Tag Archives: Missouri state impeachment

Impeachment in the States: Missouri Governor Edition, Part 9 (Still more on pre-office conduct)

04 Friday May 2018

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By Frank Bowman

Regular readers will recall that former Missouri Chief Justice Michael Wolff and I have disagreed about whether Governor Eric Greitens can be impeached for conduct that occurred before he took office.  Judge Wolff said no.  I said yes.

One of Judge Wolff’s arguments was that there had been no impeachments of federal officers for conduct prior to assumption of office.  I responded, in part, that federal practice is irrelevant to Missouri constitutional rules because the standards for impeachment are markedly different in the U.S. and Missouri constitutions.  But I concurred with Judge Wolff’s assertion that no federal official had been impeached for pre-office conduct.

Both of us were wrong.  In an op-ed in today’s New York Times, Congressman Adam Schiff recalls his experience as a member of the House Judiciary Committee in 2010 when it voted to recommend impeachment of  U.S. District Judge Thomas Porteous.  He notes that one of the articles of impeachment approved by the House and later the Senate alleged corrupt behavior while Porteous was a state judge and before he took the federal bench.

As Congressman Schiff observed, “In voting overwhelmingly to convict Judge Porteous on every count, the Senate established the precedent that a federal official can be removed for conduct committed before assuming office.”

Precedent in federal impeachment is a peculiar animal.  The process lies entirely within the province of Congress, and is generally agreed not to be reviewable by the courts. Therefore, the legal principle of stare decisis — meaning that earlier decisions of appellate courts have some binding effect on judges in later cases — doesn’t apply to federal impeachments.  Each new congress can interpret the impeachment language of the constitution however it chooses, regardless of what previous congresses may have done.  That said, congressmen have tended to look at prior impeachment decisions as guides to appropriate constitutional interpretation.  Therefore, it seems quite likely that the Porteous case will be seen as establishing a meaningful precedent.

This may be of some modest consequence in the case of Governor Greitens.  The standard for impeachment under the Missouri constitution is entirely different than the federal constitution’s famous “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”  And therefore federal practice is of little or no real importance.  Still, Governor Greitens defenders will surely try to use precedent from any source if they think it helps their man.  The impeachment of Judge Porteous takes one possible argument off the table.

The Porteous case is of greater potential importance should Mr. Trump ever face a formal impeachment inquiry.  Inasmuch as the Mueller investigation focuses largely on contacts between Mr. Trump and his associates and agents of Russia prior to Trump’s inauguration, the Porteous precedent places any misbehavior in that period squarely within the purview of the congressional impeachment power.

Impeachment in the states: Missouri governor edition, Part 2

20 Saturday Jan 2018

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By Frank Bowman

In yesterday’s post, I discussed the basics of the impeachment provisions of the Missouri state constitution and how they compare with federal practice.  Today I turn to how Missouri’s rules intersect with the publicly reported facts of Governor Eric Greitens’ sex scandal.

The Basics

To recap, under the Missouri constitution the procedure for impeaching state judges and all elective officials is as follows:

The official must first be impeached by the state House of Representatives. Curiously, the state constitution does not specify a minimum vote threshold for approving articles of impeachment, but presumably, as with federal impeachment, approval requires a majority vote.

Once articles of impeachment are approved by the House, the trial of the allegations is held, not in the state senate, but by judges.  For all officials except members of the supreme court and the governor, impeachments are tried before the supreme court.  Impeachment of the governor or a member of the supreme court is tried to “a special commission of seven eminent jurists to be elected by the senate.”

Article VII, Section 1 of the Missouri constitution lists as impeachable conduct “crimes, misconduct, habitual drunkenness, willful neglect of duty, corruption in office, incompetency, or any offense involving moral turpitude or oppression in office.”  As I discussed in detail in my last post, this apparently very broad standard has been interpreted by the Missouri Supreme Court in Matter of Impeachment of Judith K. Moriarty, 902 S.W.2d 273 (1994), to include only conduct that is a violation of some other law, i.e., some law other than Article VII, Section 1.

The legal violation need not be criminal. Nor does there seem to be a requirement like that in the federal constitution that the impeachable behavior be a “high” or great offense.  Even, as was the case in Moriarty, a minor civil regulatory infraction could apparently suffice. Moreover, it does not appear that the impeached official must have been previously found guilty or adjudged liable by any tribunal other than the impeachment court.

[NOTE: After this article was first posted, an astute reader who worked in the statehouse at the time of the Moriarty impeachment e-mailed me to point out that, prior to her impeachment, Ms. Moriarty was indicted and convicted in Cole County for a misdemeanor election law violation in connection with the same transactions that led to her impeachment. Curiously, however, in its opinion convicting Ms. Moriarty of the articles of impeachment, the Supreme Court never mentions the prior conviction or any criminal infraction.  It merely finds that she knowingly violated the civil election statutes, as alleged by the House.]

Finally, the Missouri Supreme Court held in Moriarty that judges sitting as a court of impeachment should not make political judgments about whether the charged conduct is serious enough to merit removal.  The practical effect of this limitation is that, while judges should not convict in an impeachment case unless the charged conduct violates state law, any proven violation of any state law, however minor, should result in conviction and removal so long as the Missouri House of Representatives deemed the conduct worthy of inclusion in an article of impeachment in the first place.

Is Governor Greitens impeachable?

These ground rules have significant implications for any effort to impeach Governor Greitens.

First, because the governor cannot be impeached unless he somehow violated the law, we must begin by determining whether any of his reported conduct did so.  Here’s a rundown of the major possibilities:

  • Adultery: A surprising number of states still make adultery illegal.  But Missouri is not among them.
  • Sexual offenses or false imprisonment:  Media accounts of the sexual contact between Mr. Greitens and his former hairdresser suggest that it was consensual.  In an interview today, Mr. Greitens resolutely insisted that this was the case. However, the woman’s account of the relationship includes at least one sexual encounter in which she was bound, a point Mr. Greitens has not so far denied. So long as the woman consented to the binding and all sexual contact occurring while she was bound, there would be no crime.  That said, if either the binding or any of the particular kinds of sexual contact that occurred while the woman was bound was non-consensual, the non-consensual behavior could be criminal.  Sexual contact without consent can constitute a series of crimes, ranging in seriousness from the misdemeanor of Sexual Abuse, RSMo 566.101, to felony Second Degree Rape, RSMo 566.031.  Either binding the woman without consent or declining to release her after she withdrew consent could in theory amount to false imprisonment (now known as third degree kidnapping), RSMo 565.130.  It must be emphasized that at this point there is no evidence of anything other than a consensual sexual encounter with somewhat unusual, shall we say, rules of engagement.  And that’s not a crime.
  • Blackmail or extortion: During a conversation with her husband in which she confessed to the affair with Mr. Greitens, the woman asserted that while she was bound, unclothed, and blindfolded, she saw a flash, which she interpreted as Mr. Greitens photographing her. She also said that Greitens threatened to release the photo to the public if she revealed the affair.  Mr. Greitens has denied that he took a picture or threatened to release it. There has been widespread media speculation that this conduct, if proven, might amount to “blackmail.”  The legal difficulty with this speculation is that there is no Missouri crime of blackmail.  If a person threatens public release of embarrassing material unless the victim turns over money or something else of economic value, that constitutes “stealing” by “coercion” – which includes a threat “to expose any person to hatred, contempt or ridicule.”  But there is no allegation here that Mr. Greitens sought money or anything else of economic value. Similarly, Missouri has no extortion statute.
  • “Revenge porn”: Some jurisdictions make it an offense to release publicly indecent images of another person without consent.  But Missouri has no such statute. And Mr. Greitens released nothing.
  • Invasion of privacy (the alleged picture):  Regardless of whether Mr. Greitens committed any crime akin to blackmail, if he simply took a picture, without the woman’s consent and while she was fully or partially unclothed, that would be a plain violation of Missouri’s invasion of privacy statute, RSMo 565.252.
  • Tampering with physical evidence: If the alleged photograph was ever taken, it has not surfaced, and the woman in the case says that Mr. Greitens told her he erased / destroyed the picture. However, if there was a picture and Mr. Greitens erased it for the purpose of preventing its disclosure in any “official proceeding or investigation,” that would be the crime of tampering with physical evidence, RSMo 575.100. Of course, if such a picture once existed, but Mr. Greitens destroyed it either out of remorse for his bad behavior or to prevent its discovery by, say, his wife, that would be no crime.

The bottom line here is that, if the woman is telling the truth, Mr. Greitens committed at least one crime under Missouri law – invasion of privacy for taking a non-consensual nude photograph.  The offense is only a misdemeanor, but as noted above, Missouri’s impeachment provisions set no minimum level of severity for impeachable offenses.

The most obvious impediment to proving conclusively that Mr. Greitens violated the invasion of privacy statute is the absence of the alleged photograph.  That said, even in ordinary criminal cases, physical evidence is not necessary to establish contested facts.  In criminal court, Mr. Greitens could be charged with and convicted of invasion of privacy purely on the testimony of the woman in the case.  As a practical matter, this would require her cooperation (trying to prove the case with only her taped statement to her husband would probably run afoul of the rules of evidence). But if she testified consistently with her taped statement, nothing would prevent a judge or jury from convicting Mr. Greitens because they believed her story and not his denials.

The same is true of an impeachment proceeding.  The Missouri House of Representatives could frame an article of impeachment based on violation of the invasion of privacy statute and the panel of judges appointed to hear the matter could convict the governor because they found her more credible than him. That said, without some corroboration that a photo ever existed, it seems somewhat improbable that either a prosecutor or the House of Representatives would proceed.

The most interesting legal question an impeachment case for invasion of privacy would present is whether a state official can be impeached for conduct that occurred before he took office.  The Missouri constitution doesn’t address this issue.  And the final intriguing twist on the matter is that we cannot be sure that the issue is what lawyers call “justiciable.”  In other words, the Missouri constitution delegates the task of trying impeachment of a governor to a special commission of judges appointed by the state senate.  In the federal system, the decision of the U.S. Senate on whether or not to convict an impeached officer is generally understood not to be reviewable by the courts. The Missouri constitution certainly implies that the decision of the special commission is final, but inasmuch as no such commission has ever been convened, we cannot know whether its decision would be deemed final by the regular courts.

As a final note, I have not discussed here the fact that the FBI is also apparently taking a preliminary look at this case.  I may return in a later post to consider whether any federal statute could possibly have been violated and whether a violation of federal law would be grounds for impeachment under the Missouri constitution.

Frank Bowman

 

Impeachment in the states: Missouri governor edition, Part I

19 Friday Jan 2018

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By Frank Bowman

Here in the Show-Me State, we have been granted a temporary reprieve from the feverish national focus on all things Trump by news of the sexual peccadillos of our recently-elected governor, Eric Greitens. As has now been reported across the nation, on Wednesday, January 10, shortly after his State of the State address, Governor Greitens released a statement admitting to a extramarital sexual affair with his former hairdresser back in 2015.

The admission came in anticipation of impending media reports alleging not only that there were one or more sexual encounters between the hairdresser and Mr. Greitens, but that on one occasion Mr. Greitens took a picture of the woman while she was bound and in a state of full or partial undress and then threatened to release the picture publicly if she were ever to speak about the affair. The reports were made all the juicier by the fact that the woman’s former husband secretly recorded her tearful confession to the affair and released the recording to the media.

In his statement, Mr. Greitens admitted the sex, but denied that he had either taken a picture of the woman en déshabillé or threatened to release such a picture to maintain her silence.

Political reaction to these revelations has been swift and somewhat surprisingly severe given that Mr. Greitens is a first-term Republican governor often touted as a rising political star in a state where Republicans hold all but one state-wide office and supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. Democrats immediately called for Mr. Greitens’ resignation, as have multiple Republican legislators. Even Republicans who haven’t gone that far seem, at best, to be withholding judgment pending the outcome of a criminal investigation by the St. Louis Circuit Attorney (and possibly one by the FBI).  One Republican state senator, Gary Romine, said that if investigations into Mr. Greitens’ behavior do not exonerate him, he should “resign or face impeachment.”

Naturally, as soon as I read the word “impeachment,” I perked up like a foxhound when the Master of the Hunt yells “Talley Ho!”  What follows is a two-part look at the law governing impeachment of Missouri state officials, a comparison of Missouri law to federal practice, and a preview of the particular issues an effort to impeach Mr. Greitens would present given the current state of the evidence.

Impeachment in Missouri

Article VII, Sections 1 and 2 of the Missouri constitution state:

Section 1. All elective executive officials of the state, and judges of the supreme court, courts of appeals and circuit courts shall be liable to impeachment for crimes, misconduct, habitual drunkenness, willful neglect of duty, corruption in office, incompetency, or any offense involving moral turpitude or oppression in office.

Section 2. The house of representatives shall have the sole power of impeachment. All impeachments shall be tried before the supreme court, except that the governor or a member of the supreme court shall be tried by a special commission of seven eminent jurists to be elected by the senate. The supreme court or special commission shall take an oath to try impartially the person impeached, and no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of five-sevenths of the court or special commission.

The most obvious difference between federal and state impeachment procedure is that, while in both systems the house of representatives impeaches the officer, i.e., specifies the charges against the accused, in Missouri the state supreme court, rather than the senate, tries the case. That is, the Missouri Supreme Court, not the Missouri senate, decides whether the allegations in the bill of impeachment are proven and thus whether the officer ought to be removed.  The way the Missouri Supreme Court has interpreted its function materially alters the Missouri impeachment process.

In the federal system, the president may be impeached for serious crimes (although there is disagreement about which ones) and for very serious non-criminal misconduct either in relation to the office or of a personal sort that undermines the president’s legitimacy. Most scholars would agree that, under the federal constitution, the president ought not be impeached for minor crimes (and perhaps not even for serious crimes like perjury if unrelated to his official duties) or for laziness, ineptitude, or pursuing political objectives contrary to those of the legislative majority.

Critically, all informed observers of the federal impeachment process agree that both the decision by the House about which behavior is impeachable and the subsequent decision by Senate about whether to convict and remove the accused are to a significant degree “political.”  As Alexander Hamilton famously said in Federalist #65, impeachable offenses “are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

The concededly political character of the federal impeachment process shapes the essential nature of the decision-making process.  Both the House and Senate are called upon not merely to decide the truth of factual allegations against the president, but to judge whether the conduct is of a nature that merits removal of the nation’s chief executive officer.  The second choice is a political judgment which the Framers consciously placed in the hands of two political bodies.

The Missouri constitution originally consigned the trial of impeachments to the state senate.  But in the 1940’s (perhaps in response to a case where the senate refused to convict a former senator whose factual guilt was patent), the constitution was amended to institute the present arrangement assigning impeachment trials to the state supreme court. The apparent purpose of the change was to eliminate politics from the last stage of the impeachment process, but as is so often true, this benevolent-sounding objective created a new complication.

In theory, courts are not supposed to be political bodies.  In theory, they are limited to deciding what the law is, whether facts are proven, and whether proven facts fall within the ambit of the law. Of course, any serious student of courts realizes that politics in the broad sense affects judicial decisions at every level. Judges unavoidably bring their own philosophical predilections to deciding both law and facts, and perhaps more importantly, common law judging has always had a public policy component.  Nonetheless, judges traditionally shun explicitly political judgments – such as whether removal of a particular executive branch official would or would not be beneficial to the commonweal.

This judicial discomfort manifested itself in the only Missouri impeachment case to arise after the constitution was amended to give the responsibility of trying impeachments to the supreme court. The case, Matter of Impeachment of Judith K. Moriarty, 902 S.W.2d 273 (1994), arose from the impeachment of the Missouri Secretary of State for “knowingly allow[ing] the signature of her son as candidate or of her administrative aide or both to be placed on an unsigned declaration of candidacy [for public office] so that declaration falsely declared that the son had appeared in presence of aide to declare for office within the time provided for by statute.”

The Missouri Supreme Court found that Ms. Moriarty did what the articles of impeachment charged, thus removing her from office. The interesting part is the court’s explanation of its role in the impeachment process. The court began by contrasting the traditional impeachment system in which the house impeaches and the senate tries the accused with the Missouri system of trial by supreme court:

An impeachment is thus a judgment by the House of Representatives—one of the popularly-elected, representative bodies of the people’s General Assembly—that an officer of the state has committed acts such that, were an election held, the people would not permit the impeached officeholder to remain in office. When a Senate determines whether to convict under articles of impeachment, the vote affirms or rejects the judgment of the House. Under this system, the possibility exists that the House may impeach and the Senate may convict an official for purely political reasons, though they clothe their charges with constitutional language like “misconduct.”

Missouri’s constitutional provision is a clear acknowledgment that the trial of impeachment charges is essentially judicial in character and is not a political function. This Court can convict only where there is actual misconduct as the law defines it. “Misconduct” means doing an unlawful act, doing a lawful act in an unlawful manner, or failing to perform an act required by law. It does not include errors in judgment, acts done in good faith, or good faith exercise of discretion.

This passage is remarkable in several respects.

First, it offers a distorted interpretation of the standard for defining an impeachable offense in federal and state systems in which legislators both formulate and try the articles of impeachment. The court opines that in such systems legislators are supposed to engage in a sort of mass mind-reading exercise assessing the probable electoral reaction of the public to the charged conduct. I confess to thinking this assessment misguided. In the federal system, at least, it is quite clear that senators are intended to exercise independent judgment, and that they should not decline to convict an office holder merely because they think the public might re-elect him despite constitutionally obnoxious conduct.  Were that the case, no demagogue could ever be impeached so long as he retained the probable support of the mob.

Moreover, when the Missouri court disparages senate impeachment trials on the ground that an officeholder may be convicted “for purely political reasons,” it betrays a crabbed and historically inaccurate view of what Founders like Hamilton meant by “political.”  For Hamilton and others of his generation, the term “political” ran far beyond narrowly partisan considerations to broad considerations of constitutional balance and societal good.  For them, impeachment was “political” because it demanded the exercise of sound judgment about whether removing a particular officer for particular conduct protected or disserved republican government.

More important from Governor Greitens’ standpoint is the court’s holding that, because judges and not legislators try Missouri impeachments, there can be a conviction only:

… where there is actual misconduct as the law defines it. ‘Misconduct’ means doing an unlawful act, doing a lawful act in an unlawful manner, or failing to perform an act required by law. It does not include errors in judgment, acts done in good faith, or good faith exercise of discretion.

This is huge because it markedly narrows the definition of impeachable conduct.  Indeed, the result is to judicially amend the Missouri constitution.  Recall that Article VII, Section 1 of the Missouri constitution says that officials may be impeached for “crimes, misconduct, habitual drunkenness, willful neglect of duty, corruption in office, incompetency, or any offense involving moral turpitude or oppression in office.”

Some of the items on this list obviously do refer to illegal conduct, notably “crimes … corruption in office, [and] any offense involving moral turpitude or oppression in office.” On the other hand, the constitutional text pretty plainly contemplates impeachment for lots of behavior that violates no other law. For example, neither “habitual drunkenness” nor “incompetency” is illegal.  Nor is either “willful neglect of duty” or “misconduct” necessarily a legal infraction.

To maintain its preferred self-conception of non-political arbiter of facts, the Missouri Supreme Court imposed a limiting construction on the constitutional term “misconduct” that requires the impeached official to have violated some other law.  (For you law geeks in the audience, it does so by the extremely dubious expedient of adopting its definition of “misconduct” from a Tennessee case construing the common law crime of “official misconduct,” an offense which exists nowhere in Missouri law.” Mid–South Indoor Horse Racing, Inc. v. Tennessee State Racing Commission,798 S.W.2d 531, 538 (Tenn.App.1990).)

Notably, the laws the Court found Ms. Moriarty to have violated were simply statutory rules for proper filing of candidacy for office.  Failing to perform the duties prescribed in these sections was apparently chargeable as a misdemeanor (perhaps under RSMo 115.641).  Moreover, it appears that, prior to the impeachment proceeding, Ms. Moriarty was charged in Cole County and convicted of such a misdemeanor for her conduct.  But curiously, the Missouri Supreme Court made no reference in its opinion either to the Cole County proceeding or to any violation of criminal law.  The bottom line of Moriarty seems to be that, on the one hand, the Supreme Court will not convict in an impeachment case unless the charged conduct violates state law, but on the other hand, violation of any state law, however minor, will result in conviction and removal so long as the Missouri House of Representatives deems it impeachable.

One sympathizes with Court’s reluctance to stray from its traditional judicial role, but the result is a markedly strained reading of the Missouri constitution — and one that could have considerable impact on any effort to impeach Governor Greitens.

I will address the specifics of the Greitens case in my next post.

Frank Bowman