Crisis of credibility

A report that two more Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices were no strangers to the state's sprawling electronic profanity exchange shows why the high court has been widely urged to order an independent investigation of the scandal - and why it hasn't done so.

Given Attorney General Kathleen Kane's propensity to disclose the emails selectively to maximize distraction from her own travails, only an independent investigation can determine the true extent of the official traffic in pornographic and bigoted emails. Such an investigation would no doubt show that many judges and prosecutors haven't had anything to do with such communications. But it would also reveal that many have.

Over the past year, the high court and judicial disciplinary officials have reluctantly roused themselves to effectively expel one justice, Seamus P. McCaffery, and suspend another, J. Michael Eakin, both of whom sent and received offensive emails. But the Inquirer reported this week that two sitting justices, Max Baer and Kevin Dougherty, who was sworn in this month, also received such emails.

Of course, distinctions have to be made between incidental recipients and avid distributors. But that information has been similarly obscured by the Supreme Court's failure to bring about an independent investigation.

So far, the only ostensible attempt at a thorough account of the scandal was commissioned by Kane in December - rather absurdly, after months of piecemeal releases targeting her enemies, and more than a year after her office happened on the emails in the course of reviewing the prosecution of Penn State predator Jerry Sandusky.

Doug Gansler, the attorney Kane hired to conduct the investigation, told the Inquirer Editorial Board that his team is conducting a technology-assisted review of all the emails on Attorney General's Office servers dating to 2008 and will issue a report and recommendations on their findings. That is the sort of review Kane should have undertaken at the outset - and the kind that an independent investigation should be pursuing now.

Unfortunately, Gansler cannot reasonably be called independent. He was not only hired by Kane but shares her involvement in Democratic politics, having served as attorney general and run unsuccessfully for governor in Maryland. Moreover, he is all too eager to take Kane's position on matters that have nothing to do with his supposed purview, scoffing at the criminal charges against her as well as the richly justified effort to remove her from office.

All of which makes it difficult to rely on Gansler's objectivity should his review come across questionable communications involving Kane and her allies. And yet to the extent that the Supreme Court continues to shirk its responsibility to address the crisis, Kane's kangaroo investigation will remain the analysis of record.

Contrary to the position of former Justice McCaffery, who dismissed the emails as "harmless banter among friends," these casual expressions of intolerance were exchanged among scores of professionals entrusted to impartially interpret, apply, and enforce the law. The public deserves a response equal to the affront to that trust.