2 SC judges had financial conflicts of interest in rulings exposed by national report
Two federal judges in South Carolina broke the law when they oversaw court cases in which they had a financial interest, an investigation by the Wall Street Journal has found.
The findings, published Wednesday on the front page of the national newspaper, revealed troublesome practices within America’s federal court system, where judges are supposed to deliver fair, impartial justice.
According to the newspaper’s investigation, some 131 federal judges failed to recuse themselves from cases in which they or their families owned stock — a conflict of interest that puts judges at odds with federal law and judicial ethics.
The report further discovered federal judges nationwide failed to disqualify themselves from some 685 court cases from 2010-2018.
The reporting from the Wall Street Journal is based on financial disclosure forms that are filed each year by roughly 700 federal judges. The newspaper’s reporters then cross-referenced those holdings to “tens of thousands of court dockets in civil cases” to identify the conflicts of interest.
In the Palmetto State, the newspaper discovered conflicts of interest for two federal judges.
District Judge David Norton, based in Charleston, had the most conflicts identified in South Carolina, with nine. He was nominated to the bench in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush.
Norton was also the judge who in 2017 sentenced former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager to 20 years in prison for the second-degree murder of Walter Scott, whose 2015 death was captured on a bystander’s cellphone video that wound up disproving the initial police narrative.
Judge Mary Lewis Geiger, of Columbia, had five conflicts of interest. She was nominated to her seat by President Barack Obama in 2011 and confirmed to the post in 2012.
In the relevant court cases, Geiger had clerks file notices stating that their stock ownership did not affect or impact her decisions.
While nothing prohibits judges from holding individual stocks, a 1974 federal law says that judges must recuse themselves from hearing a case in which they, their spouses or their minor children have a financial interest in a case or “ownership of a legal or equitable interest, however small.”
The Journal’s investigation, however, showed a troubling pattern of federal judges disregarding that law and judicial ethics.
The newspaper dedicated the final 19 paragraphs of its expansive national investigation to outlining the conflicts of interest that surround Norton in South Carolina.
Norton, in an emailed statement to the Wall Street Journal, said he inadvertently presided over two cases involving Walmart Inc. and a separate case involving aerospace giant Boeing.
However, Norton disputed that his stock holdings in General Electric Co. and 3M Co. required him to recuse himself from six lawsuits he oversaw related to asbestos exposure.
Norton’s financial disclosures showed he held between $95,004 and $250,000 in stock in GE and 3M, a pair of companies that were two defendants in the asbestos suits Norton heard. In a statement, he told The Journal that the companies were “defendants in name only.”
At the time, Norton’s failure to recuse himself did not draw ire from Peter Kraus, the attorney who represented James Chesher in one of those asbestos suits.
In 2015, Cheser and his wife alleged that he had developed cancer from exposure to asbestos while he served in the Navy. Cheser and his wife sought damages from GE and 3M, along with some two dozen other companies.
The newspaper found the Cheser family reached settlements with 3M and GE in 2016. Cheser died in 2017.
After learning from the Wall Street Journal that Norton had a financial interest in the case, Cheser’s widow said the South Carolina judge “should have policed himself.”
“You have to wonder if he’s looking out for himself...rather than the clients,” Cheryl Ann Chesher told the newspaper.
The newspaper also noted a previously reported ethics violation by Norton from 2007, when he purchased a box of cuff links for $700 at a government auction that belonged to a man Norton had sent to prison for a Ponzi scheme.
In 2016, nine years after the purchase, the man Norton sentenced learned the judge had bought the cuff links. He subsequently filed a complaint with the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, alleging judicial misconduct.
“The judge’s purchase did create an appearance of impropriety,” but did not affect the sentence Norton imposed, Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote in 2017.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts told the Wall Street Journal that its findings about conflicts of interest in the federal judiciary were “troubling” and said that the office “is carefully reviewing the matter.”
But in a statement released Tuesday to other national media outlets after the online publication of the story, the office noted that the cases cited in the investigation represent “less than three one-hundredths of 1 percent of the 2.5 million civil cases filed over the period, and reflects inadvertent mistakes, flaws in software, and simple human error.”
The office confirmed it is looking for ways to further safeguard the court against conflicts of interest moving forward.
This story was originally published September 29, 2021 at 1:04 PM.
