ProPublica: Many Judges Choose Not to Recuse, Even With Their Families
Excerpt from ProPublica | By: Noah Pransky, Brooke Williams, and Andrew Botolino | July 16, 2024 | Photo courtesy of Getty Images
Co-published with ABC News
To produce this story, ProPublica partnered with the Justice Media Computational Journalism co-Lab, a collaboration between Boston University’s College of Communication and the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences’ BU Spark! program. Contributing students included Emilia Wisniewski, Serena Ata, Amisha Kumar and Amanda Bang.
Soon after longtime New Orleans attorney Wendy Vitter became a federal judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana, she heard a lawsuit against the local government in Plaquemines Parish, a peninsular province encompassing the final 70 miles of the Mississippi River, between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.
A group of paramedics had sued the parish, seeking compensation for unpaid overtime. Vitter oversaw a pair of jury trials in 2019 and 2021, both resulting in wins for the parish. But an appeals court later ruled Vitter had erred in judgment and overturned her final order. That paved the way for the paramedics to be awarded more than $500,000 in compensation, plus hundreds of thousands more for their attorneys.
Throughout those proceedings, Plaquemines Parish leaders had a paid ally on their side: the judge’s husband, U.S. Sen.-turned-lobbyist David Vitter.
But there was no way for the parties in the case to easily know this. Wendy Vitter never told the EMTs’ attorneys. And they couldn't have looked it up in any court records. While the law requires federal judges to report their spouses’ income on annual financial disclosures, Vitter listed her husband as a “self employed attorney” with the name of the payroll company, TriNet HR III, that cut his checks. In fact, he is a partner and lobbyist for powerhouse Washington firm Mercury Public Affairs.