Centre County District Attorney Stacy Parks Miller can’t block access to emails and text message records that have been alleged to show improper communications with judges, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.
The justices affirmed a lower court’s opinion that the district attorney’s office is not a judicial agency and thus is not shielded from the state’s Right to Know Law.
Under that law, only financial records of judicial agencies are required to be disclosed upon request and Parks Miller had contended that applied to district attorneys as well. Justice David Wecht wrote in an opinion on behalf of the court that district attorneys are referred to as ‘related personnel’ in Pennsylvania’s unified judicial system but are not supervised by the courts.
‘Under the plain language of the RTKL, the Judicial Code, and the Rules of Judicial Administration, district attorneys (like public defenders, sheriffs, and others identified as ‘system and related personnel’) are not ‘judicial agencies,” Wecht wrote. ‘Accordingly, Parks Miller cannot invoke the protections for judicial agencies provided by the RTKL.’
In 2014 and 2015, several Centre County defense attorneys filed right-to-know requests to the county asking for emails, text messages and other electronic communications between Parks Miller and judges, including Court of Common Pleas Judge Jonathan Grine and District Judge Kelley Gillette-Walker. They also asked for logs of text messages, phone calls and voicemails and the substance of the texts and voicemails if available.
The county responded, without notifying Parks Miller or the judges, with billing information provided by Verizon and a color-coded index that tracked calls and texts between the DA and the judges but did not detail their content. Parks Miller’s emails on the county’s servers also were read to determine which were subject to disclosure and then provided to the RTKL requesters.
Some defense attorneys have used those emails and phone records to demonstrate alleged inappropriate communication between the DA and judges during cases.
Parks Miller and the judges sought injunctions that were granted by a specially-presiding Huntingdon County judge. The judges injunction was later upheld by Commonwealth Court and the Supreme Court denied a petition for appeal by the county.
The trial court ruled that it considered Parks Miller’s request to present the same issue of requests for records from a judicial agency. A Commonwealth Court panel reversed that decision, stating that Parks Miller is a public, county employee that serves the judicial system but is not part of it.
The Supreme Court’s decision should bring to a close another element of the battles that have surrounded the Centre County Courthouse for nearly three years. That included accusations that Parks Miller had forged a judge’s signature on a fake bail order as part of a jailhouse sting operation. A grand jury recommended no charges against Parks Miller after handwriting experts concluded that the signature did belong to Judge Pamela Ruest.
That issue led to a lawsuit, which has been mostly dismissed, by Parks Miller against the county, administrators and defense attorneys. Michelle Shutt, the former DA’s office paralegal who signed an affidavit accusing Parks Miller of the forgery, later filed a defamation suit against Parks Miller over remarks made by the DA after the grand jury’s decision. A federal judge dismissed Shutt’s suit, a decision Shutt is appealing.
Parks Miller still faces a disciplinary hearing over messages sent to Grine and former Judge Bradley Lunsford about ongoing cases. That hearing was originally scheduled for Nov. 29 but has since been continued.
Parks Miller lost her bid for a third term as district attorney. Defense attorney Bernie Cantorna, one of the lawyers who made the right-to-know requests, won the Democratic primary in May with nearly 70 percent of the vote and took the Republican write-in nomination. He will take office in January.
