Executive Director's Report, 1114 ALBJ, 75 The Alabama Lawyer 362 (2014)
| Author | Keith B. Norman |
| Position | Vol. 75 6 Pg. 362 |
Keith B. Norman
The New (and Improved) Judicial Recusal Law
In 1995, the Alabama Legislature passed a judicial recusal statute. That statute, strongly supported by then-Governor Fob James, required the recusal of a jurist if a campaign contribution of a party with a pending case reached a specific financial threshold: $4,000 or more for a judge or justice of an appellate court or $2,000 or more for a circuit judge.1 Under the provisions of the law, sections 12-24-1, 2 Code of Alabama (1975), the Alabama Supreme Court was to adopt rules to implement the provisions of the act.
The original recusal law was never enforced. The primary reason was that the supreme court was unable to fashion the necessary rules to appropriately implement the law as drafted.
Moreover, there was disagreement as to whether or not the law was required to be pre-cleared by the U.S.
Department of Justice, so it was never pre-cleared. Despite these problems with the law, some lawyers choose to limit their judicial campaign contributions anyway to the threshold amounts included in the statute.
This past April, the Alabama Legislature addressed judicial recusal and judicial campaign contributions for the first time since its adoption of the first recusal statute. The legislature adopted an entirely new law, section 12-24-3, repealing the old law in its entirety and replacing it with a new "rebuttable presumption" standard. Under the new law a rebuttable presumption of recusal occurs when a judge or justice receives a campaign contribution exceeding a specific percentage of total contributions received during the election cycle. The contribution can be from either a party with a pending case or one made at a time when it was reasonably foreseeable that a case could become before the jurist. Those percentages are: 1.10 percent in a statewide appellate court race;
2.15 percent in a circuit court race; or
3. 25 percent in a district court race.
The new law defines "party" to include a person who is a party in a lawsuit, that person's immediate family and the person's attorney and the attorney's law firm. The new law also specifies that when a court denies a motion to recuse, that order is appealable. While the appeal of the order is pending, the action in the trial court is delayed.
The new recusal law will not...
To continue reading
Request your trial