Judges Accused of Jailing Kids for Cash

[TacticalPeek]

Source: ABC News

Judges Accused of Jailing Kids for Cash
With Corrupt Judges, Kids' Lives Hang in the Balance

By FRANK MASTROPOLO

March 27, 2009


Luzerne County sits in the heart of Pennsylvania's struggling coal country; Wilkes-Barre is the county seat, a hardscrabble, blue-collar city that knew hard times even before this latest recession.

People there were shocked in January when federal prosecutors announced that respected county judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan had pleaded guilty to tax evasion and honest services fraud, the result of a lengthy investigation by the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI. Yesterday the Pa. State Supreme Court overturned hundreds of convictions of low-level offenders, ruling that all juveniles who had appeared in Ciavarella's courtroom without lawyers between 2003 and 2008 had not been adequately informed when they waived their right to counsel.

...

Ciavarella and Conahan, who face up to 7 years in prison, had devised a plot to use their positions as judges to pad their pockets. They shut down the old county-run juvenile detention center by first refusing to send kids there and, then, by cutting off funds, choking it out of existence. They then replaced the facility with a cash cow -- a privately owned lockup built by the judges' cronies -- and forged a deal for the county to pay $58 million for a 10-year period for its use. At the time Conahan was serving as president judge of the Luzerne County Common Pleas Court, a position that allowed him to control the county-court budget. Ciavarella was the Luzerne County juvenile court judge.

The judges entered plea agreements in federal court in Scranton in February admitting that they took more than $2.6 million in payoffs from the private youth detention center between 2003 and 2006.

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=7178686&page=1

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Money-grubbing bastards.

[ixion]

1. This is one of the primary reasons why the privatized prison scam, er, industry should be

scrapped entirely.

It does nothing but encourage fraud, and contributes to the continued shredding of our social fabric.

[midnight]

2. I second your opinion.

[malaise]

11. Many others are profiting from these privatized prisons

including Cheney who invested $87 million (according to the BBC) I can't wait for more of them to be caught.

[Echo In Light]

13. Which is the core motive behind the phony "war on drugs"

[malaise]

14. Ding ding

we have a winner. It's a great racket and someone is also making gazillions off those weapons in Mexico.

[Stuart G]

3. This judge is a real piece of shit, and they should let..

some of the youngsters that he sent to that "privately owned lockup" have a few minutes with the good judge. They would teach him a thing or two..

[shraby]

4. They should also compensate those children with

enough money to pay for 4 years of college!!

[Danascot]

12. They should determine how much time those kids served

double it and that should be the sentence.

[PSPS]

5. "cutting off funds, choking it out of existence" = "drown it in a bathtub"

[Mnemosyne]

6. Wonder how many more are doing this across the country?

Cannot wait to leave this state next year. :grr:

[Lars39]

10. I think it was going on in the town I used to live in...may still be going on.

Rich family of judges, lawyers and doctors have the place sewed up.

[HopeHoops]

7. The Harrisburg Patriot-News reported that the sentences had been vacated.

I still think the kids deserve compensation, but at least their records have been cleared. There were some really sick cases of abuse here. One of the girls spent over a month in a detention center for posting something nasty about someone on a blog - and she was the kind who never got into any trouble.

[no_hypocrisy]

8. Don't forget that former VP Dick Cheney invested $80 million in private prisons.

[The Backlash Cometh]

9. Omigod!

Wouldn't that be wonderful if they were cleaning up the judgeships all across the nation?

I'm having a wetdream.

[backscatter712]

15. Here's the fate I want for this piece of shit of a judge...

Sweeney Todd got it right...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DxUEvjAQgk

[JPZenger]

16. Here's links to much more info on this story, including new front page NYTimes Article

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=175&topic_id=14997&mesg_id=14997