Fayette attorney to update judge on recovery of deleted prison emails
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An attorney for Fayette County has until Sept. 16 at 5 p.m. to update a federal judge as to whether deleted emails related to the conditions at the county lockup can be recovered.
In a brief order, U.S. Magistrate Judge Maureen P. Kelly also asked for an update about whether emails about prison conditions may have been located on a private storage drive maintained by Deputy Warden Barry Croftcheck.
Last month, attorney Charity Grimm Krupa, who represents three former inmates, asked a judge to sanction the county because she learned in depositions that emails county officials exchanged about prison conditions had been deleted.
The suit names the county, Croftcheck, Deputy Warden Michael Zavada and former warden Brian Miller, and was filed on behalf of former inmates Zoe White, Lisa Mitchell and Cindy Lee Wilson. The suit claims the women were forced to live in deplorable conditions in the more-than-century-old lockup in fall 2017.
However, Michael Lettrich, the attorney representing the county, said county employees were following policy by routinely deleting emails. He noted that across multiple depositions taken during the case, county employees have consistently testified that Fayette’s IT Department instructs users to regularly delete emails to ensure the server continues to run smoothly.
Lettrich said in court filings last month that the county’s email service provider, Ford Business Machines in Connellsville, is trying to recover the emails. If they can be recovered, they will be produced, he said. Lettrich also said he would work with Croftcheck to see if any pertinent emails he saved on his personal storage drive should be turned over to Krupa.
Even if the emails cannot be recovered, Lettrich has maintained that he’s given Krupa thousands of pages of documentation that detail maintenance and other issues at the prison when White, Mitchell and Wilson were incarcerated.
Krupa is seeking any email correspondence about heating and ventilation issues, roof leaks, rodent or insect issues, plumbing issues, daily yard and exercise time, inmate programs, daily menus and about a sewage project completed in the fall of 2017.