The decision, the first to say the Constitution’s due process clause has a role to play in policing the role of money in judicial elections, ordered the chief justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court to recuse himself from a $50 million case against a coal company whose chief executive had spent $3 million to elect him.
Thirty-nine states, including New York, elect at least some of their judges, and election campaigns, particularly for state supreme courts, have in recent years grown increasingly expensive and nasty. In the last decade, spending on elections for state high courts has reached $200 million, according to Justice at Stake, a group that tracks campaign spending. Elected judges routinely accept contributions from lawyers and litigants who appear before them, and they seldom disqualify themselves for cases involving donors.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a decision that split along familiar ideological lines, said the Constitution required disqualification when an interested party’s spending had a “disproportionate influence” in a case that was “pending or imminent.”
Monday’s decision concerned an extreme case, and it announced a vague and general standard that will be refined and applied in the lower courts. The justices in the majority said they did not intend “unnecessary interference with judicial elections.”
But the four dissenting justices predicted that the decision would generate a flood of groundless recusal motions and undermine confidence in the judiciary.
The practice of electing judges is all but unknown in the rest of the world. Federal judges, including the justices of the United States Supreme Court, are appointed.
Much of the American legal establishment had urged the court to rule that the Constitution required elected judges to disqualify themselves from at least those cases in which interested parties had spent large sums to elect them. Such groups welcomed Monday’s decision with something approaching jubilation.
“The court’s decision is appropriately narrow but is nonetheless a huge victory for one of the most basic aspects of the rule of law: the right to a fair hearing,” said James Sample, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
But groups opposing campaign regulations on First Amendment grounds said Monday’s decision created an unworkable standard.
“The court has given no guidance on how judges should interpret potential biases, so this ruling will have a chilling effect on citizens engaging in independent speech,” Bradley A. Smith, the chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics, said in a statement.
In the West Virginia case, Justice Kennedy wrote, there was “a serious, objective risk of actual bias.” Chief Justice Brent D. Benjamin, the beneficiary of the coal executive’s spending, twice joined the majority in 3-to-2 decisions throwing out the $50 million jury verdict against the company, Massey Energy.
In a series of decisions rejecting disqualification motions, Justice Benjamin said there was no objective reason to suggest he could not rule fairly in the case.
Justice Kennedy said he did not doubt Justice Benjamin’s sincerity. “We do not question his subjective findings of impartiality and propriety,” Justice Kennedy wrote of the state court’s chief justice in Monday’s decision, Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Company, No. 08-22. “Nor do we determine whether there was actual bias.”
The plaintiffs in the fraud case, several small mining companies, won the $50 million verdict in 2002, persuading a jury that they had been driven out of business by fraud committed by Massey. That company’s chief executive, Don L. Blankenship, spent about $3 million in 2004 to defeat an incumbent justice, Warren R. McGraw, a Democrat, and to elect his opponent, Mr. Benjamin, a Republican who is now the court’s chief justice.
Mr. Blankenship contributed only $1,000, the statutory maximum, directly to Mr. Benjamin’s campaign. Most of the rest of his spending was on slashing television advertisements opposing Justice McGraw.
The sums involved, Justice Kennedy wrote, “were more than the total amount spent by all other Benjamin supporters and three times the amount spent by Benjamin’s own committee.”
But it was hard to say how much the Blankenship money mattered. Mr. Benjamin won the election by a seven-point margin, with 53 percent of the vote. He was endorsed by every major state newspaper but one. His opponent, Justice McGraw, gave a widely derided speech that probably contributed to his defeat.
Justice Kennedy said none of that mattered. “Whether Blankenship’s campaign contributions were a necessary and sufficient cause of Benjamin’s victory is not the proper inquiry,” he wrote.
Justice Kennedy, writing for himself and Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, repeatedly said the West Virginia case was “extraordinary” and “extreme.”
He added that ordinary state judicial ethics rules — rather than the Constitution — would govern most cases concerning money spent in judicial elections.
But the dissenting justices predicted that the decision would generate groundless litigation and undermine confidence in the judiciary.
“It is an old cliché,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a dissent, “but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.”
“The end result,” the chief justice wrote, “will do far more to erode public confidence in judicial impartiality than an isolated failure to recuse in a particular case.”
Chief Justice Roberts, writing for himself and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said that “the standard the majority articulates — ‘probability of bias’ — fails to provide clear, workable guidance for future cases.”
He followed this observation with a list of 40 numbered questions that “courts will now have to determine.” Among them: How much money is too much money? Must the judge cast the deciding vote? Do contributions from trade associations or interest groups count?
“Today’s opinion,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “requires state and federal judges simultaneously to act as political scientists (why did candidate X win the election?), economists (was the financial support disproportionate?) and psychologists (is there likely to be a debt of gratitude?).”
Justice Scalia, in a separate dissent, said Monday’s decision illustrated a larger jurisprudential problem.
“The court today continues its quixotic quest to right all wrongs and repair all imperfections through the Constitution,” Justice Scalia wrote.
“Should judges sometimes recuse themselves even when the clear commands of our prior due process law do not require it?” he asked. “Undoubtedly. The relevant question, however, is whether we do more good than harm by seeking to correct this imperfection through expansion of our constitutional mandate in a manner ungoverned by any discernible rule. The answer is obvious.”