(04-27-2023 10:36 AM)Frizzy Owl Wrote:  

(04-27-2023 10:34 AM)Rice93 Wrote:  

(04-27-2023 10:27 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(04-27-2023 09:16 AM)Hambone10 Wrote:  

(04-27-2023 08:24 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  Crow was CEO of a company being sued for damages and the court, including Thomas, refused to hear the case. Thomas should have recused himself since his friend was directly involved in the case.
How the heck is that not a conflict of interest????

Facts matter.

Crow was CEO of a company that had (among many other holdings) a 50% or less interest in a company that was being sued for damages. (I'm going from memory, and the article either said 50% or almost 50%.... but clearly implied less than 50.1%/not fully controlling interest... doesn't make a huge difference, just saying why I say it this way)

His side won that case in Federal Court. So court one heard the facts of the case and sided with his side.

The case was appealed. The 5th Circuit court heard the appeal and similarly sided with his side.

The case was appealed to Thomas' court... and 4 members of the court did NOT agree with the argument presented to hear the case.

Where is the potential conflict if two other courts (don't know how many judges on those courts) WITHOUT a conflict and at least 5 OTHER members of a 9 member court all agreed??

I made an immediate edit after hitting post on that as I realized it wasn’t accurate as written - it’s actually impressive how #’s beat me to the punch. The post and edit were 1 minute apart.

My takeaway here is that it is reasonable that Thomas didn’t know about this conflict of interest. It’s not reasonable to argue it was not a conflict of interest.

Completely agree. I would add that it is reasonable and nearly definitely probable that the Crow relationship had ZERO to do with the decision not to take the case. Still a conflict of interest, though.

If Thomas had no knowledge of Crow's connection to the case, then it cannot have been a conflict of interest. You can't unintentionally have a conflict of interest.

Sure. I think Thomas is completely in the clear if he didn't know about the connection. I think Crow has said that he wasn't aware of the case being reviewed by the SC either. I don't know how it works over there when is comes to sounding alarms about potential COI. You would think it would be a pretty robust system but maybe there are too many of these appeals to go that deep.

I would have thought though that given the relationship between the two and the largesse that Crow directs in Thomas' direction that one or both of them would take pains to make sure that Crow had no connection to a case reviewed/heard by the SC.