Justice Maureen O’Connor says campaign money doesn’t affect her

By 2004, the Ohio Consumer Commission had sued FirstEnergy and PUCO on behalf of customers.

Just months after the lawsuit was announced, FirstEnergy CEO Anthony Alexander held a fund-raiser at his home for the Supreme Court justices. Among the attendees was O'Connor. That night, Alexander raised $40,500, which was immediately dumped into five judges' coffers.

Citizen Action asked those judges to recuse themselves from the FirstEnergy case. They all refused, including O'Connor. "I didn't feel the need," she says. "Just because someone contributed to my campaign? I don't think that's the criteria."

Even Pfeifer, who never received a penny from FirstEnergy, agrees that it would be ridiculous for five justices to recuse themselves from a case solely based on campaign contributions. "That's an impossibility," he says. "You would have no one left to decide cases, or you'd have most of the important cases written by visiting judges. That just can't work."

Still, Pfeifer expects those justices to remain impartial. But according to the Consumer Commission, that's not what happened.

The Supreme Court ruled that FirstEnergy was allowed to continue collecting the fee, despite what the law said.

O'Connor takes offense at the notion that FirstEnergy's contributions influenced her decision. She claims it isn't her fault that businesses give her money. Her essential defense: Don't hate the player — hate the game.

"You are presuming that there is some other way of electing judges in Ohio other than to wage a campaign," she says. "There are over 100 judges up for election this year. None of them say 'Don't give me money. I don't want to get my message out; I just want people to vote based on the sound of my name.'"

O'Connor isn't an anomaly. When The New York Times ran its 2006 story, it cited Terrence O'Donnell as the justice most likely to rule on behalf of donors. (O'Donnell refused comment for this story.) In fact, no one on the bench has clean hands.

"Part of the reason there is a lot of national focus on the Ohio Supreme Court is that those campaigns got so remarkably expensive so remarkably fast," says Jesse Rutledge, a spokesman for Justice at Stake, a Washington think tank. "Ohio has been at the forefront of a national trend of big-money judicial races."

While Pfeifer remembers raising around $400,000 for his race in 1998, just two years later, candidates like Chief Justice Thomas Moyer were raising as much as $1.5 million. Justice Evelyn Stratton raised $1.9 million for her bid in 2002. And O'Donnell raised more than $3.6 million between 2004 and 2006 alone.

In fact, all the Supreme Court justices have waged multimillion-dollar campaigns since 2000, with the exception of Pfeifer, who ran in 2004 on less than $80,000. "I've been lucky," he says. "I've been elected on the cheap four times. That's because I really predated the big money."

Part of the problem is that big donors have learned to circumvent election laws. By creating their own political action committees or giving directly to parties, they can indirectly dump unlimited amounts into campaigns.

"Money in politics is becoming a shell game," says Rutledge. "Things get moved around, and you can't necessarily see what's going where."

Judges are also aggressive fund-raisers, often shaking down lawyers for donations and pushing tickets to soirees. When Scene called a sampling of lawyers who had argued before the Supreme Court in 2007, most said they'd received invitations to O'Connor's fund-raisers. "It's not unusual for law firms and lawyers to receive those," says Chuck Ticknor, a lawyer with Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs, one of the bigger firms in Ohio. "We get them all the time. It's routine for big law firms to give money to both sides."

But what about those lawyers who don't shell out? David Pheils, a medical-malpractice lawyer from Perrysburg, says he has never given to a Supreme Court race and never will. His stubbornness has cost him dearly.

"Based on the cases that I have attempted to take up to the Supreme Court, I'd have to say that Chief Justice Moyer and others are influenced by their supporters," Pheils says. "I don't feel like we get a fair hearing. They do not appreciate their role as a protector of the public."

Rutledge agrees with O'Connor that a lot of judges are simply trapped in a bad system, playing by the only rules available. Still, he's not letting them off the hook. "It's time to start thinking about changing those rules," Rutledge says. "[People like O'Connor] should be speaking out against that system. Stop playing the victim, and start being an advocate for change."