Court review ties McCaffery to 230 porn e-mails

HARRISBURG - Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery sent or received more than 230 e-mails that included sexually explicit content between late 2008 and mid-2012, including messages sent to state e-mail accounts of government employees, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the chief justice.

In a statement, Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille said the analysis found McCaffery had sent or received 2,800 messages unearthed during an internal review by the Attorney General's Office. Of those, 234 contained sexually explicit material, including more than 700 images and 45 videos.

The breakdown was released as Castille, a Republican, continued to press his colleagues for action against McCaffery, a Democrat and rival, to protect the high court's "moral authority."

The justices could vote to suspend him or refer a complaint to the state Judicial Conduct Board.

"No other Supreme Court justice was identified as having sent or received any sexually explicit e-mails," Castille's statement said.

McCaffery, a former Philadelphia police officer and judge, has declined to discuss the e-mails.

His lawyer, Dion G. Rassias, earlier this month characterized the correspondence in question as "a half-dozen private e-mails, allegedly from Justice McCaffery's personal computer." He did not return calls for comment Wednesday.

The breakdown that identified the McCaffery messages grew out of a meeting last week between Castille and a technician from the office of state Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane.

Last month, Kane released the names of eight government employees who she said routinely exchanged sexually explicit content during work hours and over state e-mail accounts between 2008 and 2012. All worked in her office during the tenure of her Republican predecessors, including Gov. Corbett.

Kane's office discovered the messages during a review of her predecessors' handling of the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse investigation. She said she released the participants' names to let the public know how state employees conduct themselves.

Kane did not name McCaffery. Castille later asked her to share with him any e-mails that her review uncovered that had been sent or received by judges or judicial employees.

The Inquirer has reported that McCaffery, using a personal Comcast e-mail account, sent at least 10 messages with pornographic content to an agent in the Attorney General's Office, who then forwarded them to dozens of others in the office. Those e-mails were sent in 2008 and 2009, according to copies obtained by the newspaper.

The Inquirer has also reported that McCaffery in January of this year sent two e-mails from the same address to the government account of his younger brother Daniel, a Common Pleas Court judge in Philadelphia.

Daniel McCaffery responded to one by asking his brother to send the message to his personal e-mail address.

Castille has said that any judge who exchanged grossly pornographic material by e-mail might have violated the state's code of judicial ethics and may be subject to discipline.

That the graphic material may have been sent from a personal account made no difference, said Lynn A. Marks, executive director of the nonpartisan judicial reform organization Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts.

"Sending sexually explicit e-mails to government accounts does not 'promote public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary,' " she said, quoting from the state's judicial conduct code. "Part of acting with integrity is a recognition of the possible effect of one's actions on the greater system."

The e-mail scandal has led to the departure of three high-ranking Corbett administration officials, including the governor's appointee to the state parole board, who stepped down Wednesday.

Randy Feathers' decision to retire from his $116,000-a-year job on the state Board of Probation and Parole came more than a week after Corbett called on him to step down.

Feathers initially resisted Corbett's request, saying he believed that Kane, a Democrat, was motivated by politics when she released the eight names - but not the names of dozens of other employees who participated in the pornographic exchanges.

In his retirement letter, Feathers wrote: "It is essential to note that my retirement should not be taken as an acknowledgment of the degree of wrongdoing of which I have been accused by Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane. In fact, I have been denied basic due process by not being allowed to observe or be provided details as to the content of the e-mails [that] . . . Kane has attributed to me."

Kane has acknowledged that 30 people currently on her staff participated in the exchanges, but said she was restricted by labor agreements and other policies from naming them. She has said she was disciplining the staff members, but she not specify what form the discipline would take. Kane also has not released the name of the now-retired agent to whom McCaffery sent e-mails, and her office has not explained why.

"People need to take a long, hard look at what she's done," Feathers said in an interview.

He was the fifth person to leave or lose his job since the scandal broke.

A onetime head of Corbett's Department of Environmental Protection, E. Christopher Abruzzo, and Glenn Parno, a top aide to Abruzzo, resigned days after Kane released their names.

Frank Noonan, the head of the state police, was also named by Kane as having participated in the pornographic exchanges. Corbett said he did not ask for Noonan's resignation because there was no evidence Noonan forwarded or even opened any of the messages.

The others named by Kane were: Chris Carusone, a onetime top lawyer in the Attorney General's Office who later became Corbett's legislative liaison; Kevin Harley, Corbett's former spokesman in both the Attorney General's Office and the governor's office; Richard Sheetz, who headed the criminal division in the Attorney General's Office before leaving to work for the Lancaster County District Attorney's Office; and Pat Blessington, a top lawyer in the Attorney General's Office who now works in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office.

Carusone last week resigned from the Philadelphia law firm where he worked. Sheetz also resigned from the Lancaster County District Attorney's Office last week.