Huntingdon County Judge Stewart Kurtz is not backing down from his rulings against Centre County.
In three separate but similar lawsuits filed by Centre County Judges Jonathan Grine and Kelley Gillette-Walker and District Attorney Stacy Parks Miller, Kurtz has preliminarily ruled that the county has acted improperly over the past several months.
All three plaintiffs say the county wrongly released some of their phone records to defense attorneys in response to Right to Know requests.
In new court documents filed Friday, Kurtz explains why he ruled against the county in the three suits by filing an order preventing the county from responding to any similar requests.
“We add only that the specter of a non-judicial county employee giving out upon request and without notice judicial phone records strikes us as manifestly wrong,” Kurtz writes.
Kurtz’s memorandum is a response to a “statement of issues on appeal” filed by Centre County’s attorney Mary Lou Maierhofer last week. She argues that the phone records in questions are actually public financial records that the county was legally obligated to release because the county provided the phones – and she’s taking her position to the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania.
Kurtz disagrees with Maierhofer’s reasoning, citing extensively from a similar case in Lackawanna County.
“It is axiomatic that any record produced by a judicial employee is a record of a judicial agency,” Kurtz quotes from the Lackawanna case. “…Just because the County provides logistical support to the courts does not mean that every record stored on what the County provides as part of its function to support the court makes it a County record.”
In her statement of errors, Maierhofer also points out that the phone records provided only showed date and duration of phone contact between judges and prosecutors. Because the records did not reveal the content of any texts or conversations, she says Kurtz was wrong to rule that the county was causing undue harm to the judges and the DA.
However, Kurtz remains unconvinced. He says that, regardless of what the records show, the county “should have immediately directed the requests” to either the DA’s office, the prothonotary or the court administrator. By not doing so, Kurtz says the county violated the separation of powers between different branches of the county government.
Bruce Castor, an attorney for Parks Miller, expresses confidence that the county will not be able to succeed in the “monumental task” of proving that Kurtz was wrong. Castor says that Kurtz quotes directly from state law and previous cases, making it difficult to argue that he made an error in judgement.
Maierhofer has told StateCollege.com that one of the issues in these lawsuits is the fact that the Right to Know law is fairly young and untested. Being only eight years old, she says the RTK law suffers from conflicting case law and ambiguity about exactly what records the county is required to release.
Craig Staudenmaier, a Right to Know attorney working on behalf of Centre County, says in an email that the county plans to ask the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania to overturn Kurtz’s injunctions in the three lawsuits.
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