Excerpt
In a small town, a local resident claims wrongdoing by a big corporation and wins a multimillion-dollar award after a jury trial. The corporation's CEO then pumps enough campaign money into a judicial election to get a new judge on the state supreme court. During an appeal, that judge casts a critical vote siding with the corporation — and reversing the resident's victory.
Sound like the plot of a John Grisham novel?
It is — his 2008 best seller, The Appeal. But it also resembles a real dispute between West Virginia coal mining rivals that now is before the U.S. Supreme Court. The decade-long dispute, a reflection of the growing questions surrounding judicial elections, tests whether an elected judge's refusal to take himself off a case involving a chief financial backer is unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court case of Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal began when Donald Blankenship, chairman and CEO of Massey, lost a $50 million verdict in a fraud lawsuit brought by Hugh Caperton and his small, independent Harman Mining Co. over the cancellation of a long-term coal contract.
As the case moved toward appeals, Blankenship contributed $3 million to help unseat incumbent Democratic Judge Warren McGraw in his race against a Republican, Charleston lawyer Brent Benjamin — 60% of the total spent in favor of Benjamin and against McGraw. Benjamin won. Three years later, when Massey's appeal got to the West Virginia Supreme Court, Benjamin cast a crucial vote to overturn the verdict that had favored Caperton.
"Justices Tell Judges Not to Rule on Major Backers" by ADAM LIPTAK, New York Times 6/8/2009
Excerpt
Elected judges must disqualify themselves from cases involving people who spent exceptionally large sums to put them on the bench, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a 5-to-4 decision.
The decision, the first to say the Constitution’s due process clause has a role to play in policing the role of money in judicial elections, ordered the chief justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court to recuse himself from a $50 million case against a coal company whose chief executive had spent $3 million to elect him.
Thirty-nine states, including New York, elect at least some of their judges, and election campaigns, particularly for state supreme courts, have in recent years grown increasingly expensive and nasty. In the last decade, spending on elections for state high courts has reached $200 million, according to Justice at Stake, a group that tracks campaign spending. Elected judges routinely accept contributions from lawyers and litigants who appear before them, and they seldom disqualify themselves for cases involving donors.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a decision that split along familiar ideological lines, said the Constitution required disqualification when an interested party’s spending had a “disproportionate influence” in a case that was “pending or imminent.”
Can you beat the audacity of Blankenship?! Talk about Carpetbagger politics, this is nothing short of buying a judge.
West Virginia needs to strengthen it's law regarding conflict of interest and make it a crime that can lead to a judge's impeachment.
It's good that the Supreme Court ruled as it did, but it should have been unanimous.
No comments:
Post a Comment