US Supreme Court conservative majority thwarts SEC!
In between making decisions that put Donald Trump further removed from the hand of justice, the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court have found time to ‘pull the handbrake’ on the Security and Exchange Commission’s long-standing practice of issuing civil penalty notices via its in-house tribunals. The conservative majority unanimously decided that this was a violation of the right to a jury trial under the 7th Amendment to the US Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts found that the power to impose penalties through administrative tribunals was not a public right belonging to government but rather involved the exercise of a ‘private right’, for which a defendant was entitled to a jury trial before a ‘neutral’ adjudicator. The minority judges unanimously slammed this decision as an erosion of the government’s power to protect the public.
It seems bizarre that a tribunal seeking to impose a civil penalty for a securities market offence would not be seen to be upholding the public interest to be protected from such breaches.