Justice Benjamins

Eleven states also elect insurance commissioners and given that insurance regulators are in many ways judges, the same potential conflicts are in play.

An elected West Virginia judge should have taken himself out a case involving one of his major campaign donors, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled.

The issue arose in coal producer Massey Energy Co.’s appeal of a $50 million jury verdict against it.

By a close 5-4 vote, the high court held that West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals Justice Brent Benjamin should have removed himself from the case because Massey CEO Don Blankenship had contributed $3 million to help Benjamin win his court seat from the incumbent.

The court found that in this case, there was a serious risk that the judge would be biased. “We find that, in all the circumstances of this case, due process requires recusal,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

The West Virginia Supreme Court was ordered to reconsider its decision in which it reversed— with Benjamin’s vote— an award of $50 million to Harman Mining Corp, which had claimed it has been forced into bankruptcy by Massey.

Harman Mining claimed that its rights to due process had been violated by Benjamin’s refusal to remove himself from the case. But Benjamin said he could be fair and impartial as he voted with the majority in two 3-2 decisions that overturned the $50 million jury verdict.

The Supreme Court decision appears narrow in its scope and responsive to the unusual facts of this case.

But we see it as another disturbing sign of the role that money has come to play in all of our elections.

Thirty-nine states elect judges. Part of the problem is that most states, like West Virginia let the individual judges decide whether they should excuse themselves. There are few standards and this latest ruling does not offer any, instead leaving it up to states to develop them.

Eleven states also elect insurance commissioners and given that insurance regulators are in many ways judges, the same potential conflicts are in play.

As we have previously repored, North Carolina has had early success with public financing of its insurance commissioner elections. In 2004, 66 percent of the funds raised by candidates for insurance commissioner in North Carolina were from interests regulated by the department. But in the most recent election won by Commissioner Wayne Goodwin, who accepted the limits under public financing, that percentage fell to just five percent.

The jobs that elected judges and commissioners perform — and public confience in them— are too important to be corroded by monied conflicts of interest, real or rumored. Perhaps North Carolina’s experiment in public financing offers a lesson in how to keep judges free to consider only the facts and the law — and not fundraising — in their decision making.

Topics Virginia North Carolina West Virginia