Opinion ID: 1156349
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Doctrine of Beneficial Transferability Revisited

Text: Now we turn our attention to the present case of Gloria DePond v. Hon. Glen B. Gainer, Jr., Auditor of West Virginia. This opinion immediately starts out with the litany concerning what is credited judicial service. What is actually credited is not necessarily set out in the text, but in footnote 1. The footnote reiterates the legal doctrine of transferability and points out that because of In re Dostert judges are entitled to judicial credit for full or part-time governmental service without the liabilities for that service as imposed on those members of the government who participate in the Public Employees Retirement System. In order to give some logic to this grab of credited service, the majority relies again, as it did in Dostert, on the fact that W.Va.Code § 5-10-2 (1985) holds that certain elected officials, i.e., legislators, county commissioners, city councilmen, and others are entitled to count a full year for the time that they serve as an elected official. This is statutory and carries with it certain requirements and limitations, and it has been approved by this Court in Campbell v. Kelly, supra . Only certain elected and appointed officials are included in the statutory language, and other public employees do not receive that credit. The breakdown in the majority opinion granting this credit to judges is the fact that those elected officials who get full-time credit for their elective office do not get full-time credit for part-time service in other public service prior to or after their elective tenure, but must work ten months in any one year to get a full year's credit. Yet we have seen by the majority opinions in Dostert and DePond a sweeping grant of credited service for judges unlike that granted other public employees, including those elected. There is no authority for this rationale. Note 4 of DePond goes on at great length about the benefit of the Public Employees Retirement System compared to the Judicial Retirement System, as did a number of footnotes in Dostert. I assume that this recitation is intended to show how unjust the legislature has been to judges. That is about as far removed from the facts as anything could be, because provisions in the Public Employees Retirement System allowed judges to join the system to give them some retirement protection until such time as they were able to qualify under the Judicial Retirement System. It is not as if they were left with no retirement, but once joining the Public Employees Retirement System they were bound by the rules and regulations thereof. Certainly, once they qualified for the judicial system they immediately switched to that system, because it did not have the restrictions of the Public Employees Retirement System of being computed on the basis of salary and number of years service to the government. Instead, judges would join the judicial system and have their pension based on 75% of their salary at the date of retirement with a continuing increase in that pension as the salary increased except as provided in W.Va.Code § 51-9-6(c) (1981). So who are we crying for? The judges? I would hope not. They have the best of both worlds. Public employees? Certainly, because they were not fortunate enough to be able to choose between two retirement systems. The majority opinion states as follows: In this regard, the West Virginia Judicial Association, as amicus curiae on behalf of the petitioner, correctly notes the importance of stare decisis to judges who have become members of the judges retirement system in reliance upon this settled law. Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines stare decisis as follows: To abide by or adhere to decided cases. It is quite obvious that stare decisis does not apply in the DePond case. Apparently the law was not settled, as DePond expands upon Dostert. If the law was settled there would be no reason to expand upon what was said in Dostert. Further, the only cases concerning the Judicial Retirement System as now envisioned are Dostert, Oakley [30] and DePond, and only two of the present members of this Court participated in the majority opinion in Dostert and none participated in Oakley. If the stare decisis law is from these cases, it is quite apparent that there is no settled law in this field as of this date.