Anyone who has looked on in horror at the increasing politicization of the judiciary through big-ticket campaigns can take some relief from a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this week.
On Monday, the court ruled that a West Virginia judge should have recused himself from a case involving a business executive who spent $3 million to help the judge get elected.
Three years after his election, West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals Justice Brent Benjamin cast the deciding vote that overturned a $50 million jury verdict against the donor’s corporation.
On Monday, a 5-4 majority on the nation’s highest court took note that the businessman had spent three times more than all other Benjamin supporters combined and deemed the connection too obvious to ignore.
“This Court does not question Justice Benjamin’s subjective findings of impartiality and propriety and need not determine whether there was actual bias,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.
“Rather, the question is whether, ‘under a realistic appraisal of psychological tendencies and human weakness,’ the interest ‘poses such a risk of actual bias or prejudgment that the practice must be forbidden if the guarantee of due process is to be adequately implemented.’”
Put more simply: An apparent conflict of interest is just as harmful to the justice system’s promise of impartiality as an actual conflict.
Kennedy predicted that the extraordinary circumstances in Benjamin’s situation makes it a rare case, but Chief Justice John Roberts strongly disagreed. In his dissent, he warned that the Supreme Court’s decision would lead to a flood of requests for judges to recuse themselves from cases.
Roberts and his fellow dissenters perhaps don’t perceive a threat, appointed judges that they are. However, many people living in the 39 states where judges are elected, including Washington, are truly troubled by the thought that bought-and-paid-for judges could go unchallenged.
In recent years, many judicial contests have become naked partisan battles, attracting deep pockets and questions about what those monied donors are expecting to buy with all that cash they contributed.
From 2000 to 2007, state judicial candidates nationwide raised $167.8 million, more than double the total raised throughout the 1990s. The trend line is similar here in Washington, where the $4 million spent on the three state Supreme Court races in 2006 was triple the record set just two years earlier.
The minority on the Supreme Court argues that allowing more litigants to ask judges to recuse themselves “will itself bring our judicial system into undeserved disrepute, and diminish the confidence of the American people in the fairness and integrity of their courts.”
As we see it, the reality is just the opposite.
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