Should NC’s top judge be allowed to suspend other judges? State lawmakers say yes

North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby should be allowed to unilaterally stop other judges from being allowed to hear cases, and block them from being paid, Republican state lawmakers indicated Tuesday as they approved a bill that would give Newby, a fellow Republican, that exact power.

The legislature is controlled by Republicans. They didn’t respond to Democrats who called the bill a thinly disguised power grab intended to let Newby force out judges he personally dislikes — or to retaliate against judges who have done something to anger politicians or well-connected community figures.

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Judges and justices are elected in North Carolina, and there are other measures in place to review the actions of — and to discipline — those on the bench. All the existing measures require approval from multiple other elected officials, not just the individual chief justice.

“This is getting pretty serious — where an elected official, at the end of the day, can kind of get removed by one or two people … just because they got sideways to somebody,” said Rep. Robert Reives, D-Chatham.

When the bill passed the Senate last week, Republicans in that chamber said it had been requested by the state court system, whose top leaders are chosen by Newby. A court system spokesperson for Newby hasn’t responded to multiple requests for comment this week and last week.

The bill passed both chambers in party-line votes, including by a 62-to-45 tally in the state House on Wednesday. The bill is now before Democratic Gov. Josh Stein, who can approve it, veto it, or let it become law without his signature. Stein didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Reives, the top Democrat in the state House, said people already distrust judges and think they issue rulings based on politics rather than the law. But he said this bill, if it becomes law, would essentially force judges to consider politics in everything they do to avoid being forced out of office for getting on the bad side of the chief justice or his political allies.

“We are inviting people to question our judicial system even more,” Reives said. “So that would take me to the conclusion: This isn't a slippery slope. We're already sliding. And all you're doing is continuing to make people not trust the very foundation of who we are.”

After the bill passed, House Speaker Destin Hall issued a written statement, saying: “All North Carolinians deserve judges who exercise sound judgment and uphold the highest standards of conduct. When they don’t, or when their actions put law-abiding citizens in harm’s way, there should be meaningful consequences.”

‘Done some serious damage’

Currently there’s a high bar to clear for any efforts seeking to curtail judges’ power in North Carolina. The thinking, as with other elected offices, has been that the people serve as the best check on judges’ power and it’s up to popular will to decide who should or shouldn’t be in office.

Like any other politician, judges can be impeached by a vote of the legislature. They can also be removed from office by a ruling of the North Carolina Supreme Court, if that’s recommended by a secretive group called the Judicial Standards Commission. The commission is in charge of confidentially investigating complaints that judges violated ethics rules or committed other misdeeds.

But House Bill 377 would add new options. Even before the Judicial Standards Commission issues a recommendation on how — or whether — to proceed with any discipline against a judge, the bill says, the Supreme Court chief justice could now act on his own to order any judge facing an investigation to be suspended without pay.

The chief justice wouldn’t need the rest of the court’s approval to do so, although that would still be needed to permanently remove a judge from office. However, critics said suspending someone without pay during an investigation — which can sometimes take close to two years — would force them to resign from office to find a new job, so this bill would essentially give the chief justice the power to unilaterally force out judges he dislikes.

“If that investigation stretches out, you’re done financially,” Reives said. “And not even talking about reputation-wise. Because if you have to resign because you are under investigation, as a judge — even if it's dismissed — people are going to say ‘Yes, sure, everything was all right.’ They're not going to trust you to be their lawyer or anything else. So you've really done some serious damage to their careers.”

Prior to the vote Hall wrote on social media that he hoped Newby would use the power to find a way to remove judges who allowed people accused of violent crimes to be allowed to pay bail.

Rep. Marcia Morey, D-Durham, a former judge who spoke out against the bill, said judicial standards investigations should target judges for ethical violations, not micromanage their day-to-day decisions from the bench.

And she noted that since the investigation process is secret, any claims against a judge could be clearly false. Yet Newby could use those to suspend them without pay anyway, and the public would never know, she said.

Morey noted that in recent years the legislature has overhauled the Judicial Standards Commission, kicking off professional legal experts and replacing them with political appointees.

“If anything, we should be making Judicial Standards a more fair, impartial, neutral, independent body,” Morey said. … “This is the wrong way to go [for] the ethics that we demand of our judges, independence of our judges. And I'm afraid this is going to be used to retaliate.”

Additionally, the bill will change the rules for how the Supreme Court handles discipline against judges after a Judicial Standards investigation is finished. If the commission recommends a judge be privately reprimanded, publicly censured or even removed from office, then the Supreme Court votes on whether to do so.

The new bill would give the court more leeway. For instance if Judicial Standards recommended a judge simply receive a private reprimand about correcting certain behavior, the new bill would let the Supreme Court ratchet up the punishment, ignoring that recommendation, and remove them from office.

Political investigations?

Recently one of Newby’s fellow Supreme Court justices, Democrat Anita Earls, was twice investigated by the Judicial Standards Commission in 2023 — the same year Republicans took control of the judiciary. The first followed a WRAL report on secret policy changes being floated by the court’s new GOP leadership that critics characterized as power grabs.

Soon after that investigation found nothing, Earls was investigated again over comments she made about bias in the judicial system and her own experiences as a Black woman serving on the state’s highest court.

While the identity of the person or people who filed those complaints against Earls is confidential under state law, Democrats at the state legislature called a press conference to publicly accuse Newby of being behind it, an accusation Newby didn’t respond to.

Earls sued the commission for violating her First Amendment rights — citing, in part, “changes under Chief Justice Paul Newby” — and eventually reached a settlement, dropping her lawsuit in exchange for the commission ending its investigation.

Earls is up for reelection this year. Her Republican opponent, former state Rep. Sarah Stevens, had been the lead sponsor of the new bill expanding Newby’s powers prior to resigning from the legislature to focus on her judicial campaign.

The power for Newby to suspend judges without pay would apply only to trial court judges — not appellate court judges on the state Court of Appeals or Supreme Court — at least in the bill before Stein.