NCLA to SC Admin. Court: Vacate Sanctions on Appraiser After Years-Delayed, Juryless Agency Proceeding
Joseph E. Kirton v. South Carolina Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation and South Carolina Real Estate Appraisers Board
Washington, D.C., May 28, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed its opening brief in Kirton v. South Carolina Dept. of Labor at the South Carolina Administrative Law Court, challenging the South Carolina Real Estate Board’s unlawful sanctions against certified residential appraiser Joseph Kirton. The sanctions stem from an appraisal Mr. Kirton performed in 2021, during the Covid pandemic—more than four years before the Board finally held a disciplinary hearing. After years of unexplained delay, the Board prosecuted him in a juryless, in-house administrative proceeding before the same agency body that had authorized the charges against him. NCLA asks the Administrative Law Court to reverse the Board’s Final Order, vacate the sanctions, and reaffirm that South Carolina agencies must obey the Constitution when they seek to punish the people they regulate.
The Board threatened Mr. Kirton with career-burdening sanctions and civil penalties through negligence-based charges—legal claims that, as both the U.S. Supreme Court and South Carolina Supreme Court have recognized, belong before a jury in a court of law. Yet the Board denied him that right, violating the Seventh and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the South Carolina Constitution, and the state’s Rules of Civil Procedure. The Board also denied him an impartial adjudication by acting as formal accuser, prosecutor, and judge: it reviewed the allegations in a meeting with the investigator and prosecutor that excluded Mr. Kirton, authorized the charges, issued the formal complaint in the Board’s own name, and then sat in judgment of those same charges.
The Board’s multi-year delay compounded the constitutional and procedural defects. Shortly before the November 2025 disciplinary hearing, Mr. Kirton learned that the only investigator who had handled the matter, reviewed the appraisal, and generated the findings underlying the charges would be unavailable for cross-examination. The Board also refused to dismiss charges brought far too late under applicable statutes of limitations and other timeliness requirements. And it denied Mr. Kirton access to complaint-file and delay-related records that state appraiser regulators are required to maintain.
However, the Board did not dismiss the case, permit meaningful discovery, or continue the hearing so Mr. Kirton could prepare a meaningful defense. Instead, it allowed the State to proceed with a substitute investigator who had no firsthand knowledge of the case, personal involvement in the investigation, or overlap with the original investigator. The substitute never reviewed Mr. Kirton’s work file, and her findings and conclusions were not disclosed to Mr. Kirton until the hearing. The Board then denied Mr. Kirton’s requests to exclude that testimony.
The Board sanctioned Mr. Kirton under appraisal standards that it had had not adopted at the time that he performed the appraisal at issue. Those standards were not enacted by South Carolina’s Legislature—or even promulgated by a government body—but by a private organization wielding unconstitutionally delegated power to write binding rules regulating South Carolina appraisers. Incredibly, the Board’s Final Order also relied in part on a theory that was never charged, never investigated as a basis for discipline, and appeared nowhere in the formal complaint, surfacing for the first time during questioning at the disciplinary hearing itself.
NCLA released the following statements:
“Mr. Kirton’s case exemplifies why due process and fundamental constitutional rights, including the right to a jury, matter. These protections are not courtesies that agencies may extend when convenient and disregard when expedient. They are nonnegotiable, constitutional requirements. Mr. Kirton has had the misfortune of experiencing firsthand what happens when the Administrative State treats those requirements as optional.”
— Casey Norman, Litigation Counsel, NCLA
“The South Carolina Constitution honors the sanctity of due process and jury trials every bit as much as our federal constitution does. In our constitutional republic, neither state nor federal officials can punish citizens without first proving their accusations to a jury of peers.”
— Russ Ryan, Senior Litigation Counsel, NCLA
For more information visit the case page here.
ABOUT NCLA
NCLA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State. NCLA’s public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans’ fundamental rights.
Joe Martyak New Civil Liberties Alliance 703-403-1111 joe.martyak@ncla.legal
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