Supreme Court Justice Thomas Omits $600k of Wife's Income

http://www.dmcantor.com/blog Things are never dull around here and today's post is quite the whopper. As reported last month it looks like Clarence Thomas, US Supreme Court Justice for over 20 years, has failed to report his wife's six figure income for over 5 years. Added up the total of omitted taxable income comes to almost $700k for Virginia Thomas' income from lobbying for the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. David M Cantor, a Phoenix Arizona DUI Attorney, gives his point of view and discusses the LA Time's article in todays video.

As David mentions the experts that were interviewed for this story have varying takes on what this means and what should happen next. On the one hand Stephen Gillers, a professor at NYU School of Law, explains that by law Federal judges must disclose the source of their spouses income. The idea here is to have transparency for high level judges to see how they might be influenced. Mr. Gillers points out that this "could not have been an oversight."

The other expert Steven Lubet, an expert on judicial ethics at Northwestern University School of Law, feels that this will likely not result in any type of penalty based on past cases. At worst Thomas might be looking at a Civil penalty.

Since this story ran Justice Thomas has updates his tax forms to accurately report his wife's source of invome. David M Cantor feels that this should be looked into a little more carefully due to the special nature of the US Supreme Court. The reason for this is because generally when their is an impropriety with a Judge a presiding Judge is brought in to determine the degree of impropriety and handle the situation. This is a bit different when we are dealing with a US Supreme Court Justice as the only Judge who can decide if their conduct is inappropriate is that same judge.

So the only person who can decide if Clarence Thomas is in an inappropriate position to rule on a case is Clarence Thomas. Now we have a situation where Justice Thomas has been caught hiding the nature of his wife's income source from a conservative think tank who lobbies for cases that come to the Supreme Court. Is this the best way to handle such an issue? What do you think?

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News & Politics

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• clarence thomas
• supreme court
• justice
• judge
• virginia thomas
• tax omission