When Remittiturs in Nursing Home Awards Trigger Inquiry into Campaign Finances for Judges…
I think it is safe to say that in recent years, juries have not been shy about awarding substantial damages in trials involving claims of negligent care, even — or perhaps especially — when the resident is very old. Lately, several of our Elder Law Prof Blog posts have focused on nursing home providers’ efforts to avoid jury trials through the use of pre-dispute, binding arbitration clauses in admission agreements. See e.g. here and here. However, there’s another way in which litigation of nursing home care claims have triggered collateral legal disputes, and this time it is for the judicial system itself.
In March 2016, former Arkansas state court judge Mike Maggio, age 54, was hit with a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, following his plea of guilty to federal charges for taking a bribe to reduce a verdict in a nursing home negligence case. Maggio was alleged to have reduced a jury verdict in a nursing home case from $5.2 million to $1 million, after the owner of the facility reportedly made multiple campaign contributions to “PACs that were to funnel the money to Maggio for a planned race” for the state’s Court of Appeals.
In issuing the sentence, United State District Judge Brian Miller emphasized that while he had earlier rejected the prosecution’s argument that any sentence should be guided by the multi-million dollar size of the remittitur, the maximum sentence was still warranted because “corruption in the judicial system especially erodes public trust in the system,” noting “a judge is the system.” Details of the investigation — as well as on-going litigation — are provided in the Arkansas Times’ Arkansas Blog.
By comparison, in West Virginia, news media questioned a business transaction and contributions to a judge’s re-election campaign, asking whether they affected the decision of the State Supreme court justice when she wrote the lead opinion in an appellate decision that reduced a 2011 jury verdict in nursing home negligence case from $90.5 million to $36.6 million. The justice denied any improper influence or relationship with defense-side parties; following an investigation, the West Virginia Judicial Investigation Commission concluded the justice had no knowledge of the transactions in question, and it dismissed the ethics complaint in June 2015.
The potential for campaign contributions to influence judicial election campaigns has long been one source of criticism of elections for judges.