Panel tosses ethics complaint against Justice DeWine
A special panel has ruled that it was OK for Ohio Supreme Court Justice Patrick DeWine to hear cases involving the attorney general’s office, even though it is run by his father, Attorney General Mike DeWine.
As governor-elect, Mike DeWine is leaving the state office that has the most dealings with the Ohio Supreme Court, but Friday’s ruling appears to also mean that Patrick DeWine is not automatically precluded from hearing cases involving the governor’s office.
The three-judge panel, citing an opinion by Ohio Supreme Court Justice Maureen O’Connor, said that when a government attorney has a familial tie with a judge, disqualification is not automatically warranted.
The panel — consisting of two Common Pleas Court judges and a Municipal Court judge — was appointed to sit in lieu of the Supreme Court, which couldn’t preside over a case involving a colleague.
The panel heard the case after special disciplinary counsel Bradley M. Frick was appointed in January by an anonymous panel of three state appellate judges. Frick said that it violated the plain language of several canons of judicial conduct for Patrick DeWine DeWine to sit in judgment of matters involving the attorney general’s office.
The case revolved “around the central issue of the appearance of impropriety,” the special panel wrote in explaining Friday’s decision to dismiss the case against Justice DeWine.
Frick “asserts that by failing to recuse himself from cases involving the AG’s office which are before Justice DeWine on the Supreme Court and by appearing in a number of photographs on the AG’s website, AG DeWine’s personal social-media pages, and on AG DeWine’s campaign-for-governor website, Justice DeWine has violated a number of judicial canons.”
Among them were the requirement to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, one mandating that judges appear impartial, one prohibiting judges from participating in campaign activity and one saying “the judge shall not convey or permit others to convey the impression that any person or organization is in a position to influence the judge.”
In its analysis, the panel of judges cited numerous cases in which the Ohio Supreme Court said that just because judges’ family members were part of — or even running — an agency bringing cases before the court, that’s not sufficient reason for the judge to recuse. It would be different if the family member were directly involved in a matter before the court, the judges wrote. They noted that Justice DeWine recused himself from a high-profile charter school case when his father started making public statements about it.
“Justice DeWine has further recused himself from any gubernatorial-election related matters,” they added.
As for family photos of berobed Justice DeWine appearing in Mike DeWine campaign materials, the panel wrote: “The family photographs are what they are: A judge is not required to remove himself from his family or from any affiliation with his family when he undertakes his judicial tenure.”