Basic Fairness

Impartiality or benefiting family members?

Even though the public would benefit from impartial courts, we often see evidence of family members benefiting from judges’ actions in West Virginia. For example:

Justice Warren McGraw authored the Bower medical monitoring decision creating a new form of lawsuits in West Virginia based on fear of injury. After Justice McGraw’s ruling, both his brother Attorney General Darrell McGraw and his son, personal injury lawyer Warren Randolph McGraw, filed lawsuits based on Justice McGraw’s newly published rule.

When a lawsuit came before the Supreme Court that would directly affect how much control Attorney General Darrell McGraw would have over the state’s government lawyers, Darrell’s brother Justice Warren McGraw refused to step down (recuse himself) from hearing that case.

Justice Robin Davis participated in the Supreme Court’s Bower medical monitoring ruling establishing the new type of lawsuit. At the same time, a medical monitoring lawsuit, represented by her personal injury lawyer husband Scott Segal concerning the drug Fen Phen, was working its way through West Virginia Courts. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, Scott Segal led a massive “healthy smoker” class action lawsuit seeking medical monitoring payments as well as an asbestos class action lawsuit in West Virginia courts. Many of Scott Segal’s huge class action lawsuits are being handled by the Mass Litigation Panel created by the Supreme Court when Justice Davis was Chief Justice

Read more:

:: Code of Judicial Conduct related to judges, family members and disqualification

:: No winners in Court's ruling on McGraw case, ordinary citizens lose too

:: Back to Eye on WV Justice