Brent Benjamin
The Supreme Court
ruled 5-4 today that a West Virginia Supreme Court justice should have
recused himself from a case that involved his biggest benefactor.
The case, Caperton et al. v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., Inc., concerned whether West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin should have been involved in a business case given that Massey's CEO, Don Blankenship, engineered massive financial contributions to Benjamin's election effort while the case was still heading to the West Virginia Supreme Court.
"We conclude that there is a serious risk of actual bias -- based on objective and reasonable perceptions -- when a person with a personal stake in a particular case had a significant and disproportionate influence in placing the judge on the case by raising funds or directing the judge's election campaign when the case was pending or imminent," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court. Kennedy was joined by the court's liberal bloc of justices: John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
The court held that Benjamin's failure to recuse himself under the circumstances violated the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Kennedy predicted that his opinion was unlikely to lead to a flood of new recusal motions.
"Because the codes of judicial conduct provide more protection than due process requires, most disputes over disqualification will be resolved without resort to the Constitution," Kennedy wrote. "Application of the constitutional standard implicated in this case will thus be confined to rare instances."
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took a different view. Roberts filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., in which he wrote, "the Court's new 'rule' provides no guidance to judges and litigants about when recusal will be constitutionally required. This will inevitably lead to an increase in allegations that judges are biased, however groundless those charges may be. The end result will do far more to erode public confidence in judicial impartiality than an isolated failure to recuse in a particular case."
Roberts listed 40 "fundamental questions" that lower courts will now have to weigh, given Kennedy's opinion.
"It is an old cliche, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease," Roberts wrote.
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Comments
"It is an old cliche, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease," Roberts wrote.
When the disease is pay-to-play justice??? I would have expected a statement like that from Scalia, who is notorious in his refusals to recuse himself from anything, but it's disturbing to read it from a Chief Justice who's been presented as intellectually and ethically squeaky clean. If we're going to reference cliches, let it be that "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion."
Posted by: Larry McD
| June 9, 2009 11:44 AM
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