Further Details on the Kurt Mitman Case from the Pennsylvania Criminal Court Docket

This is part of the split-up post, Should Rapists Edit Scholarly Journals?

Pennsylvania allows the public to see court dockets for free– good for Pennsylvania!— though I wonder if a lot of entries fell off with updating to the web or weren’t written down in the first place, and the entries aren’t labelled in any consistent andrational way. Mitman’s docket says the offense date was 7/25/2004, when Mitman was about 22, just graduated from college and going to England the next year on a Marshall scholarship after he’d done being a camp counsellor. The charges were: “IDSI Person Less Than 16 Yrs Age”, “Contact/Comm.W/Minor-Sexual Offenses”, “Endangering Welfare Of Children”, “Diss Explicit Sex Mat’l Minor”, and “Corruption Of Minors”. (I don’t see any civil case on PACER, by the way.)

Mitman posted bail on 9/23/2004, about the time he went to England to study at Cambridge. Is it usual to let people arrested for felonies leave the country? His amended guilty plea statement was on 3/22/2005, but the docket doesn’t list an initial guilty plea. On 5/5/2005 there was a hearing on reducing the bail. On 6/17/2005 somebody filed to recuse– Judge C. Theodore Fritsch? On 9/19/2005 Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg appears. Judge Fritsch, elected with the Republican party organization’s endorsement, later appeared in the news being criticized for sentencing a prosecutor turned teen corrupter to zero jail time and re-sentencing him under the adverse publicity:

Anthony Cappuccio, 32, pled guilty in March to a myriad of charges for supplying three teens with drugs and alcohol and having a sexual relationship with one, according to court documents.
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The husband and father of two is a former Bucks County assistant district attorney and served as the teen’s youth leader at church.
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The surprise reversal came after Judge C. Theodore Fritsch, Jr. received heavy criticism for Cappuccio’s sentence. Some alleged the judge gave the former prosecutor special treatment.
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Police found Cappuccio and a 17-year-old boy half-naked in a parked car behind a Richland Township strip mall in September 2008 and the investigation grew from there.
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Fritsch’s change ups the sentence from 3 – 23 months under house arrest to 6 – 23 months in jail, according to Bucks County prosecutors.

More from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Cappuccio, 32, had been a chief deputy district attorney in Bucks County until early September, when Richland Township police found him partially clothed with a 17-year-old boy in a parked car near Quakertown. He also had been a youth leader at a Perkasie church, where parents had trusted him with their teens because of his standing as a prosecutor.
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He was charged Oct. 30 with three felony counts of endangering the welfare of children, one felony count of criminal use of a communication facility, and misdemeanor charges of corrupting minors and furnishing minors with alcohol.
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He pleaded guilty to all charges. Fritsch’s first sentence was within state guidelines, but allowing him to serve it on house arrest drew gasps from the boys’ families.
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Senior Deputy Attorney General E. Marc Costanzo had likened the sentence to “being grounded in his room.”
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Yesterday, Costanzo presented evidence that Cappuccio had not worn an electronic monitor cuff until Thursday. He had been free for 50 to 60 hours per week, during which he worked at a restaurant, underwent counseling, ran personal errands, and attended his own divorce proceedings.
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Costanzo noted that Cappuccio had been seen strolling the streets of Doylestown last week during a break in his divorce case.
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That last tidbit seemed to nettle the judge, who said he had not realized all the liberties afforded by house arrest in Bucks County. “This was certainly beyond my authorization,” Fritsch said.
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Costanzo yesterday handed Fritsch a lengthy e-mail from Cappuccio’s wife. The judge took a brief recess to read the document, which detailed the extent of Cappuccio’s transgressions and the repeated, unsuccessful attempts by her, counselors, and others to get him to change his ways.
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Fritsch said he also reconsidered Cappuccio’s naming of the victims in his courtroom apology to their families last month.
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“Upon reflection . . . I do believe it is appropriate to give less weight to his remorse,” the judge said.

I don’t know what is going on with recusal and Judge Mitchell, but Judge Fritsch was on the case later too (he is a judge even now, in 2020). The next interesting thing is the 12/27/2006 “PETITION FOR A HEARING TO DETERMINE THE DEFT’S ELIGIBILITY FOR ACADEMIC RELEASE”. It’s appalling how they keep these things secret from the victims of a crime. That’s what happened more famously with Jeffrey Epstein: the prosecutor’s office didn’t tell the victims they were going to go easy on him in Florida, even though there was some law in that case that did give victims some rights, and by the time they found out it was too late to do anything. Former Judge Paul Cassell, now a professor again I think, has been representing the victims in that case, and it’s one of his big causes.

On 1/16/2008 the judge issued an “Order for Special Probation/Parole Supervision”, so I guess Mitman went on parole then. The general picture I get is that the Pennsylvania judicial and prison system is corrupt, and victims had better watch very carefully what happens to a rich criminal.