Lookout Mountain Superior Court Judge Van Pelt seeks re-election

Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit Superior Court Judge Ralph Van Pelt Jr. will be a candidate for re-election next year.

Van Pelt made his announcement Monday to run in the nonpartisan election. The Lookout Mountain Circuit includes Catoosa, Chattooga, Dade and Walker counties in Georgia.

Van Pelt has run unopposed since his first election in 1988. In the last 21 years, he has tried a variety of cases, from medical malpractice and murder to speeding.

In October of last year, Van Pelt was in the midst of a squabble with another judge for the seat of chief judge of the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit. He told Kristina Cook Graham that for years he had been reporting her alleged ethical violations to the state agency that oversees judges.

In a letter to Graham, Van Pelt explained why he thought she was unfit to run the judicial circuit. He said she spent too much time in her downtown Chattanooga house instead of her Chattooga County property. He also said she doesn’t show up to work often enough and berates court employees, and he brought up a 2009 public reprimand Graham received from the Judicial Qualifications Commission.

Retired chief judge Jon “Bo” Wood had appointed Graham to the position before he left, but Van Pelt told her that he and Judge Brian House wanted to hold a vote for the position instead — since Wood was out of the picture. In a three-person election, Van Pelt and House then voted for Van Pelt to be the new chief judge, a position that would have allowed him to make appointments to local boards and run the law libraries in Catoosa, Chattooga, Dade and Walker counties.

Lester Tate, a Cartersville, Ga., lawyer who said he was serving as a spokesman for Graham’s family, accused Van Pelt of fighting with Graham because of a decades-old rivalry. Van Pelt and Graham’s father, Summerville, Ga., lawyer Bobby Lee Cook, got into at least one public quarrel in the mid-’90s.

But despite the pushback, Graham was appointed chief judge late last year.