PA Bill Number: SB945
Title: Consolidating the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L.323, No.130), known as The County Code; and making repeals.
Description: Consolidating the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L.323, No.130), known as The County Code; and making repeals. ...
Last Action: Third consideration and final passage (199-0)
Last Action Date: Apr 17, 2024
Pa. high court: Justices 'disturbed' by reports of Eakin emails :: 10/12/2015
HARRISBURG — Justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said Monday they were “disturbed” by revelations about an alleged email exchange of explicit photos or offensive jokes between one of their colleagues, Justice Michael Eakin, and prosecutors.
The court’s statement came two weeks after Attorney General Kathleen Kane submitted a batch of emails to the court and various state ethics agencies, describing some of the more than 1,000 emails sent to Eakin’s private Yahoo email account as racially offensive and misogynistic pornography.
The emails linked to Justice Eakin are the latest turn in a pornographic email scandal uncovered by Ms. Kane that has spurred a wave of resignations or firings of state officials. Some details of the purported emails have surfaced in the Philadelphia Daily News.
“Members of the Supreme Court are disturbed by the content of the emails, as reported by the media,” the state Supreme Court said in the statement.
A lawyer the courts hired last year to look into revelations of email swapping between prosecutors and justices did not have some of Justice Eakin’s emails that were in a batch Ms. Kane’s office provided last month to the Supreme Court and to the Pennsylvania agency that investigates judicial misconduct, the high court said.
A number of the emails “were not made available” by Ms. Kane’s office last year, the courts said.
In the previous review last year, the court-appointed lawyer, Robert L. Byer, reported seeing nothing inappropriate and the Judicial Conduct Board dropped its complaint against Eakin.
The Judicial Conduct Board says it is investigating Justice Eakin’s emails again, while the courts have hired the Pittsburgh-based law firm Del Sole Cavanaugh Stroyd for a second review.
Justice Eakin, 66, a Republican and a former Cumberland County prosecutor, has said he would cooperate with the board’s investigation. He did not respond to a request for comment Monday at his suburban Harrisburg office.
In recent days, the Philadelphia Daily News has reported that it obtained copies of what appeared to be some of Justice Eakin’s emails. It described them as pornographic, or as mocking gays, women, blacks or Mexicans. Several were exchanged between Eakin and a top state prosecutor, it reported.
The newspaper did not say how it had obtained the emails.
On Monday, a Kane spokesman said the Judicial Conduct Board might not have seen every email exchange in last year’s review because the attorney general’s office had not transferred all of Eakin’s emails from its servers into an “electronic vault” before board investigators ended their review. However, spokesman Chuck Ardo said, the attorney general’s office believes Byer did see all the emails.
Kane’s office has said her office submitted Eakin’s emails to the courts and the Judicial Conduct Board late last month, suggesting that the emails raised questions about Eakin’s fitness for office.
It said it did so after reviewing the emails in response to a Sept. 11 request from the Philadelphia Daily News for emails from Eakin’s Yahoo account.
The board’s 2014 investigation of Eakin began after the Daily News reported last October that he had received two pornographic emails and one racially offensive email at his Yahoo email address in 2010. One of Eakin’s colleagues, Justice Seamus McCaffery, retired shortly after that after The Morning Call of Allentown revealed his role in the email exchanges with state prosecutors and agents.
[ed. note: Justice Eakin was one of 3 Republican Supreme Court Judges who stabbed gun owners in the back in the lawsuit against the PA State Police Record of Sale database!]
