Court rejects request to disqualify judge

MSU and The State News met in their latest contest at the Ingham County Circuit Court on Wednesday, when an effort to disqualify its two-and-a-half-year-old case was denied.

State News lawyer Herschel Fink filed the motion to disqualify the case based on a possible bias from Judge Joyce Draganchuk, who originally heard the case in 2006.

The case began after a dispute regarding a Freedom of Information Act, when MSU would not release an incident report to the State News after a February 2006 assault in South Hubbard Hall.

Since then, Fink and MSU’s lawyers have met multiple times in both the Michigan Supreme Court and the circuit court.

Fink filed his motion to disqualify the case because of a conversation he had with Draganchuk, he said.

“It’s a difficult motion, it’s not easy to ask a judge to disqualify him or herself because of bias,” Fink said.

When the case was originally heard, another lawyer was filling in for Fink, and Fink later commented to Draganchuk that the outcome might have been different if he had been in court, he said.

The judge was hostile when she responded that his presence would not have changed the outcome, Fink said.

But the conversation should never have happened, MSU assistant attorney Michael Kiley said.

“Lawyers who play by the rules know that you do not talk to a judge about a case when it is still a live case,” he said.

Kiley said there was nothing to suggest bias by Draganchuk.

“It was obvious that the motion was not supported by anything that had any meat on it,” Kiley said.

Draganchuk said she had a clear memory of the conversation, and that her intentions were not hostile.

“What my response was supposed to convey was that I do not decide cases based on personalities,” she said.

This was the first such motion Fink has filed in 36 years of practice, he said.

“I don’t file motions that I don’t think are well-grounded,” he said.

Fink plans to file an appeal of Draganchuk’s decision with Chief Judge William Collette.

“I have an obligation to protect my client’s interest, and the best way to do that is to ask for another judge to hear the matter,” Fink said.

Published on Wednesday, August 27, 2008