A trial date has been set for the courthouse hacking case whose unlikely co-defendants include a Gwinnett County Superior Court judge and a registered sex offender.
Kathryn Schrader (the judge), Ed Kramer (the sex offender) and Frank Karic are all scheduled to stand trial the week of Feb. 3. Each is charged with three counts of computer trespass, accused of playing various roles in a complicated series of events that has gripped the Gwinnett County courthouse for nearly a year.
Schrader, who was suspended last month by the Judicial Qualifications Commission, reportedly hired a private investigator named TJ Ward in February. Ward was tasked with looking into the judge's fears that someone was trying to hack into her work computer.
Ward — who entered a plea deal in the case last month and won't stand trial — subsequently hired Karic to install monitoring software on Schrader's computer. Kramer was then hired to keep track of the activity on Schrader's computer.
Prosecutors believe all of that amounted to unlawful interference with Gwinnett County’s computer network. Attorneys for the defendants have rejected that notion, saying that the software installed on Schrader’s computer was passive and not capable of anything but monitoring traffic.
The case is further complicated by the fact that Schrader purportedly feared that the person trying to access her computer was Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter.
The basis of that accusation has remained unclear and Porter has denied it. Representatives from the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia are prosecuting the case in place of the district attorney’s office.
The case came to light following an unrelated Feb. 26 arrest for Kramer, the co-founder of popular Atlanta sci-fi convention DragonCon. (Kramer has not been tied to the convention for several years.)
Kramer — who previously spent more than a decade battling Porter and other Gwinnett prosecutors on child molestation charges — was accused of taking an unsolicited photo of a child in a Lawrenceville doctor's office. Investigators searching his home computers following the arrest reportedly found a file folder with Schrader's name on it.
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