The tenet that every one is entitled to a fair trial forms the bedrock of our justice system. In one of its initial acts, the First Continental Congress forbid federal judges from presiding over trials in which they had a financial interest. Thirty years later, President John Adams expanded this prohibition to include the siblings, spouses, parents and children of judges.

Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft, and later Warren Burger, held that judges who had a pecuniary interest in the outcome of a trial jeopardized public trust in the courts. Strip away that trust, they wrote, and the system ceases to function. The judges understood that the stakes didn’t need to be high to inflict damage. In 1927, Taft heard a case involving the mayor of North College Hill, Ohio, who served as a judge in the village’s liquor court. Under the liquor court’s rules, if the defendant was found guilty, he or she was fined $100. Half of that went into the town’s coffers; the other half went to the court, and included a $12 payment to the judge. In a unanimous opinion, Taft’s argued that once money entered into the judicial process, the appearance of fairness evaporated. “No matter what the evidence against him, he had the right to have an impartial judge,” he wrote.

Speed the clock ahead 80 years. Northern District of Iowa’s Chief Justice Linda R. Reade’s financial disclosure statements show that she and her husband held stock in private, for-profit prisons at the time she took the bench in 2003 until 2011. She is the only judge in the Eighth Circuit with that kind of investment; we have not yet conducted an exhaustive study of judges nationwide, but a preliminary sampling indicates there are very few others. Judge Reade and her husband held the stock at a time when the Bureau of Prisons was under a Department of Justice decree to relieve overcrowding.

Canon Two of The Code of Conduct for United States Judges states that judges “should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities.” There is indeed the appearance of impropriety in Judge Reade’s investments. A judge who is sentencing people to prison doesn’t have the power to determine precisely where a defendant serves time, but at this point private prison beds are an integral part of our prison system; the more prisoners we have in the system, and the longer the sentences they are serving, the more beds are filled. As this story shows, Judge Reade and her husband bought more stock in Corrections Corporation of American (CCA) and in GEO Group, two of the nation’s largest private prison companies, five days before a raid Judge Reade helped to plan in which nearly 400 people were arrested at Agriprocessors. FBI emails and memos obtained in discovery show investigators discussed arresting nearly 1000 workers, more than enough to fill every bed at the CCA facility at Leavenworth, Kan.

We found the evidence of Judge Reade’s investments by chance. They were listed in financial disclosure statements that federal judges are required to make with the Administrative Office of the Courts. We weren’t expecting to find anything in particular; we were just curious about her, and financial information is often revealing. It is why we requested the same public information for the former U. S. Attorneys for the Northern District of Iowa and the chief prosecutors of the criminal division who worked on this case. We are still waiting for a response.

Judge Reade and her husband have sold off their private prison investments, most likely quite profitably. Sholom Rubashkin’s sentence has been commuted; he is now home with this family, 19 years before Judge Reade intended. But this story should not end here. Some states do not require judges to disclose their financial holdings at all, and there is legislation pending in Congress that could make information about federal judges more difficult to obtain.

The United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) keeps sentencing data. Once we learned that Judge Reade and her husband owned stock in for-profit prisons, we wanted to compare her sentencing record with that of other federal judges. We had some evidence that her sentencing was considered harsh. Former Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Myron Bright raised concerns in a 2010 dissenting opinion in U.S. v Edward Frank Brewer, a case in which a drug dealer was sentenced to life in prison. A highway divides Judge Reade’s district from that of the district to the south; Judge Bright noted that the side of the highway a defendant was arrested on seemed to matter when it came to sentencing. “So long as differences in sentencing in the Northern District of Iowa are probably traceable to the location of a highway, the people of Iowa will question the propriety and fairness of sentencing,” he wrote.

The USSC denied our request for sentencing data by judge. Federal judges are public servants, with lifetime, taxpayer-funded job security, but their sentencing statistics are shielded from public view. In light of the fact that at least one federal judge stood to profit from the sentences she pronounced, perhaps that should change.