Ethics Bureau Submits Amicus Brief in Capital Case
The Ethics Bureau at Yale recently submitted an amicus brief in a capital case before the U.S. Supreme Court that is critical of a former Chief Justice in Pennsylvania who failed to recuse himself from an appeal despite having close ties to the original case.
The case, Williams v. Pennsylvania, specifically examines whether Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille should have recused himself from an appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court by death-row inmate Terrance Williams. Castille served as the District Attorney of Philadelphia and personally authorized his subordinates to seek the death penalty for Williams while serving in that role.
In the brief, Grace Hart ’16, John Rafael Perez ’16, and Joseph Samuels ’17 argued that there were “egregious constitutional and ethical violations” inherent in Castille’s decision to remain on the panel to decide Pennsylvania’s appeal from Williams’ successful challenge to his conviction. The students, who are members of The Ethic's Burea at Yale, were guided and supervised by Visiting Lecturer in Law Lawrence J. Fox. The team communicated with various experts in the field in reaching these conclusions.
“In the brief, the Bureau argued that Chief Justice Castille’s refusal to recuse himself despite his partiality and bias violated both widely-held ethical standards and the Due Process Clause of the Constitution,” said Perez. “In doing so, he blatantly disregarded Mr. Williams’ constitutional right to a fair appeal decided by an impartial tribunal.”
The brief concludes that Chief Justice Castille’s failure to recuse himself was not only damaging to Williams’ appeal, but to the judicial system as a whole. The Bureau defended existing judicial codes of conduct based on ABA models as critical tools in modeling behavior that will ensure that society respects and trusts the judiciary.
Finally, the Bureau argued against the argument that Castile’s presence on the panel was harmless error simply because he was but one of many Justices deciding the case. Citing both binding legal principles and contemporary empirical data, the Bureau argued that a single biased member’s participation in a multi-member panel is not “cancelled out” or cured by the existence of his peers, according to the brief. On the contrary, the more likely scenario is that a single biased member can infect the rest of the panel, multiplying the impermissible biases and unjustly skewing the entire Court’s perspective, the brief argued.
“Indeed, biases can be magnified, not eliminated, by group decision-making,” said Perez.
Williams had been scheduled for execution March 4, but Gov. Tom Wolf granted him a reprieve. Williams’ case was recently before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court due to that reprieve, which was the first Wolf granted as part of a moratorium on the death penalty he announced in February, according to news reports.
Several other organizations filed briefs in support of Williams including the American Bar Association, the Constitutional Accountability Center, the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and Justice at Stake.
Perez said this case is important because “it deals with the bedrock constitutional right to an impartial judiciary.”
“The egregious violations in this case, if they are allowed to stand, threaten the most critical rights of criminal defendants facing the harshest of penalties,” said Perez. “ The brief puts forth a very simple question: If the endangerment of such a fundamental right by a state supreme court chief justice is not judicial impropriety, then what is?”
The Ethics Bureau at Yale advises lawyers on how to proceed when faced with violations of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and other ethical dilemmas. Students draft amicus briefs in cases involving professional responsibility; help people with ineffective assistance of counsel claims; and offer ethics advice to nonprofit organizations. A weekly class on professional responsibility, led by Fox, is also part of the bureau.
