A Pennsylvania Supreme Court judge is under scrutiny for sending racist and misogynistic messages from his office, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
The emails belonging to Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice J. Michael Eakin have been handed to the Judicial Conduct Board by the state attorney general, who said there was an entrenched culture among the state's criminal justice system of trading pornography.
"It's enraging," Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women's Law Project, told the Inquirer. "It's enraging that men of this stature are engaged in activities that are so demeaning to women and to minorities."
Some of the jokes, obtained by the Philadelphia Daily News, are a racist, sexist and homophobic brew.
In one email sent in 2010, Eakin had a so-called joke about a woman who goes to the doctor "beaten black and blue." The doctor advises her to take a sip of tea and hold it in her mouth until her husband goes to sleep. The beatings stop and the woman returns, marveling at how well it worked. The punchline is that the beatings stopped because she kept her mouth shut.
An email received by Eakin casts Muslim children as suicide bombers, with a Muslim mother lamenting that her children "blow up so fast." He also got an email with a video referring to Mexican people with a racial slur and calling them "animals."
Another email received by Eakin from then-Senior Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Baxter portrays black people as welfare recipients who voted for Obama to keep getting checks, the Daily News reports.
State Attorney General Kathleen Kane told reporters the emails mean "that your system, your criminal-justice system that you think you have and you think you deserve, is not working properly."
She suspended Baxter for 10 days last year. Eakin and Baxter did not respond to reporters' requests for comment.
