Pa. judges accused of jailing kids for cash-gctid33393

[Kamau Kambon]

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 thounited snakesnds 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 thounited snakesnds 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://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090211/ap_on_re_us/courthouse_kickbacks
 
Other than Judge Bruce Wright, author of Black Robes,
white Justice, are there any honest judges-or
judges who are not high ranking kkk members?
 
* I want to emphasize this point:
ALL THOSE DAMN NEGRO JUDGES ON TELEVISION
ARE WASTING THEIR TIME AND ENERGY
ON A LOT OF IRRELEVANT FOOLISHNESS-
INSTEAD, THEY SHOULD BE MONITORING
ALL white judges and hearing the
cases of all those Black Youth who
have been setup for prison by lying
white cops and crooked lawyers.

[nattyreb]

It just doesn't get more blatant than that, let's see if their "outrage" amounts to anything (Not!).  All of these private prisons will turn up the same results, each body equals more $$$, so of course they need to bring in as much "product" as possible!  They completely destroy people's lives, it's outrageous! :flaming:

[nattyreb]

With 'Judges' Like These....
[col. writ. 2/7/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal
 
    In Pennsylvania's Luzerne County, there are 9 judges of the Court of Common Pleas. Two of them just pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to convict and sentence juveniles to a private prison, so that they could get kickbacks from the prison's  builders and owners.
 
    According to published accounts, Judge Mark A. Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael T. Conahan sent hundreds of boys and girls to the private facility, and pocketed some $2.5 million in kickbacks.
 
    This was accomplished not merely because of the venal greed of the judges, but because virtually none of the children were provided with legal representation.
 
    When the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center filed a petition in the PA Supreme Court calling the county's practice of adjudicating and sentencing some 250 kids to jail without legal representation unconstitutional, the state's highest court denied the petition on Jan. 8, 2009. To make matters even worse, recently filed criminal information states that the 2 judges used their power and influence in the county to de-fund the county juvenile facility, precisely as they were steering kids to the private jail (boy -- talk about privatization!).
 
    Nearly a month later, the state's highest court changed their minds, vacating the denial.
 
    What transpired in the interim?
 
    Well, for one thing, the 2 judges provisionally pleaded guilty to federal charges of honest wire service fraud.
 
    Hundreds of children get socked into jail, after demonstrably unconstitutional proceedings with no legal representation, and the state's highest court doesn't even raise an eyebrow.
 
    The media reports on this outrage, and the PA Supreme Court expresses little interest.
 
    This is the nature of judging these days, when even kids are expendable fodder for the prison industrial complex.
 
    Luzerne County is the state's 10th largest county, with just over 300,000 souls.
 
    At least 22% of their judges have admitted being corrupt, in the sordid business of selling the freedom and well-being of poor children for profit.
 
--(c) '09 maj
 
{Sources: Legal Intelligencer, 2/3/09; 2/4/09.}