WASHINGTON - Hugh Caperton, a small coal mine owner from Slab Fork, W.Va,. was driven into bankruptcy after he ran up against the huge A.T. Massey Coal Company, but he got a measure of revenge when a jury awarded him $50 million in damages.
When Massey appealed to the West Virginia Supreme Court, however, Caperton knew he was in trouble. Massey's chief executive, Don Blankenship, had spent $3 million of his own money to elect a new justice. "The deck was stacked against us," Caperton said. As he feared, the newly elected Justice Brent Benjamin cast the deciding vote in a 3-2 ruling that overturned the verdict against Massey.
Now, this saga of money, power and judicial politics in West Virginia has prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to consider for the first time whether big spending on a judge's election can create an unconstitutional "appearance of bias" that violates the guarantee of "due process of law" in the Constitution.
The case has attracted intense interest from judges, lawyer's groups and legal ethicists, most of whom decry the trend toward campaign-style races for judgeships.
In 38 states, including Maryland and California, some judges are elected. Nineteen states besides West Virginia and Illinois elect the justices of their supreme courts. Most are in the Great Lakes region - from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin - or across the Deep South, from Georgia to Texas.
The amount of money flowing into these races has more than doubled in the past decade, and most of it comes from businesses or trial lawyers. It has created the perception that justice can be bought, or least rented when needed, critics say.
The question raised by the West Virginia case comes close to home for the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, some of whom have had their own recusal controversies. When must a judge step aside because there is a good reason to doubt he is impartial?
Massey's lawyers say the case is not as simple as it has been portrayed. Blankenship gave only a small contribution directly to Benjamin's campaign, they stress. And Benjamin has voted against Massey in other, more recent cases, they note.
They and others are skeptical of the notion that judges should step aside based on an "appearance" of bias or because they owe a "debt of gratitude" to someone. If that standard were adopted, U.S. Supreme Court justices could be asked to bow out of cases involving presidents who nominated them, they say.
