While the prosecution in suspended Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin’s political corruption trial was successful in getting nearly all of its requests to bar evidence granted, the justice’s lawyers asked the judge to place even more limitations on the state’s case against their client.
Attorneys for Orie Melvin at Myers Brier & Kelly in Scranton asked Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas Judge Lester Nauhaus to bar the prosecution from presenting 15 different threads of evidence on everything from the Supreme Court’s 1998 order limiting political activity by judicial staff to layperson testimony on how a former Orie Melvin judicial clerk may have developed carpal tunnel syndrome.
