Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., Inc.
129 S.Ct. 2252 (2009)
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Rule of Law:
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires a judge to recuse from a case when a litigant with a personal stake in the outcome had a significant and disproportionate influence in placing that judge on the bench through their election campaign, creating a serious risk of actual bias.
Facts:
- A West Virginia jury returned a $50 million verdict in favor of Hugh Caperton and his companies against A.T. Massey Coal Co. (Massey).
- After the verdict but before Massey's appeal, Don Blankenship, Massey's chairman and CEO, became heavily involved in the 2004 election for a seat on the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, the court that would hear the appeal.
- Blankenship supported Brent Benjamin's campaign to unseat incumbent Justice McGraw.
- Blankenship contributed the $1,000 statutory maximum to Benjamin's campaign committee.
- Blankenship donated nearly $2.5 million to a political organization that supported Benjamin and opposed McGraw, accounting for more than two-thirds of the organization's total funds.
- Blankenship also spent over $500,000 on independent expenditures, such as mailings and advertisements, to support Benjamin's candidacy.
- Blankenship's total expenditures of approximately $3 million were more than the total amount spent by all other Benjamin supporters and three times the amount spent by Benjamin's own campaign committee.
- Brent Benjamin won the election and became Justice Benjamin.
Procedural Posture:
- Caperton sued Massey in a West Virginia trial court, and a jury awarded Caperton $50 million.
- The trial court denied Massey's post-trial motions challenging the verdict.
- After Justice Benjamin was elected, Caperton moved to disqualify him from hearing Massey's appeal before the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia.
- Justice Benjamin denied the motion.
- A 3-2 majority of the Supreme Court of Appeals, including Justice Benjamin, reversed the $50 million jury verdict.
- Caperton sought rehearing and again moved to disqualify Justice Benjamin, who again denied the motion.
- The court granted rehearing, and a new 3-2 majority, again including Justice Benjamin, reversed the verdict.
- The Supreme Court of the United States granted Caperton's petition for a writ of certiorari.
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Issue:
Does a judge's failure to recuse from a case violate the Due Process Clause when a principal officer of a litigant, with a case pending before the court, made campaign contributions that were significant and disproportionate in the context of the judicial election?
Opinions:
Majority - Justice Kennedy
Yes, the judge's failure to recuse violates the Due Process Clause. Due process requires recusal when, under an objective standard, the probability of actual bias is too high to be constitutionally tolerable. The inquiry is not whether the judge is subjectively biased, but whether the circumstances would offer a possible temptation to the average judge to be impartial. In this case, Blankenship's significant and disproportionate influence in placing Justice Benjamin on the court, coupled with the temporal proximity of the election to the pending case, created a serious, objective risk of actual bias. The sheer scale of the financial support—eclipsing all other supporters and the candidate's own committee combined—in an election decided by fewer than 50,000 votes, constitutes an extreme and exceptional circumstance. This situation is analogous to a party choosing the judge in their own cause, which due process forbids.
Dissenting - Chief Justice Roberts
No, the judge's failure to recuse does not violate the Due Process Clause. The majority creates a vague, unworkable 'probability of bias' standard that departs from the two discrete, long-standing constitutional grounds for recusal: direct pecuniary interest and certain criminal contempt proceedings. This new rule provides no judicially manageable standard, raising dozens of unanswerable questions for future cases regarding how much money is too much, what constitutes 'disproportionate,' and how long the 'debt of gratitude' lasts. This will inevitably lead to a flood of baseless recusal motions, which will do more to erode public confidence in judicial impartiality than the single failure to recuse in this case. The facts here are less extreme than portrayed, as Blankenship's spending was largely independent, his influence on the election outcome is uncertain, and large expenditures were also made in support of the opposing candidate.
Dissenting - Justice Scalia
No. The majority's decision creates vast legal uncertainty and will harm public confidence in the judiciary. It adds a new, indeterminate 'Caperton claim' to the arsenal of lawyerly gambits, encouraging endless litigation over campaign finance reports and nonrecusal decisions. The Due Process Clause is not a tool to right all societal wrongs, and this quixotic attempt to create a perfect judicial system through an ungoverned constitutional expansion will do more harm than good by reinforcing the perception that litigation is just a game.
Analysis:
This decision establishes a new, objective constitutional standard for judicial recusal under the Due Process Clause based on campaign contributions. It expands the grounds for mandatory recusal beyond direct pecuniary interest to situations where a litigant's disproportionate financial support in an election creates a constitutionally intolerable 'probability of bias.' While the Court emphasized the 'extreme' and 'extraordinary' facts of this case, the ruling creates a new avenue for challenging judicial impartiality in the 39 states with elected judges. The decision shifts the focus from the judge's subjective state of mind to an objective appraisal of external influences and their potential effect on a judge's neutrality.
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