NCLA to SC Admin. Court: Vacate Appraiser’s Sanctions After Years of Delay and Juryless Agency Proceeding
Washington, DC, Nov. 02, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today, the New Civil Liberties Alliance asked the South Carolina Administrative Law Court to reconsider its decision affirming the South Carolina Real Estate Appraisers Board’s unlawful disciplinary sanctions on residential appraiser Joseph Kirton in Kirton v. South Carolina Dept. of Labor. The sanctions stemmed from an appraisal performed in 2021—over four years before the Board finally held a disciplinary hearing. After years of unexplained delay, the Board prosecuted Mr. Kirton 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 a state agency’s regulatory authority does not allow it to disregard the constitutional rights of the people it regulates.
The Board threatened Mr. Kirton with career-burdening sanctions and substantial civil penalties through negligence-based charges. NCLA argues that the Board deprived him of his right to a jury trial on those charges, in violation of both federal and state constitutional protections and procedural safeguards. The Board denied Mr. Kirton an impartial adjudication by reviewing the allegations in a meeting excluding him, authorizing the prosecution, issuing the formal complaint against him, and sitting in judgment of the charges.
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 rejected Mr. Kirton’s challenges to its unexplained delay in pursuing disciplinary charges, denied him access to complaint-file and delay-related records that state appraiser regulators are required to maintain, and proceeded as though its authority to prosecute licensed professionals was subject to no time limitation. It then barred Mr. Kirton from questioning the reasons for that delay at the hearing.
The Board denied Mr. Kirton discovery and refused to continue the hearing to allow him to prepare a meaningful defense. It allowed the State to proceed with a substitute investigator who had not participated in the investigation, reviewed Mr. Kirton’s work file, or spoken with the original investigator. The substitute’s findings and conclusions were not disclosed to Mr. Kirton until the hearing, where she introduced new opinions and evidence.
The Board sanctioned Mr. Kirton under appraisal standards it had not adopted at the time that he performed the appraisal. Its Final Order relied in part on a new theory of negligence that had never been alleged in the formal complaint or investigated as a basis for discipline—and that surfaced for the first time during the Board’s own questioning near the end of the hearing, after the State had rested its case.
Last month, the Court affirmed the Final Order, improperly treating evidence supporting aspects of the Board’s disciplinary findings as dispositive of Mr. Kirton’s separate constitutional and statutory challenges. But evidence supporting the Board’s factual findings does not establish that the proceedings themselves complied with constitutional and statutory requirements.
NCLA released the following statements:
“The State’s authority to regulate a profession is not a blank check to investigate, prosecute, and punish without meaningful constitutional constraints. Mr. Kirton’s case exemplifies the dangers of a system in which regulatory agencies hold all the cards, change the rules at the eleventh hour, and then insist that the outcome somehow proves that the process was fair.”
— Casey Norman, Litigation Counsel, NCLA
“The court should reconsider its decision and hold that state regulatory agencies cannot systematically strip South Carolina appraisers like our client of their constitutional rights to jury trials and due process of law.”
— 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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