HARRISBURG — Justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said Monday they were “disturbed” by revelations about the content of alleged e-mail exchanges of explicit photos or offensive jokes between prosecutors and one of their colleagues, Justice Michael Eakin.

The court’s statement came two weeks after Attorney General Kathleen Kane submitted a batch of e-mails to the court and various state ethics agencies, describing some of the more than 1,000 e-mails sent to Eakin’s private Yahoo e-mail account as racially offensive and misogynistic pornography.

The e-mails linked to Eakin are the latest turn in an e-mail scandal uncovered by Kane that has spurred a wave of resignations or firings of state officials, including another state Supreme Court justice.

“Members of the Supreme Court are disturbed by the content of the e-mails, as reported by the media,” the court said in the statement.

Meanwhile, lawyers and law professors say that Eakin’s involvement in the e-mail-swapping culture with prosecutors, if true, raises serious questions about his independence, sensitivity and impartiality toward defendants.

A lawyer the courts hired last year to look into revelations of e-mail swapping between prosecutors and justices did not have some of the Eakin e-mails that were in a batch Kane’s office turned over last month, the high court said.

A number of the e-mails “were not made available” by Kane’s office last year, the court said, even though it said the Judicial Conduct Board used its subpoena power to access e-mails from the attorney general’s office.

In last year’s review, the court-appointed lawyer, Robert Byer, reported seeing nothing inappropriate and the conduct board dropped its complaint against Eakin.

Now, the board has said it is investigating Eakin’s e-mails again, while the courts have hired the Pittsburgh-based law firm Del Sole Cavanaugh Stroyd for a second review.

Duquesne University law professor Bruce Ledewitz said the court’s appointment of a lawyer defies a 1993 amendment to the state constitution. The amendment, adopted in the wake of another scandal involving a justice, was meant to take disciplinary authority away from the Supreme Court and place it with independent panels to act as investigators, prosecutors and judges, Ledewitz said.

“How can we have any confidence at this point in anything they do?” Ledewitz questioned. “They’re not independent in this. They’re judging themselves.”

Eakin, 66, a Republican and a former Cumberland County prosecutor, has said he would cooperate with the investigation.