A.S. Haley: Massive Conflict of Interest Taints South Carolina Ruling

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Yesterday, almost two years after hearing arguments, the Supreme Court of South Carolina finally issued its decision in the case of The Protestant Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, et al. v. The Episcopal Church, et al., as I wrote in this post. Because the Court's collective opinions were some 77 pages long, I was able in the short time after their issuance to present only the broadest overview of the differences that divided the five Justices on the Court.

Today, I plan to examine in depth what I consider to be the overarching problem with the decision: the fact that it glosses over a massive conflict of interest on the part of Justice Kaye Hearn. While she was definitely biased when the case was first appealed to the Court, as I explain in more detail below, that blight on her impartiality pales into insignificance before the blatant, result-oriented bias she has exposed in her opinion concurring in a 3-2 decision that would result in the transfer of multiple millions of dollars' worth of real property from the plaintiff Diocese to the ECUSA-controlled defendant, called the Episcopal Church in South Carolina ("ECSC").

For the basic problem with Justice Hearn's role in this case is as follows. When the case was first appealed in 2015 by the Episcopal Church and the ECSC, Justice Hearn (the newest justice elected to the Court at the time) had been, since at least March 2007, a member of the Episcopal Forum of South Carolina. That was the very organization which, through 14 of its members, brought disciplinary charges in 2012 against Bishop Mark Lawrence, while he and his Diocese were still members of ECUSA, in an effort to have him deposed by the Disciplinary Board for Bishops. The Disciplinary Board's acceptance of those charges, and its issuance of a "Certification of Abandonment" against Bishop Lawrence, precipitated the withdrawal of his Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina from ECUSA...  the rest

In her concurring opinion, Justice Hearn went out of her way to castigate Bishop Lawrence and the role he played as chief pastor of his Diocese -- ecclesiastical matters which, as her colleagues pointed out, had no business being addressed in a secular judicial opinion. In doing so, she only advanced, and acted as a spokesperson in black robes for, the sectarian interests of the Episcopal Forum to which she still (presumably -- the organization no longer publishes the names of its members) belongs. At the same time, she contradicted her own precept that South Carolina courts should stay out of Episcopal Church matters and defer to its "ecclesiastical determinations."

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