Two Pa. Judges Accused of Jailing Hundreds of Kids for Bribes

[LuvBigRip]

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. —


For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.

The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

"I've never encountered, and I don't think that we will in our lifetimes, a case where literally thousands of kids' lives were just tossed aside in order for a couple of judges to make some money," said Marsha Levick, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, which is representing hundreds of youths sentenced in Wilkes-Barre.

Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC. The judges were charged on Jan. 26 and removed from the bench by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court shortly afterward.

No company officials have been charged, but the investigation is still going on.

The high court, meanwhile, is looking into whether hundreds or even thousands of sentences should be overturned and the juveniles' records expunged.

Among the offenders were teenagers who were locked up for months for stealing loose change from cars, writing a prank note and possessing drug paraphernalia. Many had never been in trouble before. Some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.

Many appeared without lawyers, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1967 ruling that children have a constitutional right to counsel.

The judges are scheduled to plead guilty to fraud Thursday in federal court. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years behind bars.

Ciavarella, 58, who presided over Luzerne County's juvenile court for 12 years, acknowledged last week in a letter to his former colleagues, "I have disgraced my judgeship. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame." Ciavarella, though, has denied he got kickbacks for sending youths to prison.

Conahan, 56, has remained silent about the case.

Many Pennsylvania counties contract with privately run juvenile detention centers, paying them either a fixed overall fee or a certain amount per youth, per day.

In Luzerne County, prosecutors say, Conahan shut down the county-run juvenile prison in 2002 and helped the two companies secure rich contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, at least some of that dependent on how many juveniles were locked up.

One of the contracts — a 20-year agreement with PA Child Care worth an estimated $58 million — was later canceled by the county as exorbitant.

The judges are accused of taking payoffs between 2003 and 2006.

Robert J. Powell co-owned PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care until June. His attorney, Mark Sheppard, said his client was the victim of an extortion scheme.

"Bob Powell never solicited a nickel from these judges and really was a victim of their demands," he said. "These judges made it very plain to Mr. Powell that he was going to be required to pay certain monies."

For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Ciavarella was ridiculously harsh and ran roughshod over youngsters' constitutional rights. Ciavarella sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a statewide rate of one in 10.

The criminal charges confirmed the advocacy groups' worst suspicions and have called into question all the sentences he pronounced.

Hillary Transue did not have an attorney, nor was she told of her right to one, when she appeared in Ciavarella's courtroom in 2007 for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal.

Her mother, Laurene Transue, worked for 16 years in the child services department of another county and said she was certain Hillary would get a slap on the wrist. Instead, Ciavarella sentenced her to three months; she got out after a month, with help from a lawyer.

"I felt so disgraced for a while, like, what do people think of me now?" said Hillary, now 17 and a high school senior who plans to become an English teacher.

Laurene Transue said Ciavarella "was playing God. And not only was he doing that, he was getting money for it. He was betraying the trust put in him to do what is best for children."

Kurt Kruger, now 22, had never been in trouble with the law until the day police accused him of acting as a lookout while his friend shoplifted less than $200 worth of DVDs from Wal-Mart. He said he didn't know his friend was going to steal anything.

Kruger pleaded guilty before Ciavarella and spent three days in a company-run juvenile detention center, plus four months at a youth wilderness camp run by a different operator.

"Never in a million years did I think that I would actually get sent away. I was completely destroyed," said Kruger, who later dropped out of school. He said he wants to get his record expunged, earn his high school equivalency diploma and go to college.

"I got a raw deal, and yeah, it's not fair," he said, "but now it's 100 times bigger than me."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,491148,00.html

[gmyers]

Nothing surprises me anymore.

[Renrut]

Hey, I just moved from there lol.

[dv8grl]

Shameful bast@rds. I hope horrible thing shappen to both of them.

[dv8grl]

$3.5M award reviewed over crooked Pa. judges' role

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090407/ap_on_re_us/newspaper_lawsuit;_ylt=AnwG2Tg8IX.UoaKo85qZLQFG2oc A

HARRISBURG, Pa. – Pennsylvania's highest court is revisiting a $3.5 million defamation verdict against The Citizens' Voice newspaper because of the role played in it by two former judges at the center of a juvenile justice scandal.

The state Supreme Court on Tuesday appointed a judge to examine the Wilkes-Barre newspaper's claim that corruption was involved in the handling of the lawsuit against it by a businessman and one of his companies. The court wants the judge to recommend whether a new trial is warranted.

The court's order says the newspaper has offered new evidence suggesting irregularities in how the case was handled because of the involvement of former Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella (shiv-uh-REL'-uh) and Michael Conahan.

Ciavarella and Conahan have pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges. Prosecutors say they took kickbacks from private juvenile detention centers.

[Jolie Rouge]

Party affiliations ??

[dv8grl]

Ex-Pa. judge to plead guilty in kickback scheme
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100429/ap_on_re_us/us_courthouse_kickbacks;_ylt=AjRGzZQ8.gy0A25V0IEMc LVbIwgF;_ylu=X3oDMTJ0OWxsNWp1BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwN DI5L3VzX2NvdXJ0aG91c2Vfa2lja2JhY2tzBHBvcwM3BHNlYwN 5bl9wYWdpbmF0ZV9zdW1tYXJ5X2xpc3QEc2xrA2V4LXBhanVkZ 2V0bw--
ALLENTOWN, Pa. – One of two former state judges accused of taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send youth offenders to for-profit detention facilities has agreed to plead guilty to a federal racketeering charge.

Former Luzerne County Judge Michael Conahan will plead guilty to his role in the $2.8 million "kids for cash" scandal, according to a plea agreement filed in Scranton on Thursday.

Prosecutors said Conahan and another former judge, Mark Ciavarella Jr., took kickbacks from the owner and builder of two private juvenile detention facilities. Last year, the state Supreme Court vacated the convictions of thousands of juveniles who appeared before Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008.

Conahan's plea agreement does not require him to testify against Ciavarella, and Ciaverella's attorney said Thursday his client maintains his innocence.

"He's going to trial," said the attorney, Al Flora Jr.

Conahan's attorney declined comment.

The charge to which Conahan will plead guilty carries a maximum sentence of 20 years and a $250,000 fine. He must also surrender his law license. Prosecutors agreed to drop all other counts, including fraud, money laundering, extortion and bribery, and recommend a sentence reduction if the former judge accepts responsibility for his conduct.

Federal prosecutors first announced charges against Ciavarella and Conahan in January 2009, describing a scheme in which Conahan forced the county-owned juvenile detention center to close and reached an agreement with a for-profit company co-owned by his friend, a prominent local attorney, to send youth offenders to its new facility outside Wilkes-Barre.

Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, sent youths — many of them accused of minor offenses — to the PA Child Care LLC detention center and to a sister facility in western Pennsylvania while he was taking payments, running his courtroom with "complete disregard for the constitutional rights of the juveniles," in the words of the Supreme Court.

The judges initially pleaded guilty in February 2009 to honest services fraud and tax evasion in a deal with federal prosecutors that called for a sentence of 87 months in prison. But their plea deals were rejected in July by Senior U.S. District Judge Edward M. Kosik, who ruled they had failed to accept responsibility for their actions.

A federal grand jury in Harrisburg subsequently returned a 48-count racketeering indictment against the judges

[dv8grl]

Pa. judge guilty of racketeering in kickback case
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110219/ap_on_re_us/us_courthouse_kickbacks;_ylt=AuCXfI7yPJwQajU28lOBd qFG2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTJ0Y3FwNDdsBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwM jE5L3VzX2NvdXJ0aG91c2Vfa2lja2JhY2tzBHBvcwM5BHNlYwN 5bl9wYWdpbmF0ZV9zdW1tYXJ5X2xpc3QEc2xrA3BhanVkZ2Vnd WlsdA--
SCRANTON, Pa. – A former juvenile court judge defiantly insisted he never accepted money for sending large numbers of children to detention centers even after he was convicted of racketeering for taking a $1 million kickback from the builder of the for-profit lockups.

Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella was allowed to remain free pending sentencing following his conviction Friday in what prosecutors said was a "kids for cash" scheme that ranks among the biggest courtroom frauds in U.S. history.

Ciavarella, 61, left the bench in disgrace two years ago after he and a second judge, Michael Conahan, were accused of using juvenile delinquents as pawns in a plot to get rich. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has dismissed 4,000 juvenile convictions issued by Ciavarella, saying he sentenced young offenders without regard for their constitutional rights.

Ciavarella maintained the payments were legal and denied that he incarcerated youths for money.

"Never took a dime to send a kid anywhere. ... Never happened. Never, ever happened. This case was about extortions and kickbacks, not about `kids for cash,'" said Ciavarella, who plans to appeal.

Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella and Conahan of taking more than $2 million in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centers and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities' co-owner.

A federal jury in Scranton convicted Ciavarella of 12 counts, including racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy, but acquitted him of 27 counts, including extortion. He is likely to get a prison sentence of more than 12 years, according to prosecutors — who revealed after the verdicts that a reputed mob boss turned informant helped them make their case.

Parents of juveniles who appeared before Ciavarella were outraged that he was released after the verdicts. Ciavarella often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to say goodbye to their families. Some of the children he ordered locked up were as young as 10.

Sandy Fonzo, whose son was jailed by Ciavarella — and committed suicide last year at age 23 — screamed obscenities at the judge and even poked him as he and his attorneys held a news conference on the courthouse steps.

"My kid's not here anymore!" yelled Fonzo. "He's dead! Because of him! He ruined my ... life! I'd like him to go to hell and rot there forever!"

Ciavarella glanced at Fonzo, then turned his back.

Fonzo's son, Edward Kenzakowski, was a 17-year-old all-star wrestler with no prior record when he landed in Ciavarella's courtroom for possession of drug paraphernalia. She said her son never recovered from the months he served at the detention centers and a wilderness camp.

Tears streaming down her face, Fonzo said she couldn't believe Ciavarella was allowed to walk out of the courthouse.

"There's no justice, there's not. He's never going to get what he deserves," she said. "I just wanted to see him handcuffed and taken out. But when I saw him just being released with that stupid smirk on his face ..."

The jury found Ciavarella guilty of taking a $997,600 kickback from Robert Mericle, the builder of the juvenile facilities — money he was ordered to forfeit to the federal government after the verdicts were announced. He was also convicted of failing to report the payments on his state-mandated financial disclosure forms and failing to pay taxes on the income. Jurors acquitted him of extorting Robert Powell, the facilities' developer and co-owner.

The defense declared victory. "We're amazed. The jury rejected 95 percent of the government's case," said attorney Al Flora.

"I find it interesting," U.S. Attorney Peter Smith said in response, "that a man just convicted of racketeering is claiming any sort of a victory out there today. I wonder what he would consider a defeat."

Prosecutors alleged that Conahan, who pleaded guilty to racketeering last year, and Ciavarella plotted to shut down the dilapidated county-run juvenile detention center in 2002 and arrange for the construction of the PA Child Care facility outside Wilkes-Barre.

Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, sent youths to the center and later to its sister facility in western Pennsylvania while he was taking payments from Mericle, a prominent builder and close friend of Ciavarella, and Powell, a high-powered attorney.

Luzerne County paid Powell's company more than $30 million between 2003 and 2007 to house juveniles at PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care. The county could have built its own juvenile center for about $9 million, according to testimony.

In dismissing thousands of Ciavarella's convictions, the state high court said he ran his courtroom with "complete disregard for the constitutional rights of the juveniles," including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea.

Hundreds of youths and their families are suing Ciavarella and Conahan in federal court, but Smith said the judges' handling of juvenile cases did not figure into the federal prosecution for legal and evidentiary reasons.

"We're very sympathetic to the pain to the community that was caused here ... and we're fully aware of the deep anguish that many parents and many juveniles feel. But the federal criminal courts are not the appropriate venue to resolve that issue fully," he said.

Ciavarella, who took the stand in his own defense, acknowledged to jurors that he failed to report the payments on his tax returns and hid them from the public, but he denied any plot to take kickbacks or extort money.

Ciavarella told jurors that he thought he was legally entitled to Mericle's money, calling it a "finder's fee" for introducing Mericle to Powell.

Ciavarella also denied that he extorted Powell, who had testified for the prosecution that he was forced to pay the judges nearly $600,000 after they agreed to send juvenile delinquents to his new lockup. The payments were disguised as rent on a Florida condominium owned by the judges' wives.

It was Conahan who made the arrangements with Powell, Ciavarella insisted. He said Conahan told him that Powell had agreed to pay them $15,000 a month for 60 months to lease the waterfront Florida property. Prosecutors scoffed at that explanation, questioning why Powell would pay nearly $1 million in rent on a condo he could have purchased outright for less than $800,000.

Officials disclosed for the first time Friday that they were led to the judges by the reputed boss of a northeastern Pennsylvania Mafia family. William D'Elia — who regularly met for breakfast with Conahan — became a government informant after his 2006 arrest on charges of witness tampering and conspiracy to launder drug money.

"D'Elia led us to Judge Conahan," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod. "From there we began to focus on them, the financial dealings between Judge Conahan, Judge Ciavarella, Mericle, Powell."

D'Elia won a sentence reduction last year based on his cooperation in another criminal case and could be released as early as next year.

Ciavarella and Conahan initially pleaded guilty in February 2009 to honest services fraud and tax evasion in a deal that called for a sentence of more than seven years in prison. But their plea deals were rejected by Senior U.S. District Judge Edward M. Kosik, who ruled they had failed to accept responsibility for their actions.

A federal grand jury in Harrisburg subsequently indicted the judges on charges of racketeering, fraud, money laundering, bribery, extortion and tax offenses. Conahan pleaded guilty to a single racketeering charge last year and awaits sentencing. Mericle and Powell pleaded guilty to lesser offenses and testified against Ciavarella; both await sentencing.

Ciavarella faces a maximum of 157 years in prison at sentencing, but will more likely receive 12 1/2 years to about 15 1/2 years under federal sentencing guidelines, prosecutors said.

PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care remain open and continue to accept juveniles from many Pennsylvania counties, though Luzerne County no longer sends delinquents to them.

[buglebe]

It's amazing how low a person will stoop for money. Seems everything is about money.

[Jolie Rouge]

Judge gets 28 years in 'kids for cash' case
By MICHAEL RUBINKAM - Associated Press | AP – 4 hrs ago

SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) — A northeastern Pennsylvania judge was ordered Thursday to spend nearly three decades in prison for his role in a massive bribery scandal that prompted the state's high court to toss thousands of juvenile convictions and left lasting scars on the children who appeared in his courtroom and their hapless families.

Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for taking a $1 million bribe from the builder of a pair of juvenile detention centers in a case that became known as "kids for cash." Ciavarella, who denied locking up youths for money, had no reaction as the sentence was announced. From the gallery, which was crowded with family members of some of the children he incarcerated, someone shouted "Woo hoo!"

In the wake of the scandal, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned about 4,000 convictions issued by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008, saying he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea. Ciavarella, 61, was tried and convicted of racketeering earlier this year. His attorneys had asked for a "reasonable" sentence in court papers, saying, in effect, that he'd already been punished enough. "The media attention to this matter has exceeded coverage given to many and almost all capital murders, and despite protestation, he will forever be unjustly branded as the 'Kids for Cash' judge," their sentencing memo said.

Al Flora, Ciavarella's lawyer, called the sentence harsher than expected. The ex-judge surrendered immediately but it was not immediately known where he would serve his time. He plans to appeal both his conviction and sentence. Ciavarella, in a 15-minute speech before the sentence was handed down, apologized to his family, the Luzerne County bar and the community — and to those juveniles who appeared before him in his court. He called himself a hypocrite who failed to practice what he preached. "I blame no one but myself for what happened," he said.

Then, in an extraordinary turnabout, Ciavarella attacked the government's case as well as the conclusions of the state Supreme Court and the Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice, a state panel that investigated the scandal. Both said Ciavarella engaged in wholesale rights violations over a period of many years. Ciavarella denied it. "I did everything I was obligated to do protect these children's rights," he said.

He also criticized Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod for referring to the case as "kids for cash," saying it sank his reputation. (Zubrod said outside court that he doesn't remember ever calling it that.) "He backdoored me, and I never saw it coming. Those three words made me the personification of evil," Ciavarella said. "They made me toxic and caused a public uproar the likes of which this community has never seen."

In court, Zubrod said Ciavarella had "verbally abused and cruelly mocked children he sent away after violating their rights." He called the ex-judge "vicious and mean-spirited" and asked U.S. District Judge Edwin M. Kosik to punish Ciavarella's "profound evil" with a life sentence. "The criminal justice system (in Luzerne County) is ruined and will not recover in our lifetimes," Zubrod added.

Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella and a second judge, Michael Conahan, of taking more than $2 million in bribes from Robert Mericle, the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centers, and of extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from Robert Powell, the facilities' co-owner. Ciavarella, known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom demeanor, pocketed the cash while filling the beds of the private lockups with children as young as 10, many of them first-time offenders convicted of petty theft and other minor crimes. Ciavarella often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to say goodbye to their families. "Frankly, I don't think Ciavarella or Conahan themselves really personally cared where the juveniles went, as long as they could use their power to place the juveniles as leverage or control over Mericle and Powell," U.S. Attorney Peter Smith said Thursday.

Speaking of Ciavarella, Smith added: "There's no true remorse and there's a blind unwillingness to admit the overall seriousness of his conduct."

The jury returned a mixed verdict following a February trial, convicting Ciavarella of 12 counts, including racketeering and conspiracy, and acquitting him of 27 counts, including extortion. The guilty verdicts related to a payment of $997,600 from Mericle. Conahan pleaded guilty last year and awaits sentencing.

Sandy Fonzo, whose son committed suicide last year at the age of 23 after bouncing in and out of Ciavarella's courtroom, said Thursday that justice was done. "This judge was wrong, what he did to my son, what he did to all of our children, what he did to our families, and today proves that," said Fonzo, who dramatically confronted Ciavarella on the courthouse steps earlier this year.

Susan Mishanski also applauded the sentence. Ciavarella had ordered her son to spend three months in a wilderness camp for scuffling with another kid. "They did not even tell him where they were taking him. It was like someone kidnapped my son," she said. "It was awful."

Ciavarella and Conahan initially pleaded guilty in February 2009 to honest services fraud and tax evasion in a deal that called for a sentence of more than seven years in prison. But their plea deals were rejected by Kosik, who ruled they had failed to accept responsibility for their actions.

http://news.yahoo.com/pa-judge-gets-28-years-kids-cash-case-141902094.html

comments

WAIT! Let me SEE if I got this right? "he'd already been punished enough".
I gotta be honest folk's - the moment I read that line I actually became nauseated. Can you believe this crap. To use your power to garner wealth while children who had committed very minor crimes (some I heard are not even really considered crimes) were basically sent to the "Privately Owned" jails to suffer for overextended periods. AND HE'D BEEN PUNISHED ENOUGH ALREADY! Someone needs to finish him in prison - he's done!

---

GOOD! What a scumbag the former judge was, and what a black mark on the reputation of the Pennsylvania judiciary he has imposed by his actions. I am so glad he didn't get a slap on the wrist. Sending kids to jail in order to enrich himself and the private prison industry is abhorrent.

~~~

To all of you who think that "privatizing" what have been governmental functions is a good idea, take a close look at this case. The owners of private prisons bribed these two judges to send them inmates, so they could make a profit. The judges took the bribes, refused juvenile defendents their rights, and sent them off to serve unjust sentences. Think of this type of corruption applied to any function you want to get government out of, because it will always happen. Putting profits above people is evil, period. Unfortunately, that is what all too many "capitalists" do.

~~~

I hope he has to share a cell with somebody he wrongly convicted. That would be proof God has a sense of irony.

~~

Ciavarella said this made him look evil,well maybe it's because he is. The judge thought that he was above the law and when he heard what he didn't want to hear,he starts to rant. This guy got exactly what he deserves!!! Put him in violent population where he put some of them!! Instead of taking bribes,he should have done what the judges did with the creation of house arrest,be part owner.
A judge using poor judgement for capitalism. He is a hypocrite!!!

~~

Only 28 years for sending 4000 kids to prison for bribe money? He is lucky he got a liberal judge. According to my math, that is a little less then three days served for each child....

[Jolie Rouge]

comments

Think about what they’re not saying in this story: children were brought before the court for ‘offenses’ that ranged from misdemeanor school fights to curfew violations, summarily found guilty, then transferred to an out-of-state children’s reformatory.

Not only the parents but even the prosecutors were often stunned by the judge’s harsh sentencing. These were children with no prior offenses from middle-class working households; not the usual collection of waifs that you’d find clutching a box of sneakers while running away from a burning store.

Worse yet, when the sentences were complete, many of these children were mysteriously ‘lost’ in the ‘system’ and never released! Some languished months beyond their release date. The judge and his subservient court continued running this scam for years, knowing full well that they had the ‘authority’ of the state behind them; that none would (or could) contest this blatant abuse of power.

But as most of overconfident will get, way too many people became a part of this network of organized criminals. So it wasn’t long before their ‘enterprise’ was exposed. And it is only for two reasons that it was further pursued: the extent of these corrupt activities coming to light and the use of this story in a major film production. Otherwise, it’s likely the judges and their conspirators would’ve been rewarded for creative thinking by our corrupt judicial overseers.

It should be obvious to all, the entire American judicial system – from the federal level on down - is completely corrupt and long overdue for a major overhaul. This lone case is an example of how indifferent they are to us all. It’s a known fact that most savvy criminals will opt for having their case handled by a judge, over a jury, sixty-two percent of the time! This says it all, when the criminals know who’s more likely to go easy on them.

It’s disheartening to see how our judicial and law enforcement servants have morphed into a machine that's betrayed the people of this nation. That these two vaunted representatives of the law were not dragged out and hung for having destroyed the lives of so many innocent children, is most surprising. I'm truly amazed that these judges are still alive...

[gmyers]

Did they do anything to the places the kids were sent to. They need to be prosecuted and shut down too.

[Jolie Rouge]

Did they do anything to the places the kids were sent to. They need to be prosecuted and shut down too.
Absolutely ....'

[Jolie Rouge]

Cash for Kids’ Judge Sentenced to 28 Years in Prison
By E.D. Kain | Forbes – 4 hrs ago

Former Pennsylvania juvenile court judge, Mark Ciavarella, has been sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Ciavarella was found guilty of trading convictions for cash, and unjustly sentencing youth to to detention centers whose owners paid him millions in bribe money.

A federal judge tossed a plea deal that would have limited the sentence to 87 months. The frightening story of the deeply corrupt judge made headlines when Ciavarella was confronted by Sandy Fonzo outside the Pennsylvania courthouse where he had been convicted. Ciavarella had sentenced Fonzo’s 17-year-old son to six months in jail despite having no criminal record on charges of possession of drug paraphernalia, a charge that often results in only a fine for first time offenders, and especially for minors.

According to Fonzo, her son, who had no prior record, was never able to recover and eventually took his own life.

"He (Ciavarella) killed his spirit," Fonzo said at the time, "He crushed him, and he didn't help him." Fonzo said her son was full of resentment and pent-up anger after being sent to the detention center.
The story takes on greater horror when you learn about the levels of sexual abuse present in the prison system, especially in juvenile detention centers where inmates are even more vulnerable to abusive guards:

Across the country, 12.1 percent of kids questioned in the BJS survey said that they’d been sexually abused at their current facility during the preceding year. That’s nearly one in eight, or approximately 3,220, out of the 26,550 who were eligible to participate. The survey, however, was only given at large facilities that held young people who had been “adjudicated”—i.e., found by a court to have committed an offense—for at least ninety days, which is more restrictive than it may sound. In total, according to the most recent data, there are nearly 93,000 kids in juvenile detention on any given day. 19 Although we can’t assume that 12.1 percent of the larger number were sexually abused—many kids not covered by the survey are held for short periods of time, or in small facilities where rates of abuse are somewhat lower—we can say confidently that the BJS’s 3,220 figure represents only a small fraction of the children sexually abused in detention every year.


What sort of kids get locked up in the first place? Only 34 percent of those in juvenile detention are there for violent crimes. (More than 200,000 youth are also tried as adults in the US every year, and on any given day approximately 8,500 kids under eighteen are confined in adult prisons and jails. Although probably at greater risk of sexual abuse than any other detained population, they haven’t yet been surveyed by the BJS.) According to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, which was itself created by PREA, more than 20 percent of those in juvenile detention were confined for technical offenses such as violating probation, or for “status offenses” like missing curfews, truancy, or running away—often from violence and abuse at home. (“These kids have been raped their whole lives,” said a former officer from the TYC’s Brownwood unit. 20) Many suffer from mental illness, substance abuse, and learning disabilities.


Any judge who would condemn children to these odds in order to line their pockets deserves the inside of a prison cell. The federal judge was right to toss out the plea deal. Ciavarella doesn’t deserve a bargain. He didn’t give any leniency to the kids he sold.

I’m not much for retributive justice, but a part of me likes to think that he’s getting what’s coming to him now that he’s on the inside of the American prison system looking out.

http://news.yahoo.com/cash-kids-judge-sentenced-28-years-prison-172357555.html

[sunniekiss]

Did they do anything to the places the kids were sent to. They need to be prosecuted and shut down too.

Unfortunately they are still open for business although the "owners" are both heading for lengthy prison sentences. The one attorney just had his $1.5 million dollar home foreclosed upon.

Both judges were democrats not that it matters much what party they are affiliated with. In the neighboring county 2 county supervisors were found guilty of corruption charges although none of the charges involved children. Both wre republican.