Moyer to seek new ethics policy

Ohio Supreme Court

COLUMBUS (AP) — Ohio’s chief justice will call for new policy at the state’s highest court after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that elected judges must not participate in cases that involve large contributors to their election campaigns.

The ruling gives Ohio Chief Justice Thomas Moyer an opportunity to seek a state policy that would allow parties to request a justice be removed from a case if there’s an appearance of bias based on campaign donations.

“This clearly offers an opportunity to reinvigorate the discussion of judicial reform in Ohio,” court spokesman Chris Davey said on Moyer’s behalf.

Moyer plans to address the issue with his fellow state Supreme Court justices, Davey said. He also plans to hold a conference later this year to discuss judicial policies

Though parties to cases can petition to have Ohio trial and appellate judges removed from cases, no such process is in place at the state Supreme Court level, Davey said. Individual justices decide themselves whether they should take part.

Conduct codes already tell Ohio judges that they must disqualify themselves from cases in which their impartiality may be reasonably questioned, said 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals Judge Colleen Conway Cooney,

“Judges are always under this ethical rule whether someone brings it to their attention or not,” said Cooney, who co-chairs the Ethics and Professionalism Committee of the Ohio Judicial Conference.

However, judges are put in a tough spot at election time because it is so expensive to get out a campaign message, she said.

Since 2000, the seven justices now on the all-Republican Ohio Supreme Court have raised from about $80,000 by Justice Paul Pfeifer for the 2004 election to about $1.9 million by Justice Evelyn Stratton for the 2002 election, according to an analysis by the public watchdog group Ohio Citizen Action. The top industries from which donations came were insurance, the legal profession, health and manufacturing.

A 2006 New York Times report showed that, over 12 years, justices on the Ohio Supreme Court rarely removed themselves from cases involving their campaign contributors and on average decided in their favor 70 percent of the time.

Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling will allow Ohio lawyers to take a look at contributions given by groups, such as insurance companies or unregulated political groups, and raise questions, said Gary Leppla, president of the Ohio State Bar Association.

“Lawyers will take this and look at it hard and see if they can apply it to another set of facts,” he said. “At least now there’s language out there that allows a party, through their lawyer, to raise the issue.”

Catherine Turcer, who directs Ohio Citizen Action’s Money in Politics Project, called on Moyer Wednesday to create a study committee to examine the influence of issue advertising on judicial elections in Ohio.

For example, the Partnership for Ohio’s Future, an affiliate of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, spent nearly $1.3 million on ads supporting two Supreme Court justices in 2006, Turcer said. In 2008, a Chamber affiliate spent just less than $1 million.

She said Ohio has aired more ads in state Supreme Court races since 2000 than any other state.

“It really highlights all the money that swirls around these judicial campaigns,” she said.