WRITING & REPORTING » NEWS THE CITIZENS' VOICE, SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2009

Muroski strives to restore confidence in a court system stained by corruption

Luzerne County President Judge Chester B. Muroski kept working through the cough that had been wearing on him for three weeks.

He shuffled through the roughly manicured landscape of case records and administrative files piled on his mahogany desk, hunting for an organizational chart and a newspaper clipping and later, for a five-page memorandum he referred to simply as “the letter.”

The 69-year-old jurist has survived a lifetime of maladies — quadruple-bypass surgery, cancer, a blood clot that forced the removal of a foot-and-a-half of intestine, and lately the fatigue that has accompanied his increased administrative workload.

Conahan had his momentary power surge, but Muroski is still standing and still wearing the robe.

The plaques and framed pictures around Muroski’s courthouse chambers — a space previously belonging to Conahan — are a testament to his career and his life.

Yet none of the images depict him in the face of his biggest challenge: steering the Luzerne County court system back from the abyss following the corruption charges in January that felled Conahan and former President Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr.

Muroski, the longest-serving and oldest member of the county judiciary, has been consumed with that mission since the weekend before federal prosecutors announced the charges against Ciavarella and Conahan.

Sensing an imminent crisis as rumors swirled about Ciavarella resigning from the president judge position, Muroski called the seven other judges to a strategy session in an office at a courthouse annex.

He established his pragmatic style of leadership on that chilly Saturday afternoon, inviting input from his colleagues and imbuing the court with a never-before-seen sense of democracy.

He offered to make a public statement on the judges’ behalf, sheltering them from the storm of public outrage if and when the crisis erupted, and he volunteered to take on the unenviable burden of replacing Ciavarella as president judge, only “if they thought they could put their trust and confidence” in him.

Six days later, in a rare public vote cast in his courtroom, they did.

Six months later, in a series of interviews and candid conversations, the judges reflected on the cultural shift Muroski has directed

and the significant changes they have made together — decentralizing the power of the president judge, cutting the court budget and settling a related lawsuit Ciavarella filed against the county, assigning cases on a random basis and changing court rules in response to allegations of “judge shopping.”

A new day

Judge Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. detected early in Muroski’s tenure the stark difference between his approach — with regularly scheduled court en banc meetings with the judges, the encouragement of discussion and voting on issues — and the dictatorial nature of his predecessors, Ciavarella and Conahan.

“The fundamental concept of all of this I believe was the reduction of the power of the president judge and the corresponding increase in collective decision making by the court en banc,” Olszewski said. “Where information was not provided to individual judges, now it is. We’ve been put in the position where we’re better able to evaluate, better able to critically evaluate and decide what the appropriate course of action is.”

Under Ciavarella, Olszewski said, “when things happened and we didn’t even know they were happening, it was pretty difficult to take action.”

Ciavarella met so infrequently with his colleagues that the flurry of en banc meetings he held last summer and fall prompted some judges to wonder if he would stand up at one and quit on the spot, Muroski said.

Ciavarella’s lack of transparency in the administrative workings of the court system left the remaining judges scrambling early in their newfound roles as administrators to correct the wayward course of his unilateral decisions.

“I didn’t realize how bad things were until I started,” Muroski said, echoing an earlier assessment of that period of discovery. “I didn’t know what I didn’t know.”

A week into his tenure, Muroski ended Ciavarella’s lawsuit against the commissioners and agreed to reduce the total cost of court salaries for the year by nearly $2 million. The court eventually laid off 27 employees, including Ciavarella’s son-in-law, probation officer Joshua Oravic.

“It was important because the intransigent position taken by the former administration was inexplicable to the public and the public got it right — it was an unreasonable effort to preserve unnecessary jobs,” Muroski said.

Commissioner Chairwoman Maryanne Petrilla said dealing with the Muroski-led court after Ciavarella’s was like “two different worlds.”

Ciavarella treated the courts and the commissioners like “rival corporations,” Petrilla said. “Now we’re Luzerne County, we’re in it together, working together, trying to save money, trying to improve services and in complete cooperation at all times.”

Ciavarella, true to his autocratic form, initiated the litigation last December without the consent of the eight other county judges, Muroski said. Ciavarella never told his boss, the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania Ronald D. Castille, either.

“We don’t like to see president judges taking on the other branches of government, filing lawsuits on their own,” Castille said. “No one ever asked us to approve a lawsuit, Ciavarella did it on his own.”

The new administrators

Muroski has embraced his colleagues as equals — inviting their input and sharing part of the administrative workload.

Judge Thomas F. Burke Jr., who said he devotes 15 percent to 20 percent of his workday to administrative matters, called the distribution of work a necessary “division of labor.”

Six county judges interviewed for this story said they are working more hours and spending more time on court administration. Judges Joseph M. Augello and Michael T. Toole did not respond to written interview requests and telephone messages.

Olszewski, the criminal court administrator, said he has incorporated the extra work into his early morning routine, waking up at 4:15 two or three days each week and combing through court briefs and other documents for three hours over a cup of coffee at his kitchen table.

“It’s difficult to concentrate on the reading of motions and briefs and writing in the courthouse because of all the people coming in and out, the phone calls, the interruptions and court,” Olszewski said. “It has become necessary, at least for me personally, to do a lot of this work very early in the morning at home in my kitchen.”

Judge Joseph J. Musto, who joined the bench last October and will depart in January, said the administrative component of his schedule jumped from negligible before the crisis to more than 20 percent after.

Muroski estimated he spends 35 percent to 40 percent of his work time on administrative matters, “plus handling a standard workload of trial work,” and overseeing the county’s drug court and the development of its mental health court.

“The amount of administrative time that he has spent is significantly greater than that of any of the rest of us, but that has allowed us to perform the judicial duties,” Judge Hugh F. Mundy said. “And I much prefer being a judge than an administrator.”

An ‘impetus’ for change

Together, Muroski and his colleagues have reversed a number of Ciavarella’s other directives — an expensive pay scheme for certain county-paid attorneys, a drawn-out process to appeal the county’s property reassessments, and a potentially illegal arrangement to have employees of the county’s probation services department conduct an educational program for drunken drivers.

Ciavarella shifted the program from its long-time provider, Catholic Social Services, to the probation department in 2007, despite an inherent conflict of interest of having a county department associated with the courts conducting highway sobriety testing in conjunction with police and operating a rehabilitative driving school.

“Probation is a close arm of the court and here we had representatives of the court collecting evidence for use in criminal prosecutions,” Olszewski said.

Eight probation officers, including the six hired to run the DUI program, and four clerks were laid off earlier this year as a collateral effect of the cut to the court budget.

Those cuts and the controversy surrounding Ciavarella’s departure forced a closer look at the DUI program and other court functions. Muroski and his colleagues saw the crisis as an “impetus for evolution” in the operation of the courts.

They held a public hearing on the effectiveness and efficiency of magisterial central court in Wilkes-Barre and, after weeks of study, decided to revert to a previous system of preliminary hearings at the offices of magisterial district judges.

They modified the rules for cases involving underinsured motorists, introducing transparency and an element of randomness to a process that had been under scrutiny by federal investigators.

And they assigned Musto and Olszewski to develop computer software to randomly assign judges to civil and criminal cases — an effort to eliminate the possibility cases could be steered to certain judges.

Attorneys for The Citizens’ Voice have accused Conahan of conspiring with his first cousin, former Court Administrator William T. Sharkey Sr., to place a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit on Ciavarella’s docket.

A judge appointed by the state Supreme Court to review the case this month recommended that the court overturn Ciavarella’s $3.5 million and said the mere “appearance of impropriety” merited a new trial.

The random-selection system “takes out of assignment the human equation,” Musto said. “A person cannot assign a case, it’s done by a computer which would obviously have no knowledge or stake in who may have a relationship with someone.”

Olszewski said his system for criminal cases includes more variables and could be ready within the next six months to a year.

Musto’s software for civil cases went live in May and this month was expanded to include assignments for hearings on preliminary injunctions.

“Every time you see the picture of Lady Justice, Lady Justice is blind. For far too long we haven’t heard about that,” Olszewski said. “That’s what we need to have. Justice must be blind. It doesn’t matter the name of the lawyer, the name of the law firm, the name of the litigant. Everybody has to be treated fairly. It’s a level playing field for everyone.”

Warning signs

Muroski suspected inequity in the court system four years ago, when he was still presiding over the county’s family and orphans court.

He wrote a five-page memorandum to the county commissioners, claiming he had been blocked from providing services to abused and neglected children because delinquency placements “had consumed much of the entire juvenile court budget.”

Delinquency court, which is for children under the age of 18 accused of criminal activity, had been the focus of the federal investigation that led to the charges against Ciavarella and Conahan.

The two former judges were accused of accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks from the co-owner and developer of a pair of privately owned juvenile detention centers.

Conahan, who served as the county’s president judge from 2002 to 2006, forced the closure of a county-owned detention center in 2003 and asked county commissioners to fund an exclusive, 20-year agreement with one of the private facilities, Pennsylvania Child Care in Pittston Township, worth $58 million.

Conahan reassigned Muroski to criminal court after he had served in family court judge for nearly 24 years.

“About three days after I sent that letter to the county commissioners, I was reassigned to criminal court, and in my view the reassignment was done in order to silence me and further encourage me to, at that point in time, retire,” Muroski said.

Muroski said he started talking to federal investigators in 2006 and would continue to answer questions, when asked.

“That’s my response to the people when they say ‘why didn’t you do something?’” Muroski said. “I did. Nobody else did.”

Muroski will be forced to leave the bench at the end of the year, when he turns 70, the mandatory retirement age for a Common Pleas judge. He has outlasted Conahan and Ciavarella and, until he passes the president judge torch, will continue to clean up their mess.

“We’re well on the way to recovery,” Muroski said. “Unfortunately, every time something happens, something is publicized about past conduct of certain judges, we take a hit. Sometimes I feel we’re back at step one, however we just pick ourselves up, try again and keep moving along.”

Copyright © 2009 The Citizens' Voice