Blankenship conviction stands

The U.S. Supreme Court let stand the conviction of Don Blankenship -- paid $17.8 million in 2009, the highest in the coal industry, and another $27.2 million at his 2009 retirement -- for orchestrating safety violations that led to the 2010 deaths of 29 miners at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine in Whitesville, Raleigh County, West Virginia.

Don Blankenship

Blankenship, who influenced state politics by donating millions of dollars to the Republican Party and State Supreme Court candidates, spent a year in Federal Correctional Institution Taft just north of Los Angeles.

He wanted his conviction vacated.

After 2008 photos of Blankenship vacationing on the French Riviera with West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Spike Maynard while Massey Energy had a case pending before that court appeared in the New York Times, Justice Maynard lost his bid for re-election in the next primary.

When groundwater pollution from coal slurry injection by Massey Energy contaminated wells around Blankenship's home, Massey Energy paid to build a water line to his home from a neighboring town and Blankenship didn’t tell his neighbors the source of their homes’ contamination.

A Blankenship employee, Deborah May, was awarded unemployment by the West Virginia Supreme Court after testifying that Blankenship grabbed her, threw food at her over a wrong fast-food order and tore a tie rack and coat hanger out of the closet when she forgot to leave a hangar out for his coat. The court ruled her leaving was justified.

The Matewan High and Marshall University graduate was born in Stopover, Kentucky and raised in Delorme, West Virginia.