Pennsylvania Supreme Court

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has decided it will not follow the Restatement (Third) of Torts, which "would have allowed defendants to introduce elements regarding the foreseeability of a product's risks, and whether alternative, safer designs were available when the product was manufactured," The Legal Intelligencer's Max Mitchell reports. The Second Restatement does not consider the feasibility of an alternative design or a manufacturer's conduct. The court did adapt PA's products law to allow juries to consider "consumer expectation and risk-utility balancing tests."
 

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that requests for records must be designated to a government agency's designated open-records officer, the Associated Press reports: "The decision overturned ruling by a divided Commonwealth Court that said state and local agencies should presume that any written request for records is a Right-to-Know request."

Here's the decision: http://law.justia.com/cases/pennsylvania/supreme-court/2014/67-map-2013....

It's been quite a week for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. First, Justice Seamus P. McCaffery resigned from the court after he was suspended by his fellow justices amid allegations that he sent pornographic emails, attempted to fix his wife's traffic ticket, allowed his wife to receive thousands and thousands of dollars in referral fees from law firms and may have "attempted to exert influence" in judicial court appointments in Philadelphia, the Allentown Morning Call reports. Then today Joan Orie Melvin, who was convicted of using the resources of her chambers on her judicial campaigns, has dropped her appeal, the Associated Press reports. The Pennsylvania Superior Court upheld Melvin's conviction and sentence, including the order requiring her to send apology letters to every judge in Pennsylvania. But the Superior Court rejected the part of the order requiring Melvin to write the apologies on copies of a snapshot of her in handcuffs. 

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.

The Allentown Morning Call's Steve Esack has a startling exclusive about Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus P. McCaffery: "Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery forwarded at least eight sexually explicit emails to an employee in the state attorney general's office who later shared them with more than a dozen others, emails reviewed by The Morning Call show. McCaffery is the first judicial figure whose name has surfaced in an unfolding controversy over state employees' sharing the emails that Attorney General Kathleen Kane's staff found in a review of the Jerry Sandusky grand jury investigation."

The emails first surfaced as part of right-to-know requests from the media, but Kane only released poritions of the media, Esack further reports.

According to Esack, Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille said earlier this week that a member of the judiciary could violate rules of conduct by sending pornographic emails on government-owned or personal computers. McCaffery's emails were allegedly sent from a personal account.

Now that the Pennsylvania Superior Court has thrown out a requirement that a former Supreme Court justice write apology letters to every judge in Pennsylvania on her picture showing her in handcuffs, prosecutors says that Joan Orie Melvin should be resentenced and face incarceration for using the resources of her chambers on her judicial campaigns, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports. Melvin is appeaing her conviction to her former colleagues on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the conviction of former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin on charges of misusing the resources of her judicial chambers on her political campaigns, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Paula Reed Ward reports. The most unusual part of Orie Melvin's sentence was thrown out: an order requiring her to write apologies to every judge in Pennsylvania on her picture in handcuffs.

Instead, Orie Melvin just has to write apologies. The Superior Court rejected the idea that forcing Orie Melvin to write apology letters was a violation of her right against self-incrimination.

According to Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus P. McCaffery's lawyer, the justice has been cleared by the FBI in an investigation about fees paid to McCaffrey's wife and chief judicial aide, Lise Rapaport, by law firms for case referrals, The Legal Intelligencer's Gina Passarella reports. The revelation came as part of arguments held on whether preliminary objections should be granted in a defamation lawsuit brought by McCaffery and Rapaport against the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News for coverage of the referral-fee issue. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the FBI did not confirm or deny the status of the investigation.

The plaintiffs argue that the articles falsely suggest that McCaffery's decisions on the court were tainted by the referral fees, while the defense argue that the press' job is to highlight potentially problematic actions of public officials, The Legal further reports.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court will take up the first case in the country in which a Catholic Church was convicted of endangering children abused by other priests, The Legal Intelligencer's Zack Needles reports. The Pennsylvania Superior Court overturned Monsignor William Lynn's conviction because "the trial judge had refused to address the defense argument that a pre-amended version of Pennsylvania's law criminalizing endangerment of the welfare of children did not apply in the case," The Legal further reports. The high court granted allocatur on the issue of whether there was sufficient evidence to convict Lynn either as a principal or as an accomplice to endangering the welfare of children.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard oral argument this week on the constitutionality of a $500,000 damages cap for plaintiffs injured by municipal defendants, The Legal Intelligencer's Max Mitchell reports. Plaintiffs attorney Tom Kline urged the justices to overturn prior precedent that allowed a statutory cap on damages against political subdivisions.