Lloyd A. Karmeier
SPRINGFIELD — The nation’s top court has ruled in a case that may help decide the fate of a multi-billion dollar appeal from Illinois.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a former Pennsylvania high court judge violated Due Process rights when he didn’t recuse himself from a death-penalty appeal in which he’d earlier been a prosecutor. The judge also highlighted his support for capital punishment during his high court campaign.
And plaintiffs in the Illinois case, a $10.1 billion lawsuit against tobacco giant Philip Morris, drew parallels between those comments and ones made by Justice Lloyd A. Karmeier of the Illinois Supreme Court during his re-election campaign two years ago. They claimed he showed bias toward their cause and declined to recuse himself from the case before ultimately ruling against them.
“The [c]ourt’s ruling in Williams is likely to clarify the general Due Process standard for recusal and provide guidance on the relevance of statements suggestive of bias made in the context of an election campaign,” plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote in their initial plea to the nation’s high court.
But lawyers for the company argued that case bears little resemblance to theirs. And the 5-3 majority decision from the nation’s top justices this morning indicated it will not have far-reaching consequences for recusal standards.
The justices hewed closely to the facts of the Williams case, quoting a maxim that “no man can be a judge in his own case” and making observations specific to the criminal trial context. The majority held that “[w]here a judge has had an earlier significant, personal involvement as a prosecutor in a critical decision in the defendant’s case, the risk of actual bias in the judicial proceeding rises to an unconstitutional level.”
Citing the Pennsylvania Code of Judicial Conduct, which disqualifies judges from proceedings in which they served as a lawyer for one side or another, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote that “[t]he fact that most jurisdictions have these rules in place suggests that today’s decision will not occasion a significant change in recusal practice.”
Kennedy was joined by the court’s four liberal justices in the decision, which mentioned the Pennsylvania judge’s campaign comments as a way to rebut the state’s argument that he did not actually play a significant role in seeking the death penalty because he merely signed off on a one-and-a-half page memo approving it.
Multiple news outlets in 1993 reported on his comments emphasizing that he “sent 45 people to death rows” as a district attorney, and those comments “indicate that, in his own view, he played a meaningful role in those sentencing decisions and considered his involvement to be an important duty of his office,” the high court majority wrote.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Illinois case, who stood to make about $1.77 billion in the litigation, seized on news reports during and just after Karmeier’s narrow retention race in 2014 that quoted him as saying that large lawyers’ fees were “distorting the system.”
One story paraphrased him as saying that the plaintiffs’ lawyers, who spent millions trying to defeat him, “stood to gain financially if he were ousted from the bench” and another quoted him as implying his victory could be “a signal that people should not try to manipulate the system for their own financial gain.”
Michele L. Odorizzi, of Mayer, Brown LLP and one of the attorneys for Philip Morris, could not be reached for comment. But in briefs that aimed to dissuade the high court from taking the case, the company wrote the Williams case has no relevance here.
“The issue in Williams is not whether (the judge) should have recused himself because of ‘pejorative’ statements he made about the defendant. Rather, it is whether his contact with the case as [d]istrict [a]ttorney disqualified him,” the company lawyers wrote. “There is nothing like that here: Justice Karmeier was not sitting on a case in which he had previously served as a prosecutor. Nor did any of his public statements suggest that he had any rooting interest in the outcome of (the tobacco case).”
Stephen M. Tillery of Korein, Tillery in St. Louis and one of the lawyers who signed off on the plaintiffs’ certiorari petition could not be reached for comment. Lawyers from that firm gave $1.2 million to unseat Karmeier in 2014, according to the Illinois State Board of Elections.
But in a reply to Philip Morris’ arguments this year before the high court, the plaintiffs wrote that the company “completely glosses over the direct parallel between Williams and Justice Karmeier’s statements: both involved election campaign speeches, both expressed an attitude toward one side on an issue implicated in litigation, and both expressed a view that one side of a specific pending case should lose.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has not yet acted on the Illinois case, Sharon Price et al. v. Philip Morris, No. 15-947.
The case has been winding through Illinois courts for more than a decade and a half. A trial judge originally awarded the plaintiffs, a class of more than 1 million people who argued they were duped into buying the company’s “light” and “low-tar” cigarettes, more than $10 billion in damages.
The Illinois Supreme Court reversed the award in 2005, with Karmeier writing that the plaintiffs did not prove they were harmed. The case got new life a few years later and ultimately made it back to the state’s top court last year, with a majority ruling the plaintiffs followed the wrong procedure to resuscitate it. The justices declined to hear it again earlier this year.