Beth Walker Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Justice Hutchison Announces Retirement At End Of Term

West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals Justice John Hutchison announced Thursday that he will not be running for re-election at the end of his term in 2024.

Story updated on June 1, 2023 at 2:58 p.m.

West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals Justice John Hutchison announced Thursday that he will not be running for re-election at the end of his term in 2024.

He noted in his letter to Chief Justice Beth Walker that he was making the announcement now so anyone who is interested in running for his seat on the high court will be able to plan accordingly.

“It’s a huge election year. You have to organize and be able to raise money, and that atmosphere is critical,” Hutchison said. “You’ve got to get out there, meet the public. Get your message out, let people know you’re running. It’s only fair that knowing that I’m not going to do it. Obviously, I am aware of the Court’s desire to undertake a strategic planning process and you need to know who will be on the Court in the long-term,”

He said, “absent some unforeseen catastrophe” that he will complete his term on Dec. 31, 2024.

Hutchison was appointed to the Supreme Court in December 2018 by Gov. Jim Justice and elected on June 9, 2020, to a term ending Dec. 31, 2024.

Hutchison filled the seat of convicted former Justice Allen Loughry. Loughry resigned from the court about a month after a federal jury convicted him on 11 charges. He was suspended from his seat earlier that year over allegations that he repeatedly lied and used his public office for personal gain.

“When I came to the Court in January 2019 the judicial system was starting to come out of a very dark place,” Hutchison noted. “What’s brought it into the light is is the infusion of new blood, new ideas with that a recognition that the Court needed to change its direction and become more transparent. Let people know what we’re doing will not be secretive as it was in the past, be willing to communicate with each other.”

He previously was appointed to the bench in the Tenth Judicial Circuit (Raleigh County) by then-Gov. Gaston Caperton in 1995 and was elected to that seat in 1996 and re-elected in 2000, 2008 and 2016.

West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals Justice John Hutchison

As a circuit judge, Hutchison was a member of the Supreme Court’s Mass Litigation Panel and was a judicial representative on the Commission to Study Residential Placement of Children. He was appointed several times to sit on the Supreme Court when a Justice had been recused.

He also served as treasurer, secretary, vice president, and president of the West Virginia Judicial Association and was chairman and vice-chairman of the association’s legislative and pensions committees. He was certified as a mediator by the National Judicial College in 2017.

He was born and raised in Beckley, West Virginia. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history and political science from Davis and Elkins College in 1972, and a law degree from West Virginia University College of Law in 1980.

Hutchison said he looks forward to spending quality time with his wife Viki and his family.

“Especially my wife,” he said. “This year we will have been married 48 years, and she has been behind me the entire time. I never will be able to repay her for what she has done for me.”

Hutchison said he hopes to continue to serve the court as a senior status judge or as a mediator.

“We need senior status judges,” Hutchison said. “We have to have judges available that can step into the breach whenever there’s nobody else that can handle a case, or there may be an illness or something and somebody can go in for a short period of time and cover a docket or whatever. And I absolutely want to make myself available for that.”

U.S. Supreme Court Asked to Hear W.Va. Gas Case

Landowners have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the reversal by West Virginia’s highest court concluding natural gas companies can deduct post-production costs from the royalties paid landowners for mineral rights.

In May, the West Virginia Supreme Court reversed its November ruling in the case after Justice Beth Walker was elected and replaced Justice Brent Benjamin.

In their petition, the landowners say the reversal could have been significant for energy companies in which Walker’s husband owned stock.

The issue is whether Walker therefore should have recused herself from the case.

The state court first ruled 3-2 against deductions by EQT Production Co.

In January, the court agreed 3-2 to rehear the case.

The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports Walker in a May 1 court memo said her husband divested energy stocks.

Walker Wins First Nonpartisan Election to the W.Va. Supreme Court

After losing a close race in 2008, Morgantown attorney Beth Walker has come back to win the first nonpartisan election to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. She did it with substantial backing from outside groups.

Beth Walker and her immediate family watched the results from her lakeside home just outside Morgantown. She held a strong lead from the beginning but was hesitant to call the race until it was clear her lead wasn’t going to fade.

That’s when her phone began dinging steadily with texts and tweets of congratulations.

“I’m just so grateful to everyone who’s helped and all the voters of West Virginia who have obviously shown some trust and confidence in me being able to serve in the next twelve years on the Supreme Court,” Walker said.

This year is the first time judges were elected on a nonpartisan basis. It’s also the first time the Supreme Court candidates were decided in the Primary Election.

Walker says she supports the nonpartisan election of Supreme Court judges and plans to carry out her term in a similar way.

“The entire campaign we’ve talked about the importance of the rule of law,” she noted, “and that’s going to be my first priority is that and taking politics out of the court. You know, we’ve made an excellent step forward I think as West Virginia electing judges as a nonpartisan election, and I plan to take that onto the court with the commitment to the best I can, at least as one justice to take politics out of the court.”

It may have been a nonpartisan election, but partisan groups poured money into TV ads supporting Walker and attacking fellow candidates Darrell McGraw and Bill Wooton. The Republican State Leadership Committee – Judicial Fairness Initiative and other groups dropped about $2 million on the campaign.

Walker beat current justice Brent Benjamin who released a statement saying, “This race had unique difficulties for the candidates. To prevail was not an easy thing.”

Former Attorney General Darrell McGraw came in at a distant second. He declined to comment on the results.

Walker is now the third woman to ever serve on the state’s highest court. She joins Justices Margaret Workman and Robin Davis – meaning the state’s Supreme Court has a female majority for the first time.

Walker Says She'll be a Conservative Justice for W.Va.

Beth Walker is running for the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.

The name may be familiar to you, maybe because of her unsuccessful bid for the high court in 2008, or maybe because of her legal challenge to opponents Brent Benjamin and Bill Wooten’s use of public campaign financing in the race, but now, Walker is traveling the state to make sure voters recognize her for her conservative values.

“I don’t have other political aspirations. I don’t hope to run for Justice and then run for something else in the future, I just want to be a good judge,” Walker said in a 2008 interview.

In addition to being a good judge, Walker said in the interview she wanted to help rebuild the reputation of West Virginia’s highest court, the Supreme Court of Appeals. Those were the two main reasons she ran to be a justice then and eight years later, those are the reasons she’s trying her hand at a seat once again.

“I have a conservative vision for our Supreme Court of Appeals and that means very simply that the court has to be fair and impartial and decide cases based on the law,” Walker said, “not based on who the parties are, not based on where you are from, not based on an individual Justice’s personal preference, but rather based purely on the law.”

Walker is from Ohio, but has spent nearly 30 years in West Virginia, the past 6 working as in-house counsel for the West Virginia University Hospital system.

Now, she’s traveling the state, meeting with voters and sharing her ideas.

“If you have an activist judge on the court who thinks it’s their place to second guess what the Legislature does, then I don’t think that’s good for West Virginia,” Walker told about a dozen women at a ‘Women for Walker’ event at Giuseppe’s Italian Restaurant in Mt. Hope.

This idea, that Justices shouldn’t legislate from the bench, is one Walker discusses a lot. She shared that message with the women at her luncheon, in that 2008 interview, and in one of her recent television ads.

But Walker hasn’t shied away from sharing her opinions about legislation either. Like her stances on substance abuse. Walker says the state needs increased access to treatment and stricter penalties for drug dealers, things she can’t accomplish on the bench, but what she can do is make sure people are talking about it.

“I knew intellectually of course that it was happening and there were problems, but until I started going to our communities and counties all over the state talking to people,” she said, “I’ll admit I didn’t have a sense of how serious it is and I think we have to be talking about it much more.”

Walker also tried to take on another area of legislation — the state’s public campaign financing program.

The program allows Supreme Court candidates who meet certain requirements to fund their campaign with $500,000 provided by the state. Two of Walker’s opponents chose to use the program and Walker sued them both, saying they missed deadlines laid out in the law.

“I have no philosophical problem with the program,” Walker said, “but the reason I filed the appeals were because the rules weren’t being followed as they had been promulgated by the Legislature and I thought that before that amount of state funds was released to the candidate to spend on their campaign that the rules ought to be followed.”

Walker said she chose not to use public campaign financing because she didn’t think it was the best use of state dollars in the tough financial times West Virginia is facing, but had she won her lawsuits, lawsuits that worked their way up to the state Supreme Court, Walker would’ve asked the state to pay her legal fees.

“I felt like in our appeal, we were doing in part what the job of the State Election Commission should have been,” Walker said. “The State Election Commission has the job to certify the candidate as meeting all of the requirements of the statute and our position was the state election commission didn’t correctly authorize that discretion.”

Beth Walker speaking with Del. Kayla Kessinger during her Mt. Hope campaign stop.

If she were a legislator, Walker said, she would revisit the program given the financial hardships in the state, but as a Justice, she won’t have any say on future rewrites to the law.

Of the five candidates running for the one open seat on the high court, Walker has the longest list of endorsements. Conservative organizations like the West Virginia Business and Industry Council and West Virginia Chamber of Commerce are backing her, as well as Republican lawmakers like Senator Shelley Moore Capito, and third party groups have recently backed Walker as well, spending PAC money on attack ads focused on two of her opponents.

Walker said she can and will separate herself from these special interests as a member of the court and isn’t afraid to recuse herself from cases that may appear to have personal conflicts.

Outside Money in West Virginia High Court Race Nears $500K

Almost a half-million dollars in outside interest group money is influencing West Virginia’s five-way Supreme Court race through advertising.

Disclosures with the secretary of state show the Republican State Leadership Committee bought $269,200 in ads against Bill Wooton and Darrell McGraw, both former Democratic elected officials.

For the first time, the race is nonpartisan and will be decided during the May 10 primary.

Incumbent Justice Brent Benjamin, who was elected as a Republican in 2004 in a flurry of outside spending, called on the GOP group to withdraw the ads. Beth Walker has much of the GOP establishment’s support.

The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce bought $169,400 in ads supporting Walker. The West Virginia Business & Industry Council’s PAC bought $54,600 in ads backing her.

Wayne King, a Democrat, is also running.

State Supreme Court Rules Benjamin, Wooton Allowed Public Campaign Financing

The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals has overturned the decisions of two Kanawha County Circuit Court judges and will allow Brent Benjamin and Bill Wooton to keep the monies their campaigns received under the state’s public campaign financing program.

The decision comes a little more than six weeks before the judicial election.

All five of West Virginia’s Supreme Court Justices recused themselves from hearing the appeals of two cases originally brought by fellow Supreme Court candidate Beth Walker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XwuMwHnEro

Walker sued Benjamin and Wooten after the State Election Commission ruled each could receive $500,000 in public dollars to fund their campaigns. Walker challenged the decisions in Kanawha County Circuit Court and two judges ruled in her favor.

In front of a panel of appointed circuit judges, attorneys representing Wooten, Benjamin and the SEC argued the Election Commission should be allowed to decide if turning in a filing late in the program constituted disqualification or some other kind of penalty.

Walker’s attorney argued allowing candidates to miss deadlines– like the SEC allowed Wooten and Benjamin to do– took away from the integrity of the campaign financing program.

Beginning this year, all judicial elections are non-partisan and will be decided during West Virginia’s primary race on May 10.