South Carolina's magistrate judges are a clown-car of corrupt cronies, but they get to put people in jail

South Carolina's magistrate judge system is a holdover from aristocratic England, where landowners would appoint someone with "common sense" to hear legal cases, without any legal training or oversight -- which is how it works in South Carolina today, where 800,000+ criminal and civil cases are heard by magistrates who are not required to have a background in law, not required to divulge official sanctions for ethical violations, and not overseen in any meaningful way as they fine, jail and censure people who are often not represented by counsel nor permitted to speak in their own defense.

The SC system nominally gives the governor final say in magistrate appointments, but a former governor told Propublica that the senate actually appoints the judges, and any governor who tried to thwart the senate's picks would have their administration sabotaged.

The senate appointments are a litany of politically connected cronies, family members, and blundering fools (sometimes all three!). What's more, these magistrates sail through their reappointments when their terms are up, because the reappointment process does not require magistrates to disclose any sanctions they've received from the Office of Disciplinary Counsel (which sanctions magistrates, lawyers and judges) -- though they are required to disclose sanctions from the State Ethics Commission (which does not oversee magistrates and is not permitted to sanction them).

If you're a magistrate whose conduct is so egregious that you would likely fail the rubberstamp reappointment process, you can still stay in office by claiming "holdover" status, which is supposed to allow magistrates to serve briefly after their terms expire while paperwork is processed or new delegations are seated. Read the rest