Rule frees state judges to decide cases involving campaign backers

According to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, the Wisconsin Supreme Court voted 4-3 to give final approval to an amendment to the state judicial ethics code recommended by two powerful lobbying groups allowing judges to hear and decide cases involving their biggest campaign supporters.  For more on the court’s action, go here.                  

As noted in a commentary posted this morning on WDC’s Big Money Blog, the new rule is at odds with a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year in a West Virginia case that a judge’s participation in a case involving major contributors to the judge’s election runs afoul of constitutional protections of the right to due process.

The blog post also focuses on the state Supreme Court’s inability to decide what to do about judicial misconduct charges against Justice Michael Gableman.

Justices Patience Roggensack, David Prosser and Annette Ziegler blocked disciplinary action against Gableman after he ran an advertisement claiming Louis Butler “found a loophole” and implied a child molester got off on a technicality of Butler’s making and “went on to molest another child.”  While the ad was shown to be a lie, the three justices stated it was simply “distasteful.”

“The justices don’t have a leg to stand on between the three of them on the truthfulness of the ad,” wrote Mike McCabe, Executive Director of the WDC. “It was way beyond distasteful. It was a lie.  Invoking free speech was a far more clever maneuver. It made letting Gableman off appear somehow principled.”