Court on judicial conflicts of interest
Posted: Monday, June 08, 2009 12:00 PM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Courts
From NBC’s Pete Williams
The U.S. Supreme Court today said state court judges can be forced to take themselves off a case when they've received big campaign contributions from a party to the legal dispute.
The ruling comes after a coal company executive lost a $50 million lawsuit in West Virginia and decided to appeal the verdict to the state supreme court. But the court had a justice he considered hostile to business interests.
So he spent $3 million on ads to get that justice defeated. The campaign helped elect a new judge, Brent Benjamin. And when the executive's case came up on appeal, Justice Benjamin voted for the coal company to win. Result: Big verdict overturned.
The man who lost that appeal, Hugh Caperton, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that judges should be disqualified from hearing cases when there's an appearance that they'd be biased.
Today, by a 5-4 ruling (by the familiar breakdown) the court agreed, saying this was such an extreme case that the appearance of bias required the judge to take himself off the case, whether he had an actual conflict or not.
Today's ruling is sure to give new ammunition to opponents of the system many states use to elect judges instead of appoint them.
The court today also handed a defeat to CBS News Correspondent Bob Simon and others who were suing Iraq for mistreatment during the first Gulf War. The new Iraq, created after Saddam was overthrown, is a sovereign country and cannot be sued, the court said unanimously.
Also, it's going to be several more hours before we hear from the Supreme Court on the challenge to the Chrysler sale. The government has now fielded its written legal brief, and the court will have to consider that first before deciding what to do.
