acroyear | 'bout time

Supreme Court: Money Can Force Judge Recusal : Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

As anticipated by a Cooley Law School symposium in March, the Supreme Court has ruled in a landmark case on the question of whether judges must recuse themselves in cases where one of the parties has given major financial contributions to the judge's election campaigns. The court ruled 5-4 that a judge must recuse themselves from such a case. [...]

The case was Caperton v Massey, which deals with an energy company owner who spent $3 million to get a justice, Brent Benjamin, elected to the West Virginia Supreme Court. Once in office, the justice refused to recuse himself from hearing an appeal that was pending before the court involving the energy company, casting the deciding vote in favor of his campaign contributor.

The court ruled that a party to the case does not need to prove actual bias on the part of the justice, concluding that when a situation contains such a clear conflict of interest, due process requires that they step aside from deciding in the case [...]

Of course, the ideal solution is to remove the election of judges entirely. Elect Attorney Generals and Prosecutors if you must have the electorate set the tone for the direction of enforcement (in places where elected sheriffs are replaced with appointed police chiefs), but the judge MUST exist above the short-term mindset of the electorate and the tit-for-tat favor games that elections force out of people.

Naturally, the ones dissenting: Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas...