Cite as: 520 U. S. 899 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
Withrow v. Larkin, 421 U. S. 35, 46 (1975), before a judge with no actual bias against the defendant or interest in the outcome of his particular case. See, e. g., Aetna, supra, at 821-822; Tumey, supra, at 523.
The facts of this case are, happily, not the stuff of typical judicial-disqualification disputes. A judge who accepts bribes from a criminal defendant to fix that defendant's case is "biased" in the most basic sense of that word, but his bias is directed against the State, not the defendant. Petitioner contends, however, that Maloney's taking of bribes from some criminal defendants not only rendered him biased against the State in those cases, but also induced a sort of compensatory bias against defendants who did not bribe Maloney. Maloney was biased in this latter, compensatory sense, petitioner argues, to avoid being seen as uniformly and suspiciously "soft" on criminal defendants. The Court of Appeals, in its opinion, pointed out that this theory is quite speculative; after all, it might be equally likely that a judge who was "on the take" in some criminal cases would be careful to at least appear to favor all criminal defendants, so as to avoid apparently wild and unexplainable swings in decisions and judicial philosophy. 81 F. 3d, at 689-690.5 In any event, difficulties of proof aside, there is no question that, if it could be proved, such compensatory, camouflaging bias on Maloney's part in petitioner's own case would violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. We now turn to the question whether petitioner has shown "good
5 At Maloney's trial, however, attorney William Swano provided testimony that lends some support to petitioner's compensatory-bias theory. See 81 F. 3d, at 697 (Rovner, J., dissenting). According to Swano, Maloney retaliated against one of Swano's clients in one of the rare cases when Swano failed to offer Maloney a bribe and, in bribe negotiations in a later case, Maloney's bag man Robert McGee admitted as much. Swano testified that he learned that in order " 'to practice in front of Judge Maloney . . . we had to pay.'" Ibid.
905
Page: Index Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007