As released by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.
HARRISBURG — On Friday, Oct. 10, 2014, Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille met with a forensic technician from Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s office in response to the chief justice's request that the office produce all emails involving sexually explicit materials sent by or to a member of the judiciary. The agent reported that the Office of the Attorney General searched its archive of emails for the period from late 2008 to May 2012 for all emails involving any justice of the Supreme Court and identified 4,000 such emails. Two-thousand eight hundred of the emails were identified as involving Justice Seamus McCaffery.
An examination by the agent of the 2,800 emails involving Justice McCaffery identified 234 emails that contained sexually explicit or pornographic photographs or videos, all of which had been sent by or to Justice McCaffery. No other Supreme Court justice was identified as having sent or received any sexually explicit emails.
The attorney general’s agent advised the chief justice that the 234 emails contained 1,502 sexually explicit images and 60 sexually explicit video files, some of which were duplicates. He estimated the number of unique images at 700 to 800 and the number of unique videos at approximately 45. The agent provided the chief justice with heavily redacted copies of the emails without the attachments and displayed many of the images and videos on a laptop computer.
The large majority of emails were sent by Justice McCaffery to an agent of the Office of Attorney General who has since retired. The agent then forwarded the materials to numerous individuals, most of whose names were redacted in the copies provided to the chief justice.
This matter is under further review by the Supreme Court.
Photo/Natalie Cake - James Roxbury and Chief Justice Castille May 2013.