Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus P. McCaffery has been suspended by his own colleagues, among other reasons, because of allegations he sent pornographic emails to other governmental officials, because he allegedly tried to blackmail a fellow justice and because he may have tried to "exert influence over a judicial assignment on the Philadelphia common pleas bench outside the scope of his official duties," the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.
Justice J. Michael Eakin says that McCaffery tried to get Eakin to intercede with Chief Justice Ronald Castille to stand down on the email issue in exchange for not releasing emails that were sent to Eakin's private email account in 2010.
When working for The Legal Intelligencer, I broke the story that McCaffery contacted Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas leaders about a judicial assignment. I wrote at the time: "According to several knowledgeable sources in the Philadelphia court system, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus P. McCaffery contacted a high-level Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas leader about civil cases in 2012. Two of the cases, sources said, involved a law firm that had previously paid a referral fee to McCaffery's spouse."
And the Philadelphia Inquirer first reported that McCaffery's wife and chief aide, Lise Rapaport, had been paid 19 referral fees from law firms. The court said in its order that McCaffery "may have acted in his official capacity to authorize his wife to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars in referral fees from plaintiffs' firms while she served as Justice McCaffery's administrative assistant." Also at issue for McCaffery are the allegations that he contacted a Philadelphia traffic-court official in connection with a traffic citation issued to his wife.
Castille said in his concurrence to the order that McCaffery sent an email depicting a "woman in sexual congress with a snake" that may violate Pennsylvania's obscenity law. Castille also called McCaffery a sociopath "who has the personality traits of not caring about others, thinking he or she can do whatever is in that person's own self-interest and having little or no sympathy for others."
In dissent from the decision to suspend McCaffery, Justice Debra Todd said "even a justice is entitled to due process" and the matter should be referred to the separate constitutional court, the Court of Judicial Discipline.
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