Is Hearing An Appeal Based on Your Office’s Alleged Misconduct Consistent With Due Process? Views Differ
By 
The state of Pennsylvania had Terrance Williams and Marc Draper dead to rights for the murder of Amos Norwood. But just a conviction was not enough for the state; it wanted the aggravating factors that would lead the jury to apply a death sentence. According to statements made by Draper (who had previously refused to speak to Williams’s lawyers), Draper “had informed the Commonwealth before trial that Williams had been in a sexual relationship with Norwood and that the relationship was the real motive for Norwood’s murder. According to Draper, the Commonwealth had instructed him to give false testimony that Williams killed Norwood to rob him. Draper also admitted he had received an undisclosed benefit in exchange for his testimony: the trial prosecutor had promised to write a letter to the state parole board on his behalf.” Williams then sued, and the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas found that the trial prosecutor had “suppressed material, exculpatory evidence in violation of Brady v. Maryland, and engaged in ‘prosecutorial gamesmanship’” and ordered a new hearing.
The DA who approved the decision to seek the death penalty was Ronald Castille. Castille was the Chief Justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court when the state appealed the PCCP’s ruling. Needless to say, Williams filed a motion asking Castille to recused himself given the conflict of interest. Castille not only refused to recuse himself but filed a rambling concurrence to the decision overruling the PPCA, reminiscent of late-period Antonin Scalia, railing against the “obstructionist anti-death penalty agenda” of Williams’s attorneys.
The Supreme Court today ruled that Castille’s failure to recuse himself violated Williams’s right to the due process of law. Speaking for the Court, Anthony Kennedy said some things that should be obvious:
The Court now holds that under the Due Process Clause there is an impermissible risk of actual bias when a judge earlier had significant, personal involvement as a prosecutor in a critical decision regarding the defendant’s case.
[…]
Due process guarantees “an absence of actual bias” on the part of a judge. Bias is easy to attribute to others and difficult to discern in oneself. To establish an enforceable and work-able framework, the Court’s precedents apply an objective standard that, in the usual case, avoids having to determine whether actual bias is present. The Court asks not whether a judge harbors an actual, subjective bias, but instead whether, as an objective matter, “the average judge in his position is ‘likely’ to be neutral, or whether there is an unconstitutional ‘potential for bias.’” Of particular relevance to the instant case, the Court has determined that an unconstitutional potential for bias exists when the same person serves as both accuser and adjudicator in a case. This objective risk of bias is reflected in the due process maxim that “no man can be a judge in his own case and no man is permitted to try cases where he has an interest in the outcome.”
The 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.
3 justices dissented from this holding. Unless you’re the kind of person who thinks it’s plausible that Donald Trump could govern to the left of Hillary Clinton, I don’t think I need to tell you which ones. I can tell you, though, that these three gentlemen also think that it doesn’t raise federal due process issues for a judge to hear an appeal involving a litigant who has spent millions of dollars to get that judge elected.