Judge Edwards, Her Niece, and the Story No One Will Touch

LACKAWANNA / WAYNE COUNTY, PA — When Dr. John William Stevens won a $1.1 million settlement in February 2025, every outlet in northeastern Pennsylvania ran the same story: a South Abington Township chiropractor, wrongly charged with sexual assault, had beaten the Lackawanna County District Attorney’s office. Fox56, WNEP, and the Scranton Times-Tribune reported the dollar figure, quoted his lawyer Joseph Guzzardo, printed DA Mark Powell’s insistence that he “did nothing wrong,” and moved on.

None of them told you the accusation began in the office of a Wayne County judge.

Two Phone Calls

The case is Stevens v. Sullum, No. 3:20-CV-01911, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in October 2020. Sexual assault charges against Stevens were filed in November 2018 and dropped in July 2019; the federal suit followed, and five years later the county’s insurer paid.

Every outlet declined to name the accuser. The federal record named her from the first filing — she is the lead defendant. Jessi Sullum, of Honesdale, was employed at Mastri Law LLC, a Scranton firm that lists the Wayne County Courthouse among its offices. According to the complaint, which U.S. District Judge Malachy Mannion found sufficient to survive dismissal in July 2021, Sullum and Stevens met on Facebook in early 2018, exchanged sexual messages, and had what the complaint describes as a consensual encounter at his office on March 27, 2018.

That afternoon, around 1:50, Sullum called two people: her boss, attorney Dominic Mastri, and her aunt — the Honorable Janine Edwards, President Judge of the Wayne County Court of Common Pleas, and one of only two judges on that court.

The complaint states it plainly: “Edwards thereafter used her influence to persuade [District Attorney] Mark Powell and [Assistant District Attorney] Judith Price to begin an intentionally biased and procedurally improper ‘investigation’ with the goal of constructing a criminal case against” Stevens.

A year later, Detective Christopher Kolcharno interviewed Mastri, who said Sullum’s primary interest after the encounter was hiring a civil attorney to sue Stevens for money. When Kolcharno tried to ask Edwards about it, the president judge refused to speak with him — a refusal recorded in the federal file and never reported anywhere. The only outlet ever to name Edwards was the River Reporter, which noted the influence allegation once in 2020 and never returned to it.

What the DA’s Own Office Knew

When the case was reassigned internally, it reached Deputy District Attorney Sara Aulisio Varela. On January 4, 2019, she put her concerns in writing. Her notes, produced in discovery, say she told First Assistant DA Judith Price she had “serious issues with victim Sullum’s credibility” because the office held “multiple police reports documenting incidents in which victim has lied to police.”

Price’s answer is the part no story about this case ever printed. According to Varela’s notes, Price said she and Powell planned to send Sullum to rehab for alcoholism and PTSD to “explain Sullum’s lies to the police,” and that they could manufacture a diagnosis of PTSD to “salvage victim’s credibility.” Sullum had not been diagnosed with PTSD.

This isn’t a defense allegation. It comes from a deputy DA’s contemporaneous notes — the kind of record prosecutors treat as permanent. The plan had a real event to draw on: five months before the encounter with Stevens, Sullum had appeared on WNEP as a survivor of the October 2017 Las Vegas festival shooting. Whatever she experienced that night, the office wasn’t proposing to document a condition fifteen months later. In its own words, it was building one “to salvage victim’s credibility” — a diagnosis for the case, not the patient.

Varela is now Chief Deputy District Attorney over Lackawanna County’s Major Crimes Unit. She has never been publicly asked about these notes.

The Affidavit, and the Evidence That Vanished

The timeline shows what the office did with what it knew. Detectives obtained a search warrant the day of the incident, and the next morning Stevens voluntarily handed over the Facebook and text messages between himself and Sullum — messages showing she had initiated much of the contact, including calling him “hot.” A probable cause affidavit was drafted two days later, on March 29, 2018. It sat unfiled for eight months.

The complaint alleges Powell and Price directed that the exculpatory messages be “intentionally omitted from all investigation reports and affidavits generated in this case.” The affidavit filed in November 2018 was unchanged from the March draft. Stevens was charged, and the case ground on until prosecutors dropped it in July 2019.

Then the evidence problem surfaced. In November 2024, U.S. Magistrate Judge Karoline Mehalchick sanctioned Detective Michelle Mancuso for deleting the emails through which Sullum had sent the bruising photographs used to justify the arrest — destroying the metadata that would have shown when, and in what form, those images were sent. Mehalchick called it “spoliation of evidence.” Whether the photographs showed what the affidavit claimed can no longer be independently tested, because the record that would have answered the question is gone.

Two months later, on January 28, 2025, the case settled for $1.1 million — and the same day, the order sanctioning Mancuso was vacated as a term of the deal. A federal finding that a detective destroyed evidence was simply traded away. Mancuso still works for the Lackawanna County DA. So does Kolcharno, whom Powell promoted to Deputy Chief Detective in 2023, while the suit was active. Sullum, named on every state-law count, paid nothing.

Everyone Moved Up

Six days after the settlement, Powell testified for under twenty minutes before the Pennsylvania Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Lisa Baker — whose 20th District covers parts of Wayne County. The Senate confirmed him days later as part of a nine-judge bloc vote, and he was sworn onto the Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas, filling the seat vacated when Judge Julia Munley was elevated to the federal bench. The $1.1 million settlement was announced five days after he put on the robe. In November 2025 he ran unopposed for a full ten-year term and won with 54,084 votes.

His public statement: “I did nothing wrong and I was not involved in the investigation of this case.” The record shows Powell personally contacted the state licensing board to suspend Stevens’s chiropractic license, which Stevens lost for more than a year.

Why Wayne County Won’t Touch It

This is where the story comes home. Janine Edwards is not an outsider to the county’s legal machinery — she is its product. She began practicing alongside John J. Martin, now president of the Wayne County Bar Association, the same WCBA whose tax-exempt status lapsed, whose Legal Journal records were deleted minutes after this outlet published a procedural audit, and whose Pro Bono Partnerships subsidiary drew $109,841 in IOLTA grants with no public accounting. Edwards served as county DA, then took the bench in January 2018. Martin’s son now sits as a Legal Journal officer beside Jessica Ellis and Christine Rechner, a court master and Pro Bono Partnerships treasurer. Sullum’s own defense attorney is a former Wayne County ADA who practices before Edwards; her employer works out of Edwards’s courthouse. The same names rotate through the officer lists, the master appointments, and the grant-funded nonprofits, inside one small bench of two judges.

The official who would ordinarily flag a judge’s alleged misconduct is District Attorney Alfred J. Howell, who succeeded Edwards in the DA’s office and appears in the Legal Journal beside her every week. This outlet has documented his pattern: a federal lawsuit accusing him of using criminal charges to collect his own father’s legal bills; a procedural audit showing he signed that charging document himself and never referred it to the Attorney General; his entanglement with the Ellis Law Group network; and a plea deal in which an attorney facing nine first-degree felonies served six months.

Howell held office through all five years of the Stevens litigation. The conflict isn’t hypothetical: in November 2024, with that suit still pending, Edwards sentenced Joseph Cordaro — the defendant Howell would later be accused, in a separate federal suit, of prosecuting to collect his own father’s legal bills. The DA who would have to report a judge’s alleged misconduct was, in the same period, trying cases in front of her. The complaint alleged one of Wayne County’s two sitting judges used her office to steer a neighboring county’s prosecution toward a relative — conduct that falls within the Pennsylvania Judicial Conduct Board’s jurisdiction. There is no public record that Howell’s office flagged it, referred it, or acknowledged it. Howell does not respond to this outlet.

The Vote

Edwards’s ten-year term expires in January 2028. She faces a retention vote — yes or no, no opponent, no party label — on November 2, 2027. Retention losses in Pennsylvania are, as Ballotpedia puts it, “exceptionally rare,” and rarer still in a county where every practicing attorney appears before the judge on the ballot.

The allegations surfaced once, in a single 2020 item, and died. The judge has never been questioned. The DA who should have answered hasn’t. The vote is fifteen months away.

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Pocono Review covers local government accountability in Monroe, Wayne, Pike, Carbon, Lackawanna, and Luzerne counties. It accepts no advertising and maintains no relationships with the governments it covers. Court records cited are from Stevens v. Sullum, No. 3:20-CV-01911 (M.D. Pa.), including the July 2021 memorandum (Mannion), the February 2023 memorandum and November 2024 sanctions order (Mehalchick), and the January 28, 2025 settlement.