Ziegler Corruption Gets National Spotlight

James Sample, counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, is introducing the nation to the ethics of the Wisconsin judiciary.

And it's not pretty.

Sample's Can $2 Million For A Judge Buy A $350 Million Tax Refund? in the Huffington Post rips Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler's corruption and the system allowing her to continue in her position.

Sample sees the Ziegler affair as emblematic of a national trend as state judicial systems become corrupt political machines.

Writes Sample:

In short, the influence of big money in our nation's state courts is nearing the point where, well, "you're going to want to tell your great grandkids about what happened to the rule of law in America back in the day."

While the outside threats to judicial independence are serious and metastasizing, the unfortunate -- and for many, uncomfortable -- fact is that the de-legitimizing of America's courts is at least partly an inside job.

When judges fail to police themselves, and when the judiciary fails to adequately police the judges who fail to police themselves, we all lose. For the most recent case in point, we turn to a blizzard of news amidst last week's blizzards in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin serves as the latest reminder that bias and/or the appearance of bias is not limited to duck-hunting. Sometimes, as in the case of now-Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, Annette Ziegler, it involves ruling on cases involving a bank that your husband helps to run, or ruling on cases involving a company in which you own $50,0000 in stock, or, one week ago, sitting on a case involving an organization that spent $2 million -- more than the total expenditures of your entire campaign -- to help get you elected. The last of these instances led to a flurry of editorials in Wisconsin urging her to step down from the case, and even from the bench.

Justice Ziegler is merely one acute illustration of an increasingly chronic problem. Indeed, for the last few years, now-Illinois Supreme Court Justice Lloyd Karmeier was Exhibit A for the failure of the rules of self-policed judicial disqualification to keep pace with a rising tide of money in judicial elections. Alas, it appears that his judicial colleague to the north, Justice Ziegler, is on pace to give him a run for the, um, money.

In almost every state in the country, including Wisconsin, the general standard on recusal closely mirrors that of the American Bar Association -- namely that a "judge shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge's impartiality might reasonably be questioned."For political candidates, money is oxygen. And in a $5 million race, $2 million buys a lot of breathing.

As detailed in the press stories, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce spent more than $2 million last spring supporting Justice Ziegler. Now, it has filed a brief and helped to finance the appeal of a case that could trigger an estimated $350 million in tax refunds to businesses. Justice Ziegler has declined to recuse herself. So let's take those words for a test drive: might it be reasonable to question Justice Ziegler's impartiality under the circumstances?

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