Opinion ID: 235069
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Unreliability of the Examiner's Report.

Text: 36 Reverting now to our statement in connection with the Board's findings of interference and restraint that the Examiner's report and the Board's findings based thereon are not entitled to the usual presumption of correctness, we do not intend to reflect on the competency of the examiner on less provocative occasions. Jewell Sanders was not proved to have deliberately given false testimony until after the hearing closed. A careful comparison of the report with the evidence leaves us in no doubt that the examiner, relying on her testimony, was carried away with his justified wrath toward Fier, which he mistook for righteous indignation toward all of the respondents. We have heretofore called attention to the intemperate language of the report and to the Examiner's rejection of uncontradicted evidence for the respondent. This Court adheres to what was so well said for it by its present Chief Judge in N. L. R. B. v. Phelps, 136 F.2d 562, 563, 564: 37    a fair trial by an unbiased and non-partisan trier of the facts is of the essence of the adjudicatory process as well when the judging is done in an administrative proceeding by an administrative functionary as when it is done in a court by a judge. Indeed, if there is any difference, the rigidity of the requirement that the trier be impartial and unconcerned in the result applies more strictly to an administrative adjudication where many of the safeguards which have been thrown around court proceedings have, in the interest of expedition and a supposed administrative efficiency been relaxed. Nor will the fact that an examination of the record shows that there was evidence which would support the judgment, at all save a trial from the charge of unfairness, for when the fault of bias and prejudice in a judge first rears its ugly head, its effect remains throughout the whole proceeding. Once partiality appears, and particularly when, though challenged, it is unrelieved against, it taints and vitiates all of the proceedings, and no judgment based upon them may stand. 38 See also, Local No. 3, United Packing-house Workers of America v. N. L. R. B., 8 Cir., 210 F.2d 325, 329, 330. 39 For that reason, that part of the Board's order based on findings of interference and restraint in violation of Section 8(a) (1), along with all other parts, must be denied enforcement. 40 Enforcement denied.