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Judicial court fines Eakin but spares his pension

A Pennsylvania judicial tribunal on Thursday found disgraced former Supreme Court Justice J. Michael Eakin guilty of ethical misconduct for his exchange of offensive emails and fined him $50,000, but allowed him to keep his $153,000 annual pension.

Former Justice J. Michael Eakin , 67, a Republican who joined the high court in 2002, has apologized for the emails and said they did not reflect his true character.
Former Justice J. Michael Eakin , 67, a Republican who joined the high court in 2002, has apologized for the emails and said they did not reflect his true character.Read moreAP Photo / Matt Rourke, File

A Pennsylvania judicial tribunal on Thursday found disgraced former Supreme Court Justice J. Michael Eakin guilty of ethical misconduct for his exchange of offensive emails and fined him $50,000, but allowed him to keep his $153,000 annual pension.

The six members of the Court of Judicial Discipline unanimously found that Eakin, by exchanging in "insensitive" sexually oriented and otherwise troubling emails on government computers, had undermined public confidence in the judiciary.

But they also found that any bias shown in Eakin's emails did not creep into his judicial opinions. Emails aside, Eakin's service during 20 years as an appeals court judge was "otherwise exemplary," the court found.

The court also said it would have treated Eakin more harshly had he not resigned from the Supreme Court this month.

"The common thread of the emails, with their imagery of sexism, racism, and bigotry, is arrogance," the court wrote.

Eakin's lawyer, William Costopoulos, said the former justice was satisfied with the decision.

"We accept the sanction imposed and will not appeal," he said Thursday. "This finally brings closure to this difficult ordeal."

Eakin, 67, a Republican who joined the high court in 2002, has apologized for the emails and said they do not reflect his character.

In the end, the judicial panel gave Eakin what he appeared to be seeking by resigning: a resolution without a public trial and without the loss of his pension.

The Court of Judicial Discipline is made up of judges, lawyers, and nonlawyers appointed by the governor and the Supreme Court.

Its ruling cut short a judicial scandal that has called into question not only Eakin's reputation, but also the entire process by which Pennsylvania investigates judges.

Both the Supreme Court and the Judicial Conduct Board, the agency that polices the actions of jurists, cleared Eakin of any wrongdoing in 2014, with an expert hired by the high court calling his emails "unremarkable" and the conduct board calling them at worst only "mildly pornographic."

After state Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane lambasted those decisions, both the court and board threw out their old reviews and started over. It was Kane who first discovered that Eakin, along with numerous other officials, had been exchanging offensive emails on state computers.

The Supreme Court's next paid expert condemned Eakin's emails in a report, but said they were not so troubling as to warrant high court action.

For its part, the second time around, the Judicial Conduct Board brought Eakin up on charges, setting the stage for Thursday's decision.

Kane criticized the decision, calling it "a lost opportunity." She said a public trial "would have allowed Pennsylvanians to finally understand the yearlong cover-up of Justice Eakin's emails."

State Sen. Anthony H. Williams, a Democrat from West Philadelphia and a leading critic of the emails, said the decision did not end the matter.

"There is a need to reform the judicial system," Williams said. "The general public is no longer confident of those who sit in judgment of others."

Lynn A. Marks, executive director of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, a reform group, applauded the decision, saying it sent "a clear message about what is unacceptable" to judges across the state.

But she said the court had missed the chance to explore whether prosecutors who had exchanged offensive emails with Eakin had a back channel to communicate with him about legal cases.

"It raised lots of issues," Marks said. "It's not going away."

Still, the court's decision forestalls the public ethics trial that had been scheduled to start Tuesday in City Hall. The proceeding could have shed light on the earlier flawed reviews of Eakin's conduct, and potentially included evidence about other justices who received offensive emails.

In earlier legal skirmishing in the Eakin case, Costopoulos had suggested he might explore the actions of two current Supreme Court justices - Max Baer and Kevin Dougherty - who had received a few of the same emails sent to Eakin.

After trying and failing to work out a deal that would have allowed him to stay on the bench, Eakin resigned without conditions on March 15.

Two days later, his prosecutors with the Judicial Conduct Board asked the Court of Judicial Discipline to drop the most serious of the four charges of ethical misconduct they filed against Eakin in December.

The board asked the court to withdraw the accusation that Eakin had brought the Supreme Court into "disrepute" - the charge that would have meant the automatic loss of his pension.

In effect, the judicial court on Thursday adopted that recommendation while adding the $50,000 fine.

Such a fine is "rare and unusual, likely unprecedented," said Samuel C. Stretton, a lawyer who specializes in judicial ethics cases.

In its 28-page opinion Thursday, the court said it viewed Eakin's "sordid" messages with "disgust." But it found Eakin guilty of only the one count.

In a stipulation sent to the court last week, Eakin agreed with prosecutors that he had sent and received about 120 troubling emails that had been captured on government email servers.

The messages included images of nudity and partial nudity, emails Eakin exchanged with friends about plans for an out-of-town trip to a strip club, and sexually suggestive musings about female staffers in his office.

The emails also contained misogynistic and racially offensive jokes, along with messages that mocked minorities, gays, and others.

Eakin was the second justice to quit the court amid the Porngate scandal. Seamus McCaffery, a Philadelphia Democrat, retired in 2014 after revelations that he had exchanged more than 200 pornographic emails.

McCaffery left the court under a deal under which he, too, kept his pension. Unlike Eakin, however, he was not fined.

cmccoy@phillynews.com

215-854-4821 @CraigRMcCoy