Judge Frank Haymond was born in Marion County on April 13, 1870. He practiced law in Fairmont and served as judge of the Marion County Circuit Court.
In 1945, Governor Clarence Meadows appointed the 75-year-old Haymond to fill a vacancy on the state Supreme Court. Haymond was elected to the court the following year and re-elected to two more 12-year terms.
When he died in 1972 at age 102, he’d served longer on the state’s high court than any past jurist.
Haymond’s judicial philosophy emphasized past precedents, and he was strongly opposed to legislating from the bench.
In one of his final legal decisions, he sternly overruled a lower court’s opinion that had declared incarceration in the aging West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville to be unconstitutional because it violated the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. A decade later, the Supreme Court unanimously declared that imprisonment at the penitentiary was indeed unconstitutional, leading to its eventual closure.
When Judge Frank Haymond was 100, he received the American Bar Association’s prestigious ABA Medal. He’s the one and only West Virginian to receive this honor.
The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected landowners’ request to review the ruling 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 said the reversal could have been significant for energy companies in which Walker’s husband had owned stock.
The issue is whether Walker therefore should have recused herself from the case.
The federal court rejected the case Monday without comment.
The state court first ruled 3-2 last year against deductions by EQT Production Co.
In January, the court agreed 3-2 to rehear the case and later reversed itself.
Biographer and journalist Wil Haygood is speaking this week at Marshall University on the late Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.
Marshall was confirmed to the court 50 years ago this year. Haygood has written a book looking at the struggle to get Marshall confirmed as the first African-American to serve on the high court. The book is titled “Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America.”
Marshall was a leading civil rights lawyer, handling cases that included Brown v. Board of Education.
Haygood will deliver the Amicus Curiae lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday in Brad D. Smith Foundation Hall on Marshall’s Huntington campus.
Out-of-state and dark money spenders (campaign contributions from nonprofits and super PACs that don’t have to disclose the sources of their funding) are contributing more money to judicial elections than they have in previous years.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute at New York University, is worried that this money will influence the 27 out of the 38 states using a judicial election system for their high courts have positions up for election this November.
Credit Shayla Klein / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Though dark money sources can only spend a limited amount of money on a candidate, they can spend an unlimited amount on television advertisements. That’s why West Virginians may have noticed a high amount of negative advertising in May.
“We saw about 3 million dollars of spending by outside groups, much of it coming from the Republican State Leadership Committee which is a national group that spends money around the country in different kinds of elections, including judicial races,” said Alicia Bannon, senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “And I think their involvement has been interesting because they have been spending in races all over the country.”
Credit Shayla Klein / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Elections nationwide saw a spike in outside spending and dark money contributions to downstream elections after the U.S Supreme Court ruled in the 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission that under the first amendment, it would be unconstitutional to prevent corporations or unions from contributing financially to campaigns.
Credit Shayla Klein / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Notes: 1) In 2004, former Massey Energy chairman and CEO Don Blankenship contributed $3 million to Brent Benjamin’s campaign. 2) This chart has been updated to reflect that the data represents total noncandidate spending. The 2016 figure has also been updated.
Credit Shayla Klein / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
But the consequences of dark money’s impact is especially apparent in judicial elections. Studies show that judges’ decisions are influenced by campaign contributions. For example, then West Virginia Justice Brent Benjamin received $3 million in campaign contributions from former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship in the 2004 elections. When Blankenship went to trial for his role in the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, Benjamin refused to recuse himself from the case and voted in favor of the defendant Massey Energy. His refusal was later ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court as a violation of due process of law.
Credit Shayla Klein / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
“In the end, we need to trust that judges are going to be able to make decisions based on the law, and not worrying about where they’re going to get money for the next election, not worry about what the next attack ad will be like,” Bannon said. “I think what we’ve been seeing is that these races are becoming more politicized. The public can reasonably ask questions – are our judges going to be reasonably insulated from the rough and tumble of politics to do their jobs as judges?”
In the meantime, Americans across the country, including West Virginia, can expect to hear more negative campaigning funded by dark money sources – until they turn out to cast their votes on Election Day.
West Virginia’s attorney general wants the state Supreme Court to put a hold on its ruling allowing a Clarksburg man to withdraw guilty pleas in a 2001 rape case.
The Exponent Telegram reports that the ruling in Joseph Buffey’s case is scheduled to become final Thursday. Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has requested a delay while his office considers whether to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Last month, the state justices ruled that Buffey’s due process rights were violated when prosecutors failed to disclose that DNA tests exonerated him in the rape and robbery of an 83-year-old woman. They sent the case back to a judge to allow Buffey to withdraw his guilty pleas.
Another man was sentenced in September to up to 70 years in prison for the crime.
The West Virginia Judiciary’s Unified Electronic Filing System has expanded to the Eastern Panhandle.
Justice Brent Benjamin announced the expansion of E-filing to the Eastern Panhandle at the Circuit Courtroom in the Jefferson County Courthouse Monday.
Jefferson County is now the second county in the state to allow E-filing opportunities, following Marion County, which filed its first electronic document in August 2013.
E-filing allows circuit courts to have electronic backups of both confidential and public cases. It also saves time and money for the lawyer since he or she would no longer have to travel to the courthouse in person to file documents to the circuit clerk.
A committee is currently studying the cost of statewide expansion for E-filing and what a reasonable filing fee and user fee should be. This statewide system will be paid for by the user, not by taxpayers, and the Supreme Court is paying for the upgrade in technology for all circuit clerk offices. Public documents will eventually be accessible from any computer anywhere.
Once expanded to the entire state, those who want to file a case in a circuit court will be able to file documents electronically themselves.
