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WEST VIRGINIA RECORD

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Justice Robin Davis gets an ethics pass from her judicial peers

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Ah yes, the old double standard! We've all experienced it: as male or female, black or white, native or immigrant, believer or nonbeliever, liberal or conservative, young or old, tall or short, fat or trim, rich or poor.

Endless are the criteria by which people can be divided. Even when the division is made on the most absurd basis, someone can figure out a way to advantage one party over the other. Sometimes the favored party constitutes a majority, sometimes not.

It may be an elite, a self-proclaimed one.

Yes, we've all experienced the double standard – from both sides, too – and we've all howled the loudest about the unfairness of it all when on the disfavored side, where the sense of injustice is keenest.

Right now, the vast majority of West Virginians are victims of a double standard. We're on the disfavored side of that standard and we should all be howling at the top of our lungs in protest.

Because it isn't fair.

There's an elite in West Virginia and we're not in it. We're not in with the in crowd. There's one standard for us, another for them. One harsh, rigid standard for us – members of the unenlightened out crowd. Another lighter, more flexible standard for them, the anointed few.

One standard for us, another for our alleged superiors. Like Robin Davis.

An attorney appearing in a case before her had purchased a million-dollar jet from her attorney-husband just three years prior to the multimillion-dollar victory she ensured for him in our state Supreme Court.

Not only that, but he and his colleagues had also contributed more than $35,000 to her 2012 reelection campaign.

Lo and behold! The Judicial Investigation Commission has unanimously dismissed the ethics complaint filed against her in this matter.

Justice Davis is supposed to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Did she do so in this instance? Would anyone of us, we presumed inferiors, have gotten a pass if we crossed the double standard line?

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