Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has won a state Supreme Court order barring a district attorney from bringing criminal charges against her until the high court rules on her challenge to the legal status of the special prosecutor who built the case against her.
The court announced the freeze Thursday. The hold on any action by Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman will last six weeks or more. The Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments for March 11 in Philadelphia on Ms. Kane’s challenge.
Ms. Kane’s lawyers contend that special prosecutor Thomas E. Carluccio lacked legal standing to lead a grand jury investigation into a leak of confidential information.
Mr. Carluccio investigated a leak by Ms. Kane’s office to a newspaper in an apparent bid to embarrass Ms. Kane’s political enemies. Last month, the grand jury recommended that Ms. Kane face perjury and other criminal charges in connection with the leak.
Mr. Carluccio and the Montgomery County judge who appointed him, William R. Carpenter, have said in court filings that Ms. Kane’s position is without merit.
Earlier Thursday, Mr. Carluccio and Judge Carpenter made public a report showing that a statewide grand jury had concluded that Ms. Kane’s office “improperly and unlawfully” released confidential grand jury materials — a finding that seemingly contradicts Ms. Kane’s assertion that the panel found that she had not leaked information.
On Wednesday, Ms. Kane and her lawyer mocked the special prosecutor’s investigation and said the panel had found no evidence that she had illegally leaked.
“They started looking for a grand jury leak,” Ms. Kane told the media. “They can’t find a grand jury leak, so they go and make things up.”
The grand jury investigation led by Mr. Carluccio ended earlier this month, and documents unsealed in the case this week show that the panel recommended that Ms. Kane face four charges — perjury, obstruction, official oppression and false swearing.
Ms. Kane, the first woman and first Democrat elected as Pennsylvania’s top law enforcement official, has repeatedly denied illegally leaking anything or lying before the grand jury.
In the report released Thursday, the grand jury concluded that “information subject to grand jury secrecy was improperly and unlawfully disclosed to members of the news media and the general public.”
Notably, the report said that even current staffers at the attorney general’s office said the leaked material included secret grand jury information.
Ms. Kane’s personal lawyer and spokesman, Lanny J. Davis, sharply criticized Judge Carpenter and Mr. Carluccio for releasing the report on Thursday.
He said the release had unfairly blackened Ms. Kane’s reputation. He also said the release seemed to violate “the spirit, if not the letter” of the court’s stay on any action against Ms. Kane.
The report provided little additional details of the case against Ms. Kane.
Rather, it was essentially a policy document in which the grand jurors urged the Legislature to narrow the state’s broad Shield Law, which protects reporters from being compelled to identify confidential sources.
In appearances before Mr. Carluccio’s grand jury this month, reporters from the Philadelphia Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer invoked the Shield Law when asked to identify sources of their stories.
The report said the Shield Law, which dates to 1937, should be amended to require reporters to reveal their sources in stories involving grand jury matters. Without such a change, it said, reporters would continue to get leaks in grand jury cases, which are secret proceedings.
The state Supreme Court has previously rejected attempts to amend the Shield Law.
“Important information, tips and leads will dry up and the public will often be deprived of the knowledge of dereliction of public duty, bribery, corruption, conspiracy and other crimes … unless newsmen are able to fully and completely protect the sources of their information,” the court wrote in 1963.
On the issue of the status of the special prosecutor, Ms. Kane’s lawyers have argued in court papers that only an attorney general can legally lead a statewide grand jury investigation. They say that there is no statute to support Judge Carpenter’s decision to appoint Mr. Carluccio as a special prosecutor.
Pennsylvania once had a law with a process for naming special prosecutors, but the statute expired a dozen years ago.
In rebuttal, Judge Carpenter and Mr. Carluccio have pointed not to any specific law, but to a series of state Supreme Court opinions holding that judges who supervise grand juries may appoint special prosecutors as part of their duty to ensure that proceedings remain secret.
First Published: January 22, 2015, 10:50 p.m.
Updated: January 23, 2015, 4:52 a.m.
