The Family Court Problem

Last April, Inga Saffron, a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, began to raise questions about the dual role being played by attorney Jeffrey Rotwitt in the project to build a new courthouse for Philadelphia's Family Court. Rotwitt, who was being paid a significant fee as the attorney for Chief Justice Ronald Castille and the court system, ended up also being the co-developer of the project. To many of us outsiders, that looked a lot like a conflict of interest, but it seems to have taken Chief Justice Castille a while to recognize it. There's a lot about this saga that doesn't smell right, but especially offensive was a ham-handed attempt by L. Stuart Ditzen,  a former Inquirer reporter and now a spokesman for Castille, apparently to intimidate Saffron by reminding her, not too subtly, of a multi-million dollar verdict against the Inquirer in a 1973 libel case. You can read the latest installment of this story in this article in this morning's Inquirer. I hope the Inquirer and its reporters, Joseph Tanfani and Mark Fazlollah, continue to dig into this story about the Family Court deal because the truth needs to come out. Not only is there a lot of taxpayer money involved, but it is also important to find out if there is a segment of our legal community that believes it can play by different rules than the rest of us.