SCOTUS Tightens Rules On Judicial Recusal

When judges had “an earlier, significant personal involvement” in a case, they should recuse themselves from participating in any future iterations of that case, the Supreme Court ruled this week. The case at hand focuses on Ronald Castille, the former district attorney for Philadelphia who authorized seeking the death penalty for Terry Williams, a then 18-year-old convicted of murder. Castille used the Williams case in advertisements when he later ran for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where he was appointed Chief Justice. He served in that role when the state’s high court affirmed the death sentence given to Williams. In Castille’s case, his role as prosecutor and then judge “rises to an unconstitutional level,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in this week’s ruling. Kennedy wrote that the Constitution’s “due process guarantee that ‘no man can be a judge in his own case’ would have little substance if it did not disqualify a former prosecutor from sitting in judgment of a prosecution in which he or she had made a critical decision.” The U.S. Supreme Court also reversed the state court’s decision to reinstate the death penalty against Williams, which came after evidence surfaced of prosecutorial misconduct and also after Castille refused requests to recuse himself.