NC governor vetoes bill that lets chief justice suspend judges without pay

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein on Monday vetoed a bill that would allow the state’s chief justice to suspend trial judges without pay during investigations into their conduct.

Stein, a Democrat, told The News & Observer in a statement that the bill “would have a chilling effect on judicial independence” and said that no other chief justice in the country has such a power.

“Just as the respective leadership in each legislative chamber does not have the power to suspend duly elected legislators, and just as the Governor does not have the power to suspend an elected member of the Council of State, the Chief Justice should not have the power to suspend a trial judge elected by the people,” he said.

Democrats in the Legislature had similar concerns when the bill hit the floor in both chambers.

Currently, judges who are suspended during these kinds of investigations receive pay, lawmakers have said.

The bill would have required the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission to make a recommendation in order for the chief justice to suspend a trial judge during an investigation. Stein called that step “cold comfort” given that appointments to the commission are made almost entirely by the chief justice and legislative leaders.

State Sen. Warren Daniel, a Burke County Republican, said the new powers were necessary because judicial standards investigations can take too long.

“There might be situations when behavior could be egregious enough that, if the proceeding was going to last for a year ... it might be appropriate to go ahead and do this,” he said last month on the Senate floor.

The chief justice is elected into office, and Paul Newby, a Republican who was first elected to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2004, currently holds that title.

The bill also makes tweaks to electronic court filings, as well as to how superior court judges are rotated throughout districts.

The Legislature has adjourned until November, making a veto override unlikely until then. A three-fifths majority is required to override a veto.

Republicans have a supermajority in the state Senate, but House Republicans require at least one Democrat or unaffiliated lawmaker to vote with them to override Stein’s veto. State Rep. Carla Cunningham, a former Democrat who switched to unaffiliated after losing her primary, voted in favor of the bill earlier this month.

House Speaker Destin Hall told reporters that “any bill that’s on the calendar that has been vetoed, we intend to override at some point if we possibly can.”

Democratic opposition to the bill

While the bill was debated on the North Carolina House floor on Aug. 5, House Minority Leader Robert Reives, who also serves as a criminal defense lawyer, said it is “really, really easy for somebody to jump up and say you did something, and you spend a lot of time, effort, and money to prove that you didn’t.”

He said more than a quarter of complaints against judges that go to the Judicial Standards Commission are from criminal defendants.

Durham Democratic state Rep. Marcia Morey, who previously served as a chief district court judge, said during the debate that the provision is not open or transparent and “not the way you do an independent investigation of judges who are coming under the judicial standard review.”

“If anything, we should be making judicial standards a more fair, impartial, neutral, independent body,” she said.

State senators advanced the bill in late July. Wake County Democratic state Sen. Lisa Grafstein said she was concerned about giving a small number of people so much power, and “that we’re doing that at a time when that power is being abused in so many ways.”

Latest in a series of court changes

Republicans’ attempt to grant these new powers to the chief justice is the latest in a long string of efforts to reshape the state’s judicial system.

After Republicans lost their majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2016, the Legislature made all judicial elections partisan.

And in 2023, lawmakers made another change to the law that appeared to specifically benefit Newby. A provision slipped into the state budget raised the mandatory retirement age from 72 to 76 for appellate judges. Newby, whose term ends in 2029, will be 73 by then.

That same budget bill gave legislative leaders more appointments to the Judicial Standards Commission, stripping them away from the State Bar. The bill also gave lawmakers the power to appoint 10 special superior court judges, appointments that had typically been made by the governor.

The last major judicial change came in late 2024, when Republicans passed a massive power shift bill in the final days of their veto-proof supermajority.

That bill, Senate Bill 382, limited the governor’s ability to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals by requiring him to select from a list of three names provided by the political party of the departing judge.

Stein sued over the change and won at the trial court level, but the decision was later reversed by the Court of Appeals. In a 2-1 decision, the panel’s Republican judges ruled that it was within the Legislature’s purview to limit his appointments.

Stein’s case is currently pending before the state Supreme Court.

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