The porngate emails sent by prosecutors from the state Attorney General's Office to members of the judiciary have created a legal swamp for the judicial and executive branches of Pennsylvania government. Public officials, prosecutors and members of the judiciary are desperately attempting to make the situation appear to be something it is not. The result is that the very serious problem of the compromise of the judiciary is lost in a fog of confusing accusations and counter-accusations. The continuing statements and actions of many of the participants resemble scenes from the television series “Monty Python's Flying Circus.”

The problems are exacerbated by state Attorney General Kathleen Kane, who inherited the porngate problem from the existing personnel when she was elected to office. Kane, who had the power to deal with the cause of the problem and propose a solution, has demonstrated she has no concept of how to deal with the issue. Instead of taking steps as the chief prosecutor to resolve the improprieties in past and current prosecutions, she has engaged in a political pillow fight with her former staff and her political foes, and continues to issue conflicting statements that tend to obscure the very serious issues. Due to her contradictory statements, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has not confronted the compromise of the judiciary. The court must confront the compromise of members of the judiciary revealed by the existence of these emails.

The facts are very simple and, from a lawyer's standpoint, very disturbing. A group of prosecutors in the Attorney General's Office has, for at least a year or more, sent a series of ex parte communications to members of the judiciary by email. This occurred before Kane took office and possibly continued thereafter. These emails were sent pursuant to a well-thought-out plan. Some emails were very pornographic, others were simply off-color, and many contained racial or ethnic slurs. They were sent on government computers. The prosecutors who sent them often appeared before the judges who received them in active litigation cases. It does not take an expert in legal ethics to ask, “If a prosecutor can send such off-color emails to a judge who he appears before, what sort of relationship exists between them, and what other ex parte communications have they exchanged about the cases they were handling?”