, the same as senators and representatives.

Congress has provided for occasional cost-of-living increases over the years.

Federal judges with limited jurisdiction, such as magistrates and bankruptcy court judges, had salaries of $149,132.

Each of the eight associate justices on the Supreme Court makes $203,000 per year. Roberts, the highest-paid federal judge, has a salary of $212,100.

The chief justice also expressed hopes to improve relations with Congress and implement more internal changes for dealing with public complaints about judges.

But he ignored other topics affecting the federal courts, including security threats, overburdened staffs, and political criticism over what some see as "judicial activism" in many court rulings.

Looking ahead, the justices have a busy six months before them. They will hold oral arguments next week on standards to evaluate challenges to lethal injection protocols used by 35 states, and whether that form of execution constitutes cruel and unusual punishment by subjecting condemned inmates to excruciating pain. Nearly all capital prisoners are executed by lethal injection.

The high court in coming days is also expected to accept an appeal over whether child rapists can be executed.

And in perhaps the most closely watched case of the term, the court is expected to look at a politically charged dispute over whether the Second Amendment allows individuals to carry handguns, free of burdensome government regulation. It is a fundamental constitutional question that has never been fully addressed by the Supreme Court. E-mail to a friend

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