Posted on Thu, Nov. 5, 2009
HARRISBURG - The state Supreme Court said yesterday that it was sufficiently troubled by the role two former judges at the center of a juvenile justice scandal played in a defamation case that it was overturning a $3.5 million verdict against a northeastern Pennsylvania newspaper. A new trial was ordered.
The court said the appearance of judicial impropriety was enough to justify its actions in the case that involved reporting in 2001 by the Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice of raids by state police and IRS agents on the home and business of Thomas A. Joseph.
Joseph was never charged. His lawsuit against the paper; its parent company, The Scranton Times L.P.; and former reporter Edward Lewis claimed he had been defamed by anonymous sources that connected him to suspected illegal activity.
Joseph and his direct-mail marketing firm, AcuMark Inc., won the verdict after Luzerne County Court Judge Michael T. Conahan assigned the case to fellow Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., who issued the multimillion-dollar verdict after a bench trial in 2006.
The state Supreme Court upheld the award last year, saying that the articles were inaccurate and that the paper had failed to follow its own rules for anonymous sourcing.
Conahan's relationship with reputed mobster William D'Elia, a childhood friend of Joseph's, was a factor in their decision, the justices wrote. D'Elia's home was searched on the same day as Joseph's, and the paper claimed that D'Elia and Conahan fixed the case.
Ciavarella said at a July hearing that he had never spoken with the two men about the case, but Conahan and D'Elia asserted their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.
"The inherently troubling nature of Conahan's and Ciavarella's compromised positions as jurists is enhanced in this case, given that the subject matter of this defamation lawsuit concerned newspaper articles reporting on the undisputed fact of a federal criminal investigation into D'Elia's and Joseph's alleged ties to organized crime activities," the court ruled.
Tim Hinton, the newspaper's lawyer, said he expected to push for dismissal of the case once it was assigned to a county judge.
"I think the Supreme Court is making great strides in rectifying the damage caused by Conahan and Ciavarella," Hinton said.
Conahan and Ciavarella are awaiting trial in federal court on charges that they took more than $2 million in kickbacks to place children in privately run juvenile facilities.
The two former judges pleaded guilty this year to fraud and tax evasion, but the presiding judge refused to accept their pleas, saying they had not adequately accepted responsibility for their actions.
Joseph's attorney, George Croner, told the Associated Press in April that he had no doubt that the stories defamed his client. He did not return a phone message seeking comment yesterday.
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