A panel of Commonwealth Court judges ruled this week that the Centre County District Attorney’s office is not a judicial agency, reversing previous orders from the county court granting DA Stacy Parks Miller injunctive relief from turning over records under Right-to-Know requests.
The previous orders were handed down Senior Judge Steward Kurtz of Huntingdon County, who was specially presiding judge in the matter. They stemmed from the county’s response to right-to-know requests for telephone records showing communication between Parks-Miller or her office and several county judges.
The county initially granted access to documents tracking telephone communication between the district attorney’s office and the judges, although it didn’t reveal the content of the communications. Kurtz ruled the county must direct requests received to appropriate officials, who would then respond.
“The preliminary injunction the trial court issued… is premised on its conclusion that the DA’s office is a judicial agency,” Judge Robert Simpson wrote in the Commonwealth Court’s opinion. “The trial court erred as matter of law in concluding so.”
In reversing the order that the county could not respond to any open record requests for Parks Miller and her office, Simpson said the D.A.’s assertion the records should be protected under the Criminal History Records Information Act (CHRIA) was without evidence.
“We are unable to uphold the court’s injunction on such unsubstantiated assertions,” Simpson wrote. “Such an injunction that bars disclosure without regard to subject matter is overbroad.
He added, however, that the county should be cautious and consult as to whether a record is subject to CHRIA before replying to open record requests.
In a separate, civil lawsuit now in federal court, Parks Miller is suing Centre County and a number of county officials and defense attorneys for defamation, inflicting injurious falsehood, malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, conspiracy, abuse of process and negligence.
Parks Miller said in the lawsuit that the county broke the law in releasing her phone records to several local defense attorneys named in the suit, whom she says “wrongly used the records to accuse her of conspiring to ‘fix’ criminal cases’ with county judges.”
She also accuses the defendants of taking part in a personally-motivated conspiracy to ruin her personal and professional reputation by making, supporting and publicizing false allegations that she forged the signature of Judge Pamela Ruest (who is a defendant in the suit) and texted judges during trials in order to influence cases.Parks Miller claims her former paralegal, Michelle Shutt, knowingly made the false accusation that she forged Ruest’s signature.
She claims local defense Bernard Cantorna and Andrew Shubin wrongly brought the false allegation to the county commissioners at the time — Michael Pipe, Steven Dershem and Chris Exarchos — whom she said acted outside the scope of their authority by pressuring police into conducting an investigation when the allegations had already been referred to the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General. Exarchos lost his re-election bid in November.
She says the commissioners also contravened state law by hiring a law firm to act as a special prosecutor against her. She also accuses Ruest of lying about not remembering that she had signed her own name to the alleged forgery.
The suit came after a grand jury found no evidence to charge Parks Miller.
