Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was asked during yesterday’s portion of her confirmation hearings about the big Don Blankenship-Brent Benjamin case, which resulted in a decision by the high court last month that Benjamin should have recused himself from the matter. A rehearing in the case is scheduled for early September.

Here’s the exchange between Judge Sotomayor and Sen. Russell Feingold (courtesy of The Washington Post):

Feingold: I’d like to start by talking for a moment about the recent Supreme Court decision in Caperton versus Massey. I consider this a significant case that bears upon the flood of special interest money that threatens to undermine public confidence in our justice system.

The facts of this case are notorious. John Grisham used them as an inspiration for his novel “The Appeal.” A jury in West Virginia returned a $50 million verdict for a large coal company. And pending the appeal, the company’s CEO spent $3 million to elect an attorney named Brent Benjamin to the state supreme court.

That was a huge amount of money, relatively speaking, more than the amounts spent by all of Benjamin’s other financial supporters combined. Benjamin won the election, because a West Virginia Supreme Court justice, and lo and behold, he voted to overturn that $50 million verdict against his main campaign contributor.

Twice he refused to recuse himself in the case despite his obvious conflict of interest. And last month the Supreme Court held that Benjamin’s failure to recuse himself was intolerable under our Constitution’s guarantee of due process of law.

The court also noted approvingly that most states have adopted codes of judicial conduct that prevent this kind of conflict. And to that end, I commend the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s plan to revise its recusal rules to provide additional safeguards that protect judicial impartiality.

You’ve been a judge for many years and you many have seen examples when you thought a judge should have withdrawn, although hopefully none were as egregious as this case.

In your opinion, what additional steps should judges and legislators take to ensure that the judiciary is held to the highest ethical standards and that litigants can be confident that their cases will be handled impartially?

SOTOMAYOR: Senator, I would find it inappropriate to make suggestions to Congress about what standards it should hold judges to or litigants. That’s a policy choice that Congress will consider.

I note that the American Bar Association has a code of conduct that applies to litigants. The judicial code has a code of conduct for judges. And as you noted in the state system where judges are elected, many states are doing what I just spoke about, making — passing regulations.

Caperton was a case that was taken under the local rules of the Supreme Court presumably that exercises supervisory powers over the functions of the courts. And it presented obviously a significant issue because the court took it and decided the case.

At issue fundamentally is that judges, lawyers, all professionals must on their own abide by the highest standards of conduct. And I have given a speech on this topic to students at Yale at one point where I said, the law is only the minimum one must do, personally one must act in a way in cases to ensure that you’re acting consistent with your sense of meeting the highest standards of the profession.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Legal actions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.