Further bad publicity today around the misuse of email in public office – all of which could have been avoided with an effective email acceptable use policy and deployment of Imager Analyzer to protect employees, officials and valuable reputations.
Full story here:
Kane, Castille reach deal over porn e-mails
The Inquirer – ANGELA COULOUMBIS AND JEREMY ROEBUCK, INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS POSTED: Wednesday, October 8, 2014, 5:26 PM
HARRISBURG – Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane has agreed to give Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court chief justice the names of any judges or judicial employees who may have exchanged sexually explicit e-mails, her office said Wednesday.
A technician from Kane’s office is scheduled on Friday to show Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille copies of any messages sent from judicial e-mail accounts or judges’ private accounts that turned up in Kane’s internal review of employee e-mails, her spokeswoman said.
The office will not turn over complete messages, but will let Castille view them and give him copies without explicit content, spokeswoman Renee Martin said. The names of some recipients or senders will be redacted.
“This is the point where we came to that everyone is comfortable with right now,” Martin said.
The deal to share the e-mails followed a standoff between Kane and Castille, who first made the request for the information last month.
It also came as two more former employees of the Attorney General’s Office resigned their current jobs after being tainted in the scandal, bringing the total to four. Kane, a Democrat, had named those men and four others as having sent or received pornographic e-mails on state computers and e-mail accounts between 2008 and 2012. All worked under her Republican predecessors, including Gov. Corbett.
Kane’s office has acknowledged that 30 current employees also participated in the exchanges, but has refused to release their names, citing labor agreements and human resource policies.
Last week, the e-mail scandal intensified and widened to touch one top jurist: Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery.
Using a private account, McCaffery sent at least 10 messages containing sexually explicit content in 2008 and 2009 to an agent in the Attorney General’s Office, according to copies of the e-mails obtained by The Inquirer. The agent forwarded the material to dozens of others in the Attorney General’s Office.
McCaffery has not commented on the e-mails. His attorney, Dion Rassias, said in a statement last week: “I just wonder why a half-dozen private e-mails, allegedly from Justice McCaffery’s personal computer, are front page news.”
Castille has said that any judge who exchanged grossly pornographic material using court equipment might have violated the state’s code of judicial ethics. Kane said she named the eight men two weeks ago because she believed it was in the public’s interest to know how state employees conducted themselves during work hours. Last week, two quit their current posts and a third was being pressured to resign.
This week, Chris Carusone, a onetime top attorney in the Attorney General’s Office, became the latest casualty of the scandal. He left Conrad O’Brien, the Philadelphia law firm where he has worked for the last year. In a statement, the firm acknowledged that Carusone stepped down, but did not explain why.
“Chris is a talented attorney with an expertise in representing clients during government litigation, and we wish him all the best in his new endeavor,” wrote the firm’s chairman, Jim Rohn.
And Richard A. Sheetz, who once headed the attorney general’s criminal division, also resigned this week from his position at the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office, that office confirmed Wednesday.
Neither Carusone nor Sheetz could be reached for comment Wednesday.
Last week, the head of the state Department of Environmental Protection, E. Christopher Abruzzo, stepped down, as did a top aide, Glenn Parno.
Corbett has called on his appointee to the state Board of Probation and Parole, Randy Feathers, to step down, but Feathers has refused to do so. Feathers has asked Kane for an independent forensic analysis of the e-mail data.
Corbett can seek a two-thirds vote in the state Senate to oust Feathers from the board.
Corbett has said he did not know of the e-mails at the time, and was only made aware of them a few months ago.
Frank Noonan, the head of the state police, was also among the eight men Kane named. The governor has not asked for his resignation, saying there was no indication that Noonan sent, forwarded, or opened any of the e-mails.
