You may have heard about or even been unfortunate enough to experience an insurance company treating policyholders unfairly when handling insurance claims. The wrongdoing by insurance companies can often continue even during litigation. It appears that some insurance companies try to play unfairly during litigation by influencing judges. The Chicago Tribune recently reported that the Illinois Supreme Court is being asked to reconsider a decision involving State Farm based on allegations that State Farm misrepresented the amount of campaign contributions it made to Justice Lloyd Karmeier. An investigation by a former FBI officer revealed that State Farm contributed somewhere between $2.5 and $4 million dollars to Karmeier’s campaign. It should be no surprise that Karmeier ruled in favor of State Farm when it appealed a $1 billion dollar judgment awarded to a policyholder. Despite requests for Karmeier to step down from deciding the case, he refused.
In 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a similar case out of West Virginia and ruled that a judge who would not step down, even though he had received $3 million dollars in campaign donations from the defendant, had created a “probability of actual bias.” It seems likely that the Illinois Supreme Court will follow this same line of reasoning, and we will continue to follow this case to see how the Illinois Supreme Court deals with the allegations against State Farm.
