Brett Murphy, Katelyn Polantz talk court ethics and judicial journalism at Pitt Law School

On Thursday afternoon, ProPublica reporter Brett Murphy and CNN reporter Katelyn Polantz discussed their experiences reporting on high-profile legal stories and issues regarding court ethics in an event titled “Lavish Gifts, Judicial Ethics, and the U.S. Supreme Court.” The talk was moderated by Chancellor Emeritus Mark Nordenberg and took place in the Teplitz Memorial Courtroom of the Pitt Law School.

Nordenberg began the discussion by talking about the Supreme Court’s waning approval amongst the American public before introducing Murphy and Polantz.

Murphy, a Pitt alumnus, is currently a reporter for ProPublica’s national desk and was part of the team that won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for their series of reporting on how some Supreme Court justices accepted luxurious trips and gifts from a small group of billionaires. The Pulitzer Prize Board cited the team’s reporting as a reason why the Supreme Court adopted its first ever code of conduct.

Polantz, also a Pitt alumnus, is currently a senior reporter on crime and justice at CNN where she has covered both impeachments of former President Donald Trump, the work of the January 6 Special Committee and Trump’s criminal cases in New York, Washington, D.C., Georgia and Florida. In 2020, Polantz won an Emmy Award for her coverage of the arrest of Roger Stone.

Polantz began the discussion by asking Murphy what the process was for getting started on the “Friends of the Court” series. Murphy described how the ProPublica team began with questioning Justice Antonin Scalia’s death while on a hunting trip and asking themselves if trips like that were typical for Justices. Murphy noted that due to the Supreme Court not being subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the team had to get information through alternative sources like security marshalls for Justices and Facebook pages.

“From a Facebook enthusiast page for private jet travel in New Haven, we found that on the date of the trip, someone had taken a picture and said it was great to welcome Justice [Clarence] Thomas to New Haven,” Murphy said. “That, coupled with the tail number on the plane, we were able to identify Harlan Crow as the person who paid for that trip.”

Murphy said this information led to the team to investigate further and determine the extent to which Justices were receiving gifts. This led to Murphy and other team members traveling to 15 states, knocking on doors of people like waitresses, limousine drivers and private jet pilots who may have witnessed interactions between billionaires like Crow and Supreme Court Justices.

“For every 100 doors I knocked on, I think 10 people would agree to chat with me on the porch for a minute,” Murphy said. “It’s a very high rejection rate, a lot of self-reflecting in the car about what I could have said differently, but that’s how we reported the story.”

While working on the stories, Murphy said he used the Ethics in Government Act and the ethical norms reported by legal scholars and other judges as “lodestars” to ensure his reporting stayed on the track.

“The defense from Justices from the beginning has been, ‘These are actual friends of mine,’ … and the question was always, ‘Would they be your dear friends if you were not a Supreme Court Justice?’” Murphy said. “We were also trying to address what was normal and normative and what kinds of interests would such billionaires have before the court. Why would they want these relationships?”

According to Murphy, “sources came out of the woodwork” after the articles were published, helping them identify more instances of Justices receiving trips and gifts. He said the influence of the series ProPublica published and the public response has been “great to see.”

“As tips come in, we’re going to continue reporting them,” Murphy said. “The evidence that we accumulated in those first couple stories clearly indicated that this was a ‘tip-of-the-iceberg’ situation where what we are learning about represents only a small sample that’s probably out there.”

After Murphy described his reporting, Polantz discussed her own experiences covering legal stories. She said that in 2020, the courts were “utilized by the people wanting to spread disinformation about the election.”

“Federal courts don’t have a lot of transparency in their proceedings. You can’t listen, you can’t watch on YouTube a federal court proceeding, there are no cameras in federal courts,” Polantz said. “I do think it helped spread the idea that there could be [election] fraud.”

Polantz added that the lack of transparency in court proceedings caused January 6 defendants to behave differently inside and outside the courtroom.

“There have been sentencings … where the defendant will admit to their crimes and then tell the judge that they are absolutely sorry and remorseful and can’t believe that they did this horrific thing on January 6, and then walk outside of the courthouse and say something very different to cameras,” Polantz said.

Nordenberg shifted the conversation to discuss the prospect of American press freedoms coming under attack. Murphy cited the raid of a Kansas newspaper and the vandalization of a New Hampshire journalist’s house as instances of media repression.

“The rhetoric that a journalist is the enemy of the people rather than a representative of facts and the truth, I think that’s a real problem to be concerned about,” Murphy said. “I think a lot of [people] would prefer us to be stenographers of the things they say rather than journalists who put what they say into context.”

Polantz said “there’s been a systematic loss of trust” in the press and a “loss in people’s ability to differentiate between fact and opinion.”

“We see this quite a lot in the political world where there are people who exist to give opinions and to comment and to sway you in a direction. That’s a different role than the people like Brett and I who are gathering information and presenting it in stories,” Polantz said. “The more you’re undercutting the press, the less people are able to tell what’s true and who the organizations are to trust and who’s not.”

After the event, David Ehrenwerth, head of the advisory council for the Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law & Public Policy and an attorney at K&L Gates, said he likes to attend talks like these because he “always learns something.”

“I learned more about the ingenuity of the people in the media who have to find their stories through a lot of activity and I was impressed with that,” Ehrenwerth said. “I’m also impressed with their diligence and their efforts to be fair.”

Henry Moore, a junior film production and political science major, said he recently transferred to Pitt and attended the talk to meet people with similar interests and to hear from the two award-winning journalists.

“The fact that there was a Pulitzer Prize winner from ProPublica and an Emmy Award winner from CNN, I was like, ‘Well, I certainly have to go and see this,’” Moore said. “It was a really good experience to hear from Pitt graduates how to achieve big things in the journalism sphere.”