Attorney Henry E. Hockeimer, Jr., left, and former Mayor Stephen Reed after Reed’s arraignment July 14 on corruption charges.
The Philadelphia attorney representing former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed has filed a wide-ranging set of requests for city records, enlisting the state’s right-to-know laws in Reed’s defense against corruption charges, TheBurg has learned.
Henry E. Hockeimer, Jr., of the Philadelphia law firm Ballard Spahr, sent the open-records requests to city hall between July 20 and July 28, a week after Reed was arraigned on racketeering charges stemming from a state grand jury probe.
He asked for a vast array of documents, including Reed’s correspondence with various officials and advisors, minutes and agendas of several years’ worth of meetings, files related to city borrowings and current Mayor Eric Papenfuse’s communications with law enforcement and reporters.
The requests, themselves a matter of public record once submitted, were provided to TheBurg in response to a right-to-know request.
The purpose of the records request is not clear. Under state law, requesters are not required to provide their reasons for seeking records. Hockeimer, reached late on Thursday, had no immediate comment, except to say he had filed an appeal for parts of the requests the city had denied.
But in building their cases, defense attorneys sometimes assert the right to review government records to survey the evidence gathered against their clients and build stories that counter the ones told by prosecutors.
“The state’s investigation is the state’s investigation. It’s not the defendant’s investigation,” said Ion Meyn, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin law school and a former faculty member at the Wisconsin Innocence Project. “To rely just on what the state has investigated would be a mistake.”
The state’s initial disclosures about a case “should trigger successive, targeted, and written demands that are reiterated on the record, deepening accountability,” Meyn wrote in 2014, in an article for GPSolo, a publication of the American Bar Association. “A counter-investigation is essential to checking the state’s work.”
Nonetheless, the use of open records requests by defense lawyers does not appear to be widespread in Pennsylvania, according to Erik Arneson, director of the state open records office.
In part, that may be because one of several exemptions in the law, pertaining to records of a criminal investigation, is “broad enough that there’s not much to be gained” from making such requests, Arneson said.
At the same time, records that were deemed public before their connection to any criminal investigation generally remain public after charges are filed, he said.
In Reed’s case, Hockeimer sent a series of four open records requests to Harrisburg city hall, asking for documents in detailed lists that appear to stem from allegations in a grand jury report that was made public July 14.
On the basis of the report, Reed was arraigned that morning on 17 criminal charges encompassing 499 individual counts, including theft, bribery, deceptive business practices, criminal solicitation, evidence tampering and misapplication of entrusted property. Topping the list was a racketeering charge, a first-degree felony.
The report alleged that Reed, the seven-term mayor of Pennsylvania’s capital, used public borrowings to divert fees to pet projects, like acquiring Western-style and other artifacts. It portrayed the former mayor as heedlessly leading the city deeper and deeper into debt in the service of personal interests with little or no public benefit.
Reed, speaking the morning of his arraignment, said he had not been a part of any crime. “I devoted my life to the city of Harrisburg, and I look forward to waging a vigorous fight against these charges,” he said.
In his requests, Hockeimer targeted documents that appear to be related to specific allegations. For example, he asked the city for files related to “the City Council special projects fund created in 2003,” which the state has alleged was created as a bribe to secure council votes for a new borrowing on the Harrisburg incinerator.
In another example, he asked for the personnel file and travel records of Richard Pickles, a former city police captain whom Reed allegedly deputized to collect artifacts on cross-county road trips that were paid for by the city.
Some of the requested records are likely to be voluminous. One list includes a request for “all records including, but not limited to, documents, notes, correspondence and files” related to eight separate years of bond offerings. The closing documents alone for a single bond offering can run to many hundreds of pages.
In the case of some records, it’s not clear on what basis Hockeimer believes them to be in the possession of city government. For instance, he asked for records that current Mayor Eric Papenfuse provided to the Patriot-News, the FBI, the state police and the state attorney general between the fall of 2007 and the present.
Papenfuse did not take office until 2013, though he was briefly a board member of what was formerly the Harrisburg Authority, a governmental entity, before resigning in the fall of 2007. In 2009, during a campaign for city council, he claimed publicly that he had been assisting the FBI’s public corruption unit with an investigation into Reed.
Attorney General Kathleen Kane gave credit to Papenfuse’s persistence when she announced the charges against Reed last month. “Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and he wouldn’t let it go,” she said.
Harrisburg solicitor Neil Grover said Thursday that he could not comment on the requests, saying the city was in the midst of a legal review.
The grand jury probe, which was extended by court order to January 2016, is ongoing.
