The Curious Case of the $32,000 Couch
2018-09-02 · Guest: Laurie Lin (Charleston Gazette-Mail columnist) · 52:09
Impeachment of the West Virginia Supreme Court
Bob Zadek and guest Laurie Lin discuss the bizarre scandal that led to the impeachment of nearly the entire West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. The conversation explores how personal animosity and extravagant office renovations—including a $32,000 couch—triggered a constitutional crisis in the state.
Topics: West Virginia Supreme Court, Allen Loughry, judicial impeachment, government spending, Steve Canterbury, judicial ethics Speakers: Bob Zadek (Host), Laurie Lin (Guest)
The Intersection of Interior Design and the Judiciary [00:00]
Bob Zadek: You’re listening to the Bob Zadek Show, a full hour of libertarian discussion with the smartest guest on radio. Live, spontaneous, and thoughtful. It’s the show of ideas, not attitude. And your calls are welcome at 424-BOB-SHOW. Now, your host, Bob Zadek.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thanks so much for listening to our show. We are always the show of ideas, never the show of attitude.
This morning, we dare to go where no other talk radio show has ever gone. We examine the often-ignored intersection between the judicial system and interior decorating. Can interior decoration bring down the entire judicial system of a state? To answer that intriguing question for this morning, I’m happy to welcome to the show, uh, Laurie Lin.
Laurie Lin is a columnist and editorial writer for the Daily Mail opinion page at West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette-Mail. Her opinion writing has been honored by the West Virginia Press Association. She’s a former corporate tax lawyer, and she’s co-founder and panelist for The Front Porch podcast, which is a, uh, PBS project in West Virginia. So this morning we examine the intersection between interior design and the judicial system, specifically the judicial system of West Virginia. And man, does Laurie have a story for you this morning? Laurie, welcome to the show this morning.
Laurie Lin: Good morning, Bob. Thanks for having me on.
Bob Zadek: Well, Laurie, um, West Virginia was, uh—is of course—has a, uh, judicial system. It has a court system, it has a state Supreme Court, and things were pretty quiet in the state Supreme Courts until around, what, 2013, 2014, and then things started to change. They changed slowly, but accelerated rapidly, so that right now one of the big discussions in West Virginia is who’s gonna get the screen rights and who’s gonna get to play the judges.
So tell us this story of what happened from a sort of basically unnoticed—except by the lawyers who practiced before them—state Supreme Court of West Virginia. What happened to get the attention of the national media, of pundits all over the place, of the West Virginia legislature, West Virginia citizens? What happened and how did all of this start? And by the way, to keep our audience—keep their eye on the ball—I will tell them in advance that Laurie’s story ends up, forgive the spoiler, with the almost entire West Virginia Supreme Court getting impeached. Yes, getting impeached. How could that happen? Laurie, what happened starting in around, uh, 2013 or so?
Laurie Lin: Sure. Well, I will try to, uh, give the story without, you know, drilling down too much into, uh—as you can imagine, there’s enough detail here to fill, you know, five hours. Um, but the way when I like to start the story is, uh, in 2012. So West Virginia Supreme Court judges, as all judges in West Virginia are, um, are elected by, uh, popular vote, and there are five seats on the court. Two of them were up for election that year in 2012. Um, and one of them was won by, uh, a justice who was already on the court. She was running for her second term, Robin Davis, who’s a Democrat. Um, her husband is one of the most—maybe the most, uh—wealthy and successful trial attorney, plaintiff attorney in the state. Um, and so she won re-election.
The other seat was a little bit of an upset. Most people thought that a Democrat was going to win that seat, but it was actually won by a, a young Republican by the name of Allen Loughry. When I say young, he was, I think, 42. He wasn’t, you know, too young to be a judge, but he was on the young side. And at the time that he won election, uh, Loughry was actually a law clerk on the court. He worked—already worked at the court for a different justice.
Bob Zadek: Tell us about the, uh, political orientation of West Virginia. Is it a, a Democratic state, a Republican state, a purple state? Tell us a little bit about the environment of West Virginia in which all of this is taking place.
Laurie Lin: Sure. So at the time that I start my story in 2012, it was still firmly a blue state, a Democratic state, and had been for 80 to 90 years. The legislature had been controlled by Democrats, both houses. West Virginia would occasionally elect Republican governors, but overall mostly Democrat governors. Of course, by now, today in 2018, that has completely shifted as far as the governorship and both houses of the legislature—all Republican—and the court has somewhat shifted.
West Virginia actually stopped partisan judicial elections in 2016. So technically, from then going forward, um, you don’t elect judges based on a party orientation. But we know the party orientation of the justices. But that was where it started. And again, uh, the new justice, the—and the justice who turned out to be the most controversial—Allen Loughry, was a Republican.
Bob Zadek: Okay, so Loughry goes—makes this huge, uh, promotion from clerking for a Supreme Court judge to being a Supreme Court judge. That’s quite the career trajectory, but he does it.
Laurie Lin: Exactly. And so I, I trace a lot of the conflict on the court—which is, I think, somewhat behind how this all transpired and how it came to light—trace it back to that time when he went from, you know, being fairly low on the totem pole at the court to being one of the five people in charge of not only the court but actually the entire judicial system of West Virginia. Because, of course, the court is kind of the bosses of, of the entire thing. All the state, uh, judges, um, you know, answer to them in the administrative sense.
Um, so, uh, we know now—it wasn’t obvious at the time, of course, but, uh—we know now that there was, uh, a bunch of interpersonal conflict between Justice Loughry and, uh, the guy who is the court administrator. His name is Steve Canterbury, and so his job was to run the administrative side of both the court and the West Virginia judicial branch. Um, it’s clear that he and Loughry did not like each other. They’d had some run-ins, you know, when Loughry was a clerk. And so if you kind of put yourself in the shoes of Loughry and of Canterbury, overnight the relationship reversed. So Loughry went from the underling to Canterbury’s boss, and all of a sudden Canterbury—is this guy that he had been in charge of and had not liked very much is suddenly his boss.
It’s pretty clear that Robin Davis, the other justice, the Democrat, was involved in that as well. She and Loughry appear to be not huge fans of each other, whether that was just a personality thing or if there was an—also an, you know, ideological component to that, sort of unclear. But we know now that they traded sort of snippy memos back and forth. Justice Davis questioned Justice Loughry’s use of court vehicles for travel and wrote, you know, a memo about it, and, and Loughry responded by writing a memo about Justice Davis’s hosting parties at her house that were paid for by the court. But anyway, there seemed to be a lot of tension simmering at the court. Of course, again, we don’t—we didn’t see that at the time, but we know it now.
The Firing of Steve Canterbury [04:30]
Bob Zadek: So what ultimately happened to—Laurie, Laurie, forgive me, but the Supreme Court has a pretty important job. Am I being overly harsh by saying this sounds a tad petty?
Laurie Lin: I think, I think that’s, you know, I think they say that about academia, right? The, the, the feelings are so high because the stakes are so low. Um, and so, yeah, I think maybe it’s, you know, you look at it and you say, “Didn’t you guys have some, some things to actually do, some work to get done?” Um, there seems to be an awful lot of worrying about, you know, how, how your offices are looking and, you know, who, who is making the decisions. Um, yeah, I know, I—it, it does look, it does look petty, um, looking from the outside.
And ultimately what seems to have sent this out into the public realm and turned it into a huge controversy is, uh, pettiness in the sense of Allen Loughry became the Chief Justice in 2016, and a new justice was elected, uh, Justice Beth Walker, who is a Republican. Loughry apparently seems to have convinced, uh, Justice Walker and another one of the Democrat justices to fire Steve Canterbury, the court administrator. And so in early 2017, Steve Canterbury gets called into a meeting and is told, you know, “You’re fired, clean out your desk.”
And, uh, there’s some allegation that Canterbury said to Loughry, “I’m gonna destroy you, you’re gonna pay for this,” although he denies that. But what we do know, what he definitely did, is he went to the press. Um, and so the reason that we know all this—that we know about the spending and the interior design—is that Steve Canterbury, in anger at being fired, uh, went and talked to the press. And so that is how we kind of got where we are today with all of this, uh, coming out. Steve Canterbury is the source, and he, he completely acknowledges that. It’s no secret.
Bob Zadek: And what did he tell the press? What got the press’s attention?
Laurie Lin: So, what got people’s attention is, in a nutshell, lavish spending on office renovations.
The $32,000 Blue Suede Couch [12:38]
Laurie Lin: That’s really what’s captured the attention of the court. Um, so I think what you would say is that a culture seems to have developed at the court where justices had very free reign to thoroughly renovate their offices and personalize things exactly to their individual tastes, down to things like flooring, built-in cabinetry, lighting, everything. The whole thing. And so what came out was the cost of these things. Uh, Justice Davis’s was the most expensive, and it was over half a million dollars. And then it included things like $58,000 in glass countertops, $24,000 of marble baseboards. And then for Justice Loughry, his was the second most expensive, a little bit more than $300,000. His office included the infamous $32,000 blue suede couch that you may have heard of. That’s kind of the emblem of this controversy. You can Google it, and it looks like something you just buy at Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel, but somehow it costs $32,000. So this, as you can imagine, uh, took hold of the public. People—everybody buys couches, you know, people understand how much a couch is supposed to cost. And when you hear that $32,000 of taxpayer money has gone to buy a couch, uh, it really captures people’s attention and it certainly did in West Virginia.
Judicial Budgetary Independence in West Virginia [14:25]
Bob Zadek: And we should mention that um, there was a somewhat unusual uh, reg—uh, rule governing how much the Supreme Court can spend because normally government uh, the departments can only spend what funds have been appropriated. But tell us about the somewhat unusual provision in West Virginia that invited this somewhat lavish spending.
Laurie Lin: Yeah, that’s actually really important. And so I—some people say that West Virginia is unique in this. I’m not sure if it is totally unique, but in West Virginia the judiciary has complete control over its budget and not just control over how to spend it, but control over how much it is. So the judiciary, the state supreme court, goes to the legislature every year and says, “We will be spending this much money,” and it’s not—they’re not asking, they’re telling. And the reason for that, the reason that is cited uh, by the judges in defending this system is, you know, first it’s in the constitution, but their defense of it is, “Well, we need to be completely independent because if the legislature controls our budget at all, they could reduce it uh, as a, you know, retaliation if they don’t like our decisions.” So that’s the theory behind it. Uh, but it’s also why they, you know, in part why they were able to do this because they do have complete control and oversight of their budget. Now that will almost certainly change after this November. They um, on the ballot, there will be a constitutional amendment, as you can imagine, uh, sparked by this controversy uh, that will give the legislature control, partial control over the budget, uh, as is the case in most states and is—is the case in—at the federal level. Uh, the U.S. Supreme Court actually goes to Congress each year and requests a budget. Congress, of course, usually approves it. Um, so West Virginia will actually come into line with most of the states and the federal government in that respect.
Bob Zadek: So what the justices did in their lavish spending—and we’ll come back to this later on—but what they did was a tad, to say the least, insensitive and politically unwise, but not per se illegal.
Laurie Lin: Exactly. It is—it is—it is not illegal, not illegal uh, under federal law or under state law. And so that gets us a little bit into a question of impeachment, of course. Um, you know, we always have the back and forth when we talk about impeachment. What is an impeachable offense? Um, in West Virginia, the West Virginia Constitution uh, specifies impeachment for, quote, “maladministration, corruption, incompetency, gross immorality, neglect of duty, or any high crime or misdemeanor.” Um, so that’s a little bit broader than our U.S. Constitution.
Bob Zadek: That’s nice and specific, isn’t it? Oh my God.
Laurie Lin: Um, yeah. So you have to sort of think about, you know, is this maladministration? Is it corruption? Which category does it fit in? Does it actually fit in any of those categories?
The Impeachment and Indictment of Allen Loughry [17:10]
Bob Zadek: So now we had to get back to the story. We have the judges um, have a feeding frenzy, if you will, a decorating frenzy. They spend up the yin-yang. Um, Steve Canterbury, who is fired and doesn’t take it lightly, goes to the press and starts telling the press about the lavish spending, which remember is not illegal, but it’s not a great idea. And the press and the public capture it. And now so what happens to the story from here? Now the press is all up in arms. They um, they’re pounding on their keyboards and what’s going on um, politically and in the public sphere when all of this comes out?
Laurie Lin: So it simmers on for several months. Uh, Loughry defended himself initially by saying—well, I—so what came out first was Loughry’s spending because that was what Steve Canterbury wanted to come out uh, because he didn’t like Justice Loughry. And so Loughry defended himself by saying, “I didn’t know how much any of this cost, none of this is my idea. Uh, I just let Mr. Canterbury handle all of it. I didn’t know what the totals were. This is not my fault. I should have been, you know, I’m—I’m astonished and enraged that so much money was spent myself because I didn’t know about it.” The problem with that was, you know, if you look at the actual—the—the things that were purchased, one of them, for example, includes a floor medallion set into the floor of Justice Loughry’s office with each West Virginia county made out of a different exotic wood and Loughry’s home county made out of blue granite. And it’s, you know, it’s hard to imagine that Loughry didn’t order that, wasn’t interested in that, that it was somehow foisted on him. It just—it didn’t really seem credible. And ultimately, Canterbury produced some kind of documentary evidence. There was a drawing that Justice Loughry had made of how he wanted his office to look; there were emails. It just wasn’t—you know, maybe he didn’t know the exact figure of how much things cost, but it’s pretty clear that he—what—what was done was done at his direction. Um, and so this kind of dribbled out over several months and that—the other justices’ spending came to light. Eventually what triggered the impeachment proceedings was that the feds got involved. Um, Justice Loughry was indicted in June by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia. Now he wasn’t indicted for the actual spending because as we just said, that’s not illegal, right? So he was indicted for um, wire fraud, which is basically using a state gas card to make purchases for personal trips. Also for lying, allegedly, about uh, about these things when the f—when the feds asked him about some of them, he is alleged to have lied. And then there’s another charge relating to witness tampering, which we’re not totally sure the details of that, but he’s alleged to have somehow tampered with the—the testimony or potential testimony of an employee at the court. And so he was indicted in June. And once he was indicted, that was—of course the legislature had talked about impeaching him, and there’d be—been a lot of back and forth, but that was kind of the spark. So let’s start impeachment proceedings. And as—as we can talk about, once they got started, uh, the—the ball got rolling. Ultimately, all of them were impeached.
Bob Zadek: Now I’d like to, Laurie, I’d like to—uh, there’s a bizarre sideline in this. We’re talking about Allen Loughry, who was a clerk, get elected to the state Supreme Court as the chief judge, fires the administrator, and now he’s been in—in the thick of it on all kinds of charges. But Loughry had another career of sorts. He was an author. And before we go to break, tell us in a few seconds about Loughry’s um, uh, venture into writing. What did he write and when did he write it, to borrow a phrase?
Laurie Lin: Uh, so w—uh, when he was a clerk, he uh, published a book, kind of self-published it, I believe, that was—that came out of his uh, judicial or his doctoral thesis. He has a doctorate in law. And the title of the book is Don’t Buy Another Vote, I Won’t Pay for a Landslide: The Sordid and Continuing History of Political Corruption in West Virginia. So this book purports to be, and really is, frankly, uh, you know, the—the definitive history of political corruption in West Virginia. And uh, I have a copy myself. They’re selling for about $400 on Amazon. Uh, so yes, he does have quite the background in corruption, and he’s now written, you know, his own chapter.
Bob Zadek: And I should mention as a sidelight, uh, uh, uh, former senator, the late John McCain, um, had written—was a contributor of that book, as was former s—Senator Robert Byrd, the—one of the lions of the Senate when he was alive. So here we have Loughry now indicted on all kinds of really nasty charges, having spent uh, an arm and a leg on his furniture, just got elected to the state supreme court, and he is, among other things, an author.
Bob Zadek: And, Laurie, this book will be worth millions, since it is now out of print. It’s a very interesting sideline. So, we have now—we have Loughry, who is isolated and who has zeroed the focus of Canterbury and gotten the attention of the press, the public, and the legislature, but he’s not going to go down alone. And keep this in mind as we go to our very short one-minute break: Loughry, in the furniture part of it, did nothing wrong, nor did anybody else—any of the other justices.
This is Bob Zadek. I’m talking with Laurie Lin this morning. Laurie has written a wonderful story telling us about the impeachment of the entire West Virginia Supreme Court. Well, not quite. There were resignations. More about that when we come back from our one-minute break. Please stay tuned. There is so much more to come.
The Political History of Jim Justice [25:42]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. We’re speaking this morning with Laurie Lin. Laurie is a columnist and editorial writer for the Daily Mail opinion page at West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette-Mail. Laurie was a practicing attorney, and she has written a wonderful story about the impeachment or resignation of the entire West Virginia Supreme Court.
Laurie, before we pick up with our story, I can’t help myself. To give us more of an insight into West Virginia politics, and if only because of the name, you must tell us very briefly about the political history of the Governor of West Virginia, who plays somewhat of an important role in all of this. So, I don’t want to get too much into the weeds, but tell us a bit about the political history of your governor with the wonderful name of Jim Justice.
Laurie Lin: Sure, that is certainly a rich topic. So, Governor Justice, of course, would be appointing any justices who get impeached, at least for a period of time. He would get to choose their replacements until it would be time to elect them. And he is now a Republican. He was actually not elected as a Republican; he was elected in 2016 as a Democrat. He is the richest man in the state. He made his money in coal and agriculture. He now owns The Greenbrier hotel, which many people are familiar with as a big West Virginia symbol.
And so he was elected in 2016 as a Democrat. Almost immediately, that summer of 2017, he switched his party registration and became a Republican. Now, Republicans are a little bit wary of him. I think it’s fair to say he’s not terribly popular right now in either party. Democrats are furious with him and are very angry at the thought that he might be selecting, you know, ultimately maybe all of the Supreme Court for a time. And so they’ve thrown around words like “coup,” you know, over—you’re trying to overthrow the court. So definitely his controversial position is a minor part of this story.
Bob Zadek: West Virginia politics is so unusual. I just want to move to the state just so I can experience voting there for one or two elections just to be part of the fun. What an amazing state. But okay, we go back to my own observation. We go back to our story.
So now we have Loughry, who’s been indicted—who started, who got elected, who was a clerk, got elected as a justice of the Supreme Court, fires who used to be his boss, boss goes to the newspapers, blows the whistle on the $32,000 sofa. Loughry—the feds perk up. He was using cars for personal purposes—kind of minor offenses, but they were offenses nevertheless. And he gets in deep trouble, gets indicted by the feds. His career is on a downward spiral, and the legislature is looking towards impeachment of him. But what about—how do the other justices now get dragged into all of this?
The Impeachment Proceedings and Resignations [34:10]
Laurie Lin: So, impeachment hearings are scheduled in June. The day before impeachment hearings are to start, one of the other justices, Justice Menis Ketchum, a Democrat, resigned. And he later, a few weeks later, pled guilty to, I think, one or two charges of wire fraud for using a state car improperly and a state fuel card improperly. He was using state cars to commute to work and to go to some golf tournaments. What is not 100% known, but what is believed to be happening, is that Justice Ketchum is cooperating with the ongoing federal investigation. So maybe he’s going to be a witness against Loughry.
Bob Zadek: So he’s—he now flipped?
Laurie Lin: Well, we don’t know for sure. We know that he is cooperating with the federal investigation. Whether that’s against Loughry, whether it’s against one or more of the remaining three justices, we don’t know. But now Justice Ketchum is out of the picture. He did not get impeached because he resigned right before the impeachment proceedings started.
So the hearings went forward involving only the remaining four justices on the Supreme Court. And then, as you know, as you alluded to, all four of them ultimately were impeached, which is—I should point out, you know, just in case we’ve all forgotten our civics—impeachment doesn’t mean they’re removed; it’s only the first step of the process. It’s analogous to our, you know, U.S. Constitution: the lower body of the legislature impeaches, and that’s like being indicted, and then there’s a trial in the upper body of the legislature, which would be the West Virginia State Senate, and if they’re found guilty at the trial, then they’re removed from office.
Bob Zadek: Now, what did the other three judges—Loughry has been in the center of this discussion—what did they do wrong? Did they just also spend lavishly, which as we said was not even a crime? What did they do wrong that brought them into this mess?
Laurie Lin: Well, so there was, I think it’s fair to say, there was significant spending on offices by all of them. I already talked about Justice Davis. Her office was actually the most expensive. The other two, their offices were six-figure renovations, but below six figures, so like, you know, between a hundred and two hundred thousand. Justice Davis got impeached over her spending. The other two did not get impeached for their spending.
There was another a little bit of a side issue where four of the justices were alleged to have circumvented state law to pay senior status circuit judges—so trial judges—more than they were entitled to be paid. And that’s kind of a technical one. It’s pretty clear that they actually did it. So they did violate the law. Why they did it, I think, is a little bit more complicated and kind of exonerates them in my view, which is because they needed to pay these judges so they could have judges to actually run the court. And the legislature had passed this law that limited the pay, which may have not been really a well-thought-out law.
So anyway, long story short, three of the four justices did, including Loughry, get impeached on that count. Then there was one more count that’s kind of a catch-all “culture of the court” count, which basically says you guys had no policies to police each other. There were no policies regarding office spending, use of state vehicles. And so that was kind of the final catch-all category.
And one of the justices, Justice Walker, the other Republican, only got impeached on that count because she was so new to the court, she hadn’t been involved in the pay for the senior circuit judges. So in the end, that’s the only count that she faces. And then the third Democrat, Justice Workman, faces that count, and also the senior circuit judge pay.
Then I should mention, the day after this impeachment vote was held, Justice Davis, the one with the $500,000 office, resigned. So we now have two resignations. And she resigned, I think pretty clearly, because she did not want to go to trial and have her office spending put under a microscope, nor I think did the Senate Democrats want to have to try to defend her spending. So she resigned angrily the day after the impeachment.
Now only three justices are still in the court, technically, and all three justices have been impeached and are waiting for their Senate trials, which in theory would happen this fall in September or October.
Bob Zadek: And is it going to be televised nationally?
Laurie Lin: It will be—you will be able to stream it from the West Virginia Senate website.
Laurie Lin: …if you’re in West Virginia, you can certainly watch it on West Virginia Public Broadcasting. I don’t know. I imagine it could be picked up, um, nationally by, you know, something like C-SPAN or something like that. Uh, but yeah, you should be able to stream it on the, uh, West Virginia website.
Tim Armstead and the Court Vacancies [35:17]
Bob Zadek: There’s one other—there’s before we get into now the—the policy stuff, there’s one other character I want you to speak about briefly, and that’s Armstead. Um, he has an interesting, somewhat, uh, unimp—less important, but he is affected by this in very strange ways. Tell us who Armstead is and how he is—how he fits into all of this.
Laurie Lin: Sure. So Tim Armstead is, uh, the man who until recently was, uh, Speaker of the House—of the House of Delegates in West Virginia, the lower chamber. He’s a Republican, and he announced, uh, back in—I want to say 2017, before this even started—that he would not be running for reelection to the House because he was interested in running for the state supreme court. Uh, he’s a lawyer, and so, um, so he announced that, and obviously he’s been part of this impeachment process. He—he—he made an effort to stay in the background, but as a member of the House, he was, uh, i—ultimately required to vote on impeachment. So he voted on the impeachment; he voted to impeach. Um, the governor, uh, just this past week or maybe the week before, appointed, uh, Speaker Armstead to one of the vacant seats on the court that have, you know, been created by the—the two resignations. And so he is both a temporary justice on the court, um, as of mid-September—he’s not—he hasn’t been sworn in yet—but he’s both a justice and running for one of the seats, which are both up for election, uh, in November. So he’s no longer part of the House, but he has been part of the House. Now he’s part of the court and also running for—for a seat on the court.
Defining Corruption and Maladministration [38:50]
Bob Zadek: So—so tune in. This is a tune-in for the fall and see what happens. Now—now, Laurie, let’s get to the really cool stuff. First of all, most of the articles—and this has gotten, um, written about widely in the political press—uh, the word “corruption” appeared throughout. Almost every article, uh, uses the words “corruption” in reference to the judges. But there was—putting aside using the fuel card and putting aside using a car to drive to a golf tournament or whatever they did, a government car—putting aside those cheap shots, if you will, at least at the level of the state supreme court—putting all that aside, where was the corruption? Uh, the judges—and I ask our friends, uh, who are listening to the show—here you are, you get elected to a pretty gosh-darn important position. You get elected to the state supreme court and you’re feeling pretty important. You can’t help but feel important. You go there, you show up, and you’re told, “Okay, here’s your office, all this mahogany and all this beautiful wood. And by the way, you can decorate it and spend as much as you want. We have an unlimited budget. And everybody before you has spent unlimited amounts of money. So have at it.” And you say, “That’s pretty cool. I’m in.” And you go ahead and do it. And as a result of doing what everybody before you—what every judge before you has done—you find yourself—in the case of Loughry—you found yourself indicted and you’re going to go to jail for like 400 years. That’s the accumul—that’s what he could be sentenced for. You lose your bar license, you get impeached, and you’re shell-shocked. What in God’s name did I do? I just did what everybody else did. Is that being too charitable with these justices?
Laurie Lin: Well, I think it’s a really good point because if you look at what, you know, the job of a judge is in the most basic sense, um, i—you know, is to hear cases, depending on what, you know, level they’re hearing them, and hopefully administer justice. And I don’t think any—any person who’s been before this court can say, “I didn’t receive justice because Justice Davis spent sixty thousand dollars on a glass countertops,” right? The two things are pretty separate. So nothing that they’ve actually done as judges, uh, has come into play here. They’re not accused of any, uh, you know, bribery, fraud, making sloppy decisions, nothing like that, uh, in the impeachment. So I do think it’s fair to say, yeah, this is—this is a little bit unusual in that sense. They’re not being impeached for what you would normally think a judge would be impeached for. But having said that, maladministration is one of the offenses in the West Virginia Supreme Court that are impeachable. And I think it’s fair to say that when you have a small state, a fairly poor state, a state that has had big budget troubles that has had to cut back in a lot of ways—uh, you know, West Virginia’s been hard hit by the changing energy economy and their dependence on coal—um, certainly in recent years, a lot of state agencies have had big cuts. And particularly in that environment, when you have people spending this much on, uh, things that are essentially for their own use—you know, I cannot just wander into Justice Loughry’s office and sit on his couch. That is really only his couch—his couch and his, you know, people who work for him. It’s not a public expenditure. When they’re spending that much money, I do think it—it—it arguably falls into the category of maladministration, which is impeachable.
Bob Zadek: Now, you asked—the job description of the Supreme Court justice is to be a good judge. While it’s impossible to make this kind of, uh, calculation in a—in a precise way, but there isn’t—I don’t see there’s any real suggestion that these judges individually or as a group were, as a group, bad at their job or worse than justices who buy their furniture at IKEA. There’s no suggestion that the core mission of the core job was done any worse. So they were gluttonous in their spending and they had, uh, a tin ear when it comes to the political implications of it and—and appearances, but in the job, isn’t it fair to say that spending and the being a good justice are totally unrelated? It’s like being short and being a good justice. They just have nothing to do with each other.
Laurie Lin: I—I think you could certainly make that argument and certainly for those of us who would like the court to turn in maybe a little bit more conservative judicial direction, um, Justice Loughry was a hero. Uh, you know, he was elected as a Republican on a court that had not seen very many Republicans elected. He wrote opinions that were pretty good, pretty careful. You know, I could certainly quarrel with some of them, but he was not—you know, he obviously was taking the job very seriously, as I think were all of the justices. Um, it is—it is a shame certainly for those of us who followed his career and thought he had a lot of—you know, he was talked about as a possible, uh, you know, federal court appointment one day. Um, and so yeah, I—I do—I—I do think it is striking. Uh, but you know what? I looked up the corruption—the definition of corruption the other day, and there is the—the kind of lying, bribery definition, but there’s also, in a non-political sense, corruption means to be changed in a bad way. And I think what some people would say is that Justice Loughry was corrupted in the sense of being changed by being elected to the court, and maybe it went to his head and that—that’s what led to his downfall.
The Debate Over Judicial Elections [42:15]
Bob Zadek: But what you say—the way he was corrupted was his personality, not his skill as a—as a justice. Now, uh, another—another issue that is brought to my—our listeners out there, and it is—have not been, but we haven’t resolved it as a country really, if it can be resolved, and that is your Supreme Court justices are elected. Um, and there is a discussion, uh, an important discussion whether judges in general should be elected or appointed. Um, most—many lawyers observe that the best way to get good judges is to have an independent judge selection committee, a bar association or some group of disinterested, um, observers of the judicial system, and they submit a list to the governor and the governor picks from that list but must pick from the list. I’ve always felt that the election of judges is a rather bizarre way. It’s like—it’s like electing people to play professional football. How can you elect people? It requires, um—you have to know all about the activity to decide who’s going to be best at it. So does—is there any lesson, because you—you are a political observer, you’re a—a journalist and you are, uh, were and perhaps still are a practicing attorney—the—is there anything that this experience in West Virginia tells you about the issue of election or some other selection mechanism for judges?
Laurie Lin: Yeah, it—that is a really important question. And I think it—it comes down to what you want to maximize. And to me the two competing values are independence, as you say, and democratic accountability, right?
Judicial Independence and the West Virginia Impeachments [46:53]
Laurie Lin: So you want—you—we live in a democracy and you want, uh, the people kind of in charge of you to be accountable to you in some sense, but our judiciary is counter-majoritarian in the sense that we want them to be able to make decisions—like, for example, to strike down a law that infringes on free speech, even though it might be a popular law, or to, uh, protect, uh, you know, criminal due process, even though it may be clear that someone is guilty, and—but yet, you know, the search warrant was illegally executed. Um, and so you want to make sure that you, you know, make a decision that preserves due process, uh, so innocent people aren’t convicted.
And so to me, I come down more on the side of: we want judges to be independent. Now, of course, in, in the federal system, Article III judges are appointed and they are lifetime appointments, and so, uh, democracy only enters into it in the sense that we elect the people who appoint them and confirm them, and we also elect the people who could potentially impeach them. Impeachment is the, the check on, uh, the judges, and you know, it has been used on Article III judges. I think only one U.S. Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached, and he ultimately wasn’t removed.
But, um, you know, uh, in West Virginia, even though they are elected judges, they are being potentially removed, not by direct democracy—they’re not being voted out of office right now. Uh, they are being impeached, which is, uh, the less democratic way of removing them. So, yeah, I, I do think it is really, uh, interesting to look at, at election versus appointment. And right now it’s, it’s about half and half. I think about half the states elect their, uh, the highest court and about half appoint them, either, either through the legislature or the governor.
Bob Zadek: Now we have only a couple of minutes. The, uh, two questions, Laurie, if we have time. Number one: uh, in the whole process, um, whether or not the judges get impeached or rather convicted, uh, and they’re thrown out of office in the upper house or not, um, has West Virginia been well served in this entire process or has the process let down the citizens of West Virginia?
Laurie Lin: That’s really, uh—yeah, that’s kind of the basic question here and it’s, it’s a little bit hard for me to answer. I think you could say, well, this has been a sideshow; uh, it’s brought the state negative attention. If we were going to impeach, we should only impeach Justice Loughry, who is, you know, pretty clearly the most, uh, culpable here. But on the other hand, I do think it’s valuable, uh, that the spending and the general culture of the court was brought to light, and I think we are going to see some positive changes.
For example, the constitutional amendment I alluded to, uh, I think is, is on balance a good idea, uh, to, to have the judicial system answer to another entity in their spending. Um, and certainly, look, no one is going to spend five hundred thousand dollars renovating their office in the state, which—you know, going forward—which may be a small—you know, five hundred thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket even in a state as small as West Virginia. Um, but y—you know, it—you need to have people accountable and people need to feel like the government is spending their money efficiently. And, uh, I think people will have a sense that at least—sorry, the only real winner, I think the only real winner in this is IKEA. Um, they’re gonna—they’re gonna make winner at all events.
Bob Zadek: Um, Laurie, thank you so much for sharing this wonderful story of down-and-dirty politics and the judicial system in West Virginia. Uh, Laurie, we appreciate you very much giving us an hour of your, of your time on this Sunday morning. Uh, as John Philip Sousa starts playing in the background, I want to thank Laurie so much for joining us and to all my friends out there for spending an hour with us. This is Bob Zadek. I’ll be back again next Sunday for another one hour of “ideas, not attitude.” Please stay tuned and I’ll speak to you next week. Laurie, thanks so much.
Laurie Lin: Thanks, Bob. A pleasure.