Kiddy Kickbacks Are Judicial Dysfunction

I ran across this op-ed in the New York Times on judicial dysfunction and had to take a moment to review.  Needless to say, it was nothing but a reiteration of what I have been screaming about for years.

Kiddy Kickbacks.

No one ever discusses the issues in child welfare and the courts but one must understand that the same principles, if not worse, exists in dependency courts dealing with these matters as there is absolutely no regulation or ramifications to any misconduct.

Well, I retract that last statement.  The feds did set precedence with the "Cash 4 Kids" scandal.

A Study in Judicial

Dysfunction

Harsh state judicial campaigns financed by ever larger amounts of special interest money are eating away at public faith in judicial impartiality. There are few places where the spectacle is more shameful than Wisconsin, where over-the-top campaigning, self-interested rulings, and a complete breakdown of courthouse collegiality and ethics is destroying trust in its Supreme Court.

Maura Corrigan, the leader in
special interest campaigning

One of those "few places" is Michigan where Supreme Court judicial campaign, which are suppose to be non-partisan, are bankrolled by special interests.  Just ask former Chief Justice for the Michigan Supreme Court, now Director of the State Department of Human Services, Maura Corrigan.

On Monday, a special prosecutor was named to investigate an altercation between two justices on opposite sides of the court’s bitter ideological divide. Ann Walsh Bradley, a member of the court’s liberal wing, has charged that David Prosser, a conservative, put her in a chokehold during a heated exchange shortly before the court upheld the new state law eliminating most collective-bargaining rights for public employees.

Justice Prosser has disputed Justice Bradley’s version of what occurred, and the facts remain unclear. What is certain is that Justice Prosser should have recused himself from that ruling. His vote to uphold the law occurred shortly after his re-election campaign in which he benefited from heavy anti-union independent spending.

Justice Prosser won the April election by a very small margin, prompting a recount. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that he then raised more than $270,000 for the recount, much of it in $50,000 chunks. (The contribution limits that apply under Wisconsin’s public financing system for judicial races do not extend to recounts.) Some $75,000 of the haul was used to pay fees to a law firm led by an attorney representing conservative groups in a case challenging state campaign disclosure rules, which is scheduled to be heard by the court next month.

Maura Corrigan has ensured that disclosure of her campaign contributions does not exist  due to the incumbent waiver but her audacity is engrained in the minds of those who have been affected through her questionable campaign activities.

Given the lawyer’s role in Justice Prosser’s recent recount success, a reasonable person might well question the judge’s impartiality on that case, too. After first saying he had no intention of recusing himself, Justice Prosser on Thursday asked the parties in the campaign finance case to file memos stating their views about recusal. It should not take a formal request for him to step aside.

A contentious 4-to-3 decision by the court last month declared recusal decisions by the justices to be unreviewable. In another sign of the court’s dysfunction, the deciding vote came from Justice Patience Roggensack, whose involvement in an earlier case was the subject of the disqualification motion that the court was reviewing. Like the ruling itself, Justice Roggensack’s participation in judging her own conduct showed astounding disregard for legal ethics and every litigant’s right to impartial justice. The problems don’t even stop there. A year ago, by another 4-to-3 vote along ideological lines, the court weakened the recusal standard by adopting a rule saying that campaign fund-raising or expenditures can never be the sole basis for a judge’s disqualification. The rule was largely written by a business group that has spent lavishly in judicial campaigns.

Members of Wisconsin’s top court need to focus on restoring civility and public trust. For starters, they should scrap last year’s decision on campaign money in favor of strict disclosure requirements for lawyers and litigants. They should also adopt an appeals process for recusals, so the final decision is no longer left to the judge whose impartiality is being questioned. The court’s credibility, and justice in Wisconsin, are on the line.

In the Michigan, the higher court rules allows the court to "entertain a case".  This means that not all cases are guaranteed to be given the light if day, particularly when these judges sit on the boards of the defendant parties and get kiddy kickbacks.