Judicial Candidates Made Numerous Prohibited Donations

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Before running for Wayne County Superior Court judge, Billy Strickland II was a bull rider turned farmer turned beaver trapper turned lawyer. He was also a frequent political donor.

Strickland’s financial contributions to Republican candidates continued after he filed to run for office in December 2023, records compiled by Open Secrets show. In 2024, he gave more than $15,000 to support presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Donald Trump, gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, and Hal Weatherman, who ran for lieutenant governor.

In the name of protecting the impartiality, integrity, and independence of the judiciary, the North Carolina Code of Judicial Conduct prohibits such giving. But an analysis by The Assembly finds it’s a prohibition many judges and candidates aren’t following. 

Six other attorneys running for judicial office and eight sitting judges also made recent political donations, according to Open Secrets data. One district court judge in the Sandhills, Steve Bibey, made at least nine donations between 2014, the year he was first elected to the bench, and November 2023. (He was a judicial candidate or judge for most of that time—he lost his 2018 re-election but won again in 2020.)

The Judicial Standards Commission enforces the code of conduct by offering advice and training to judges, investigating citizen complaints, and, in some cases, issuing private “letters of caution” or recommending that the state Supreme Court take public disciplinary action. While part of its mandate is to increase public awareness of the ethical obligations of judges, the commission’s executive director, Brittany Pinkham, declined to discuss the history of the prohibition on political donations or its enforcement.

State law makes North Carolina one of the most secretive states in the nation when it comes to disciplining judges, according to data from the National Center for State Courts’ Center for Judicial Ethics. All of the commission’s proceedings and records are confidential unless the state Supreme Court issues an order of public discipline, or suspends or removes a judge.

It wasn’t this way prior to 2013, when the Republican-led state legislature passed a bill that effectively pulled the curtain down on how the Judicial Standards Commission operates. The commission’s hearings had been open to the public, and information about the proceedings and its recommendations were considered public record. A panel of six Court of Appeals judges considered complaints about state Supreme Court justices. 

Now, commission hearings and records are no longer public, and the state Supreme Court has the sole authority to issue public discipline. (It suspended one judge last year. In some years, it has issued as many as three disciplinary orders; in other years, none.)

Judicial candidates who are not already on the bench are required by the North Carolina State Bar to follow the Code of Judicial Conduct. The bar is responsible for handling any disciplinary action related to their political donations. But Katherine Jean, counsel to the bar since 2005, told The Assembly she doesn’t recall the issue ever having come up.

Ellen Murphy, a Wake Forest University law professor who sits on the bar’s ethics committee, called the pattern of donations that The Assembly uncovered “disappointing.” 

“The duty of a judge is to maintain the impartiality of the judiciary and the perception of it,” she said. “If the public perceives the judiciary as politicized, it is not a successful institution, in my opinion.”

Murphy said she found the evidence of repeat donations by some sitting judges especially troubling: “A history of improper donations over a period of years is indicative of a lack of enforcement.”

“If the public perceives the judiciary as politicized, it is not a successful institution, in my opinion.”

Ellen Murphy, Wake Forest University

Meanwhile, public confidence in the courts is in precipitous decline across the country, polling shows. Experts describe a trend toward increased politicization of the courts over the past 15 or so years.

Charles Geyh, a professor of law at Indiana University who specializes in judicial ethics, said as judicial elections have gotten more partisan and more fractious, “the pretext that judges are different, that they are not like other political candidates when they run for office, has been harder and harder to preserve.”

‘Maybe Send a Big Star and an Asterisk’

Though Strickland made his first run for judicial office this year, he has twice before appeared on the ballot. 

He ran for a seat in the state Senate in 2020 but lost in the Republican primary to Jim Perry.

In 2022, he ran for election to represent the 1st District in the U.S. House of Representatives but lost the primary to Sandy Smith. (He came in third in an eight-way race.)

An attorney with his own practice in Goldsboro since 2008, Strickland told The Assembly he wasn’t aware that judicial candidates were barred from donating to other candidates. 

He learned when he attended a September forum of the Goldsboro Alumnae Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and the Goldsboro Wayne Branch of the NAACP, he said. His opponent, District Court Judge Ericka James, used the first question to highlight his political donations.

“My opponent immediately attacked me about being unethical,” Strickland said. “I was just floored.”

The James campaign subsequently released a TV ad accusing Strickland of ethics violations.

“Wayne County residents deserve judges who are focused on the law—not politics,” James said in a news release announcing the ad. “Unfortunately, Mr. Strickland has it backwards. He is so focused on cultivating his partisan political relationships that he is violating the ethical rules for judicial candidates. Mr. Strickland is asking voters to trust him to administer justice as he cannot follow judicial campaign rules himself.”

She later filed a complaint against him with the bar, Strickland said.

Judicial candidates do not get special training from the state Board of Elections, the bar, or the Judicial Standards Commission when they launch their campaigns. Strickland said he read the Code of Judicial Conduct but skimmed past the sentence about political contributions. 

“I think just saying, ‘Read the bar opinions and judicial canons’ to political candidates is overly broad,” he said. “Maybe when people sign up, maybe send a big star and an asterisk.”

“Obviously, I did not know this was a rule,” he added. Once he found out, he asked the campaigns to return the contributions. “We actually had almost all the campaigns reimburse us.”

Other judicial candidates The Assembly spoke with about their political donations responded similarly. 

“I didn’t know all the rules that applied as far as judicial standards and whatnot,” said Jamal Summey, who made four donations to Democratic candidates totaling $775 while campaigning in 2024 for a district court seat in Bertie, Halifax, Hertford, and Northampton counties.

As he spoke to a reporter, he was driving away from his first ethics training as a newly elected judge. 

“I probably need to call Judicial Standards and see what else I need to do,” he said.

To Geyh, the Indiana University law professor, the “How was I to know?” argument is understandable—up to a point. 

But North Carolina attorneys must pass a test that covers the ethics provision the candidates apparently overlooked, he said. “It strikes me as being very similar to someone saying, ‘How was I to know that burglary was a crime?’

A Repeat Donor

The Assembly found a similar rate of political donations among Republican and Democratic judicial candidates. 

Strickland, who was elected a Superior Court judge as a Republican, outpaced all other candidates in giving this election cycle. No others donated more than $1,000, according to Open Secrets. 

Bibey, a district court judge in Montgomery, Moore, and Randolph counties, stood out for having made repeated political donations as a judicial candidate or judge.

His first donation dates to 2013, the year before he first ran for judicial office. Open Secrets shows donations to candidates in 2014, 2016, 2019, and 2023. He also made donations to the N.C. GOP, which is permitted under the judicial code.

When Bibey donated to Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign in April 2023, according to the data his profession was listed as judge.

A man who answered a phone number associated with Bibey’s campaign denied making the contributions. The man hung up when asked whether he was Bibey.

Southern Pines newspaper The Pilot endorsed Bibey, a U.S. Air Force veteran and former Moore County law enforcement officer, in his 2014 run against an incumbent district court judge but concluded its editorial with some criticism. 

“We would feel even better about recommending Bibey if he hadn’t been campaigning in such an openly partisan fashion,” the editorial board wrote. “This kind of thing happens widely, but the state should crack down on it.”

Bibey ran unopposed last November. 

Competing Principles

The Judicial Standards Commission operates in tricky legal territory. It has to balance judges’ right to free speech with the public policy goal of delivering impartial justice. 

The U.S. Supreme Court set off a wave of litigation over how to achieve that balance with a 2002 decision that overturned Minnesota’s prohibition on judicial candidates announcing their views on disputed legal and political issues.

In the aftermath, North Carolina’s system for maintaining judicial ethics has been dogged by disputes over what judges can say on political topics.

The commission’s executive director abruptly resigned in 2022 after she distributed a memo interpreting political guidelines for judges. The memo’s reading of the judicial canons threw into question some endorsements made by state Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr. It was swiftly revised. 

“I think just saying, ‘Read the bar opinions and judicial canons’ to political candidates is overly broad.”

Billy Strickland II, Superior Court judge

Lawmakers then changed the composition of the commission, removing the bar’s appointees and replacing them with judges appointed by House and Senate leaders. Critics said they were worried the new structure would make it easier to use the commission to politically attack a judge.

ProPublica reported that the state Supreme Court, which has a Republican majority and oversees the commission, quashed the commission’s recommendations to discipline two GOP judges in fall 2023. Those decisions were likely the only times in more than a decade in which the court didn’t follow the commission’s guidance, the outlet reported.

Justice Anita Earls, one of two Democrats on the state Supreme Court, sued the Judicial Standards Commission in 2023 over its investigation into statements she made to the legal publication Law360. In the interview, she decried the lack of diversity within the state judiciary, spoke about how Chief Justice Paul Newby derailed efforts to fix it, and accused her conservative colleagues of putting politics above the law. The commission alleged that her statements may have violated a provision of the code prohibiting judges from saying anything that could undermine the public’s confidence in the court. Earls said the investigation stifled her free speech, and some of her supporters called the investigation political and racist. (Earls is Black.) 

The commission dropped the complaint, and Earls dismissed the lawsuit in January 2024. 

More recently, Republican state Sen. Buck Newton said he filed a complaint with the Judicial Standards Commission against Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, alleging that she had violated judicial ethics because of statements she made on the campaign trail about abortion. It’s not clear what the status of that complaint is. 

North Carolina goes further than the American Bar Association’s model code in its restrictions on political donations. The ABA recommends setting maximums for contributions to other candidates and organizations.

That difference, especially amid the other ethics controversies, could contribute to the North Carolina commission’s apparent lack of enforcement of its ban on donations to other political candidates, Geyh said. 

“I think there may be room to argue that that would not survive constitutional scrutiny—that it’s not narrowly tailored enough,” he said. 

A candidate might argue, for example, that giving money to Donald Trump while running as a Republican candidate “does not imply that my impartiality is impugned in a way that justifies that kind of restriction on my speech,” he said.

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Carli Brosseau is a reporter at The Assembly. She joined us  from The News & Observer, where she was an investigative reporter. Her work has been honored by the Online News Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors, and published by ProPublica and The New York Times.

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Michael Hewlett is a staff reporter at The Assembly. He was previously the legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. You can reach him at michael@theassemblync.com.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the North Carolina State Bar.