Flying High In West Virginia

ABC has this story raising allegations against a justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals

 A West Virginia businessman has filed a formal complaint against state Supreme Court Justice Robin Jean Davis with the state’s Judicial Investigation Commission, alleging she had a conflict of interest with a lawyer who bought a jet from her husband as he prepared to argue a $90 million case before her.

“The fact is, an attorney appearing before Justice Davis with a $90 million judgment in hand paid some $1.3 million to the Segal-Davis family, clearly creating a perception that the Justice’s ability to hear the case with complete impartiality could have been impaired,” wrote Bill Maloney, a Republican coal industry veteran from Morgantown who ran unsuccessfully for governor and now runs a conservative think tank.

The complaint is the latest challenge to Davis, the state court’s senior justice, following an ABC News investigation that discovered a lawyer appearing before her had purchased a Learjet from Alpine Air, the holding company solely owned by Davis’s husband, Scott Segal. The airplane sale took place just weeks after the Mississippi lawyer, Michael J. Fuller, had won a $90 million judgment for a client who was suing a nursing home for helping cause the death of his elderly mother. Davis found for Fuller’s client in the appeal and wrote the majority opinion in the decision that cut the award by $40 million but enabled Fuller to collect a $17 million fee. Maloney is not involved in the nursing home case, but in a statement indicated he filed the new complaint because he’s interested in protecting the reputation of the state’s judicial system so as to not scare off economic investments for the state.

Earlier ABC coverage is linked here. (Mike Frisch)