Supreme Court case focuses on issue of judges' bias

Dejected, Caperton and his lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. They won the support of the Brennan Center in New York and other reform groups that have tracked the rising tide of spending in judicial races.

"It is dialing for dollars from people who have cases before the court. Why else would you give a lot of money to a judicial candidate?," asks Bert Brandenburg, executive director of Justice At Stake, a public-interest group which sees judicial elections as a threat to impartial justice.

The solution, says Caperton's Washington lawyer Ted Olson, is to require judges to step aside from a case when they owe an obvious "debt of gratitude" to one of the parties.

"You can't eliminate judicial elections. The people have no interest in changing that," says Olson, who formerly represented the Bush administration before the Supreme Court. "You can tell judges you have to take yourself out of a case if a reasonable person would question your ability to be impartial."

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in Caperton v. Massey on March 3.