CHARLESTON – Jurors heard testimony about possible witness tampering in the federal trial of suspended state Supreme Court Justice Allen Loughry.
Kimberly Ellis testified Oct. 5 about a conversation she had with Loughry, former court administrator Gary Johnson, two Supreme Court attorneys and court senior financial officer Sue Racer-Troy.
Jurors also heard an audio clip Ellis made with her cell phone during the meeting, which took place last October. In the audio clip, Loughry asked Ellis if she remembered a meeting in which she had written on paper the costs for the Supreme Court office renovations for former Justice Menis Ketchum and current Chief Justice Margaret Workman.
Loughry
“I was very specific over and over, that level we spent on anything, I didn’t want mine to be more than Menis’s or Margaret’s,” Loughry says to Ellis in the clip. “Do you remember those conversations?”
“I don’t,” Ellis responded, adding in testimony that those conversations “never happened.”
Ellis testified she also felt threatened in a phone call from Loughry on Jan. 4, 2017. He called her in the evening and asked her to keep it off the record, she testified.
“It is my understanding that you’re loyal to (former court administrator) Steve Canterbury, and you’re a spy,” Loughry told Ellis, according to her testimony. Canterbury had been fired by Loughry earlier that day. “But you have nothing to worry about. We like you.”
She said Loughry told her to scrape Canterbury’s name off of his office door the next morning when she got to work. She also said she taped the October meeting because other court employees had been fired, so she turned the recorder on and held it in her lap during the meeting.
Ellis worked with an interior design firm on a Supreme Court remodeling project before she became a court employee. She testified that despite him saying otherwise in media reports, Loughry was heavily involved in the renovations of his office, including picking out a $32,000 sectional couch and a $7,500 wooden floor inlay that features a map of West Virginia with each county a different color of wood except for his native Tucker County, which is made of blue granite.
Court spokeswoman Jennifer Bundy also testified Friday, saying she “had no reason to question” it when Loughry told her to tell members of the media the court had a home office policy. Loughry also is accused of causing another Supreme Court employee “to send an email to a report that falsely and fraudulently claimed that ‘the court has a longstanding practice of providing the justices an opportunity to establish a home office, with court-provided technology equipment (i.e. computers) and furniture to suit their respective needs.”
Others – including former Justice Brent Benjamin – have testified they knew of no such policy other than computers.
Benjamin also talked about how tense things were among the justices in 2016 when an investigation into state vehicle use began. He called a judicial administrative conference in September 2016 the “low low.” That’s when the court voted 3-2 to not institute a policy governing vehicle use. Benjamin and former Justice Robin Jean Davis were in the minority, while Loughry, Workman and former Justice Menis Ketchum were in the majority. Ketchum has pleaded guilty to a federal charge of using a state vehicle and gas purchasing card for personal use on a golf trip to Virginia.
“It became apparent to me that it had been done in the office and brought to conference,” Benjamin testified. “I was upset because I felt we needed to discuss it more.”
Benjamin said he did pull Loughry aside: “Allen, are you telling me it was always official travel, that you didn’t use them for personal purposes?”
Benjamin also said Loughry told him he only used vehicles for official business, but he also testified that Loughry wouldn’t tell him when he asked where Loughry went on these trips.
The state Supreme Court suspended Loughry without pay while charges of judicial misconduct against him were pending on June 8. That motion meant that Loughry could not hear any arguments or perform any judicial functions while his case progresses through the court system.
Two days prior, a request to suspend Loughry's law license was issued, along with a 32-count Statement of Charges.
In the June 6 filing, the Judicial Investigation Commission claimed Loughry violated the Code of Judicial Conduct by making "false statements with the deliberate attempt to deceive, engaged in sophism and gave disinformation with the intent to harm another person.”
The JIC statement said it had been investigating Loughry since February.
Loughry also faces another trial next month before the state Senate after the House voted to impeach him. If found guilty there, he would be removed from the court.
Loughry was elected to the Supreme Court in 2012, and served as chief justice in 2017.
U.S. District Court case number 2:18-cr-00134
