HARRISBURG — The days when election to Pennsylvania's appellate courts was a virtual guarantee of a lifetime job — with power, prestige and a generous paycheck — are over.

Thomas Saylor, the only state Supreme Court justice up for a yes-or-no retention vote this fall, said last month that the process was aimed at allowing a sitting judge with a good record to campaign for another 10-year term for little more than the cost of a stamp to declare candidacy.

But in 2005, voters ended more than three decades of humdrum tradition by making then-Supreme Court Justice Russell Nigro the first statewide judge to be ousted on a retention vote.

"In this election year, it's going to take a little more than a postage stamp to be successful," Saylor said, only half-jokingly, in a speech at a Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon.

Voters appear to be paying more attention than ever to the judiciary and looking to make themselves heard on issues such as the Supreme Court's resurrection of politically unpopular pay raises for 1,000 judges that the Legislature had repealed. And last week came the first criminal indictment of an appellate judge in more than a decade.

Eight jurists on the three statewide appellate courts are standing for retention this year.

Nigro's defeat was widely seen as a symbolic vote against the pay raises that legislators secretively approved for themselves, the judges and certain executive branch officials earlier in 2005.

The response to Nigro's loss was immediate. Within days, the Legislature had repealed the raises, but the fallout continued. In the 2006 elections, 24 incumbent legislators were thrown out of office.

The November vote will be the first judicial election since the Supreme Court restored the judge's raises nearly a year ago. While some observers believe the controversy has cooled, some candidates have been calling attention to it themselves.

Saylor, for example, cast the only dissenting vote in the decision to reinstate the raises. He brought up the subject in his press club speech and defended his position as the product of legal analysis, not political opportunism.

Superior Court Judge Joan Orie Melvin filed a lawsuit in an effort to give back her raise. A Commonwealth Court judge rejected her arguments and warned that, while she is free to "proselytize" against excessive judicial pay in her retention campaign, judges should not "be filing specious complaints in judicial forums." She's appealing to the state Supreme Court.

Jack Orie, the judge's brother and her lawyer in the case, said his sister is not playing politics but believes that she should receive the salary in place when she was elected in 1997 plus cost-of-living adjustments.

"That's just kind of the way we've been brought up," Jack Orie said.

Then there's the case of Superior Court Judge Michael T. Joyce of Erie, who was indicted Wednesday on federal charges of mail fraud and money laundering in an alleged scheme to cheat two insurance companies out of $440,000. On Friday, the Supreme Court suspended him with pay.