Former Centre County District Attorney Stacy Parks Miller.
I now have two small-town (county) legal systems to compare. However, I am more familiar with the Centre County (PA) legal system than the Monroe County (MI) legal system. My experiences with the Monroe County system have been much better than my experiences with the Centre County system.
While things seem to be turning around over the last couple of years, the Centre County legal system was a mess for the ten years before that. There is even a Facebook group called Crisis in our Courthouse about the mess. I did not create it and don’t know who did. It has documented much of the turmoil in great detail and contains more information about the stuff I will discuss briefly here.
The district attorney, Stacy Parks Miller, sued Judge Ruest and many county commissioners, including Ava’s ex-husband. The portion of the lawsuit against Judge Ruest stemmed from an incident in which an inmate I met, Ryan Richard, apparently asked his cellmate, who thought he would be released soon, to hire a hitman to kill someone in the district attorney’s office he got out. The cellmate reported this to the district attorney for, I assume, some leniency. Parks Miller wrote a fake order for the cellmate to show Ryan that the cellmate was indeed getting out. Needing a judge’s signature on the document, she either had Judge Ruest sign it or forged her signature. Handwriting experts later determined that the signature was likely not forged. However, Judge Ruest did not recall signing it; the cellmate was accidentally released and wound up back in Pam’s courtroom. This fiasco looked very bad for Parks Miller, who I suspect slipped the order into a stack of documents Judge Ruest needed to sign, knowing, as I’ve mentioned previously, that she doesn’t take the time to read the things she signs. Parks Miller was facing some serious charges of forgery, but the court eventually dismissed them. However, she decided to sue Judge Ruest for lying about having no recollection of signing the order, implicitly suggesting Parks Miller had forged her signature. Someone that had worked in the DA’s office also claimed that Parks Miller had forged the signature. If these forgery allegations were false, Parks Miller should be very mindful of false claims and how they can affect the accused’s life.
I have included the 60-page lawsuit and the 94-page request for sanctions in image galleries. While these documents are written in boring legalese, they are pretty entertaining to read, and the majority of the pages are exhibits, most of which are also quite fascinating. Both orders were submitted to the court by Parks Miller’s attorney, Bruce Castor. However, I suspect both were written primarily by Parks Miller, as they appear to be very personal and a bit deranged. If the name Bruce Castor sounds familiar, that’s because he was one of the attorneys willing to represent Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial. Most people thought his initial address to congress was a disaster, and another attorney did all subsequent speaking. He will come up again as Parks Miller’s attorney later in the book.
Parks Miller was also suing the county supervisors and asking that the county be held in contempt of court because they released some of the text messages she had sent using a county-issued phone after receiving a Freedom of Information Act request. The courts later determined that the supervisors should not have released the text messages. However, the messages revealed that Parks Miller had been texting Judge Lunsford during a trial in which both participated. This clear violation of court rules did not sit well in the community. Parks Miller’s defense to the public was that her “tough on crime” tactics upset defense attorneys who were being vindictive.
In Parks Miller’s lawsuit, the county supervisors used a defense of “high public official immunity,” which states that people cannot sue public officials for defamation for acts done while performing their duties as public officials. I will discuss this later when explaining the lawsuit I filed against Parks Miller, who used the same defense. You can read more about Parks Miller here.