Supreme Court says judicial contributions can violate due process

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. See the full ruling (PDF).

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:

Because the objective standards implementing the Due Process Clause do not require proof of actual bias, this Court does not question Justice Benjamin’s subjective findings of impartiality and propriety and need not determine whether there was actual bias. 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.” There is a serious risk of actual bias 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. The proper inquiry centers on the contribution’s relative size in comparison to the total amount contributed to the campaign, the total amount spent in the election, and the apparent effect of the contribution on the outcome. It is not whether the contributions were a necessary and sufficient cause of Benjamin’s victory. In an election decided by fewer than 50,000 votes, Blankenship’s campaign contributions—compared to the total amount contributed to the campaign, as well as the total amount spent in the election—had a significant and disproportionate influence on the outcome. And the risk that Blankenship’s influence engendered actual bias is sufficiently substantial that it “must be forbidden if the guarantee of due process is to be adequately implemented.” The temporal relationship between the campaign contributions, the justice’s election, and the pendency of the case is also critical, for it was reasonably foreseeable that the pend-ing case would be before the newly elected justice. There is no allegation of a quid pro quo agreement, but the extraordinary contributions were made at a time when Blankenship had a vested stake in the outcome. Just as no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, similar fears of bias can arise when—without the other parties’ con-sent—a man chooses the judge in his own cause. Applying this principle to the judicial election process, there was here a serious, objective risk of actual bias that required Justice Benjamin’s recusal.

Similar issues have arisen in Michigan, where the state Supreme Court is currently considering stronger rules on when a judge must recuse themselves in a case. With more than $7 million spent in a state Supreme Court election last fall, major campaign contributions are more and more likely to be involved in cases heard by the court.

The majority opinion was written by Justice Kennedy on behalf of himself and Justices Ginsburg, Souter, Stevens and Breyer. The dissenting opinion was written by Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito.