Pennsylvania Judges Plead Guilty in Juvenile-Center Kickback Scheme

[WSJ_law_blog]

Associated Press

Michael Conahan, center, leaves the federal courthouse in Scranton, Pa., on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009. (AP Photo/David Kidwell)

Once in a while, a story comes along that defies intellectual discussion or debate and just sort of slugs you right in the solar-plexus.
Such is the case with this story that broke yesterday out in Scranton, Pa., where two judges pleaded guilty to operating a kickback scheme involving juvenile offenders. The allegations: the judges, Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan, took more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

An estimated 5,000 juveniles were sentenced by Ciaveralla since 2003 (Conahan is accused of setting up the contracts in 2002); many of them were first-time offenders and still remain detained. Here’s the story, from the NYT. Click here and here for stories from the Scranton Times-Tribune.

The Times’s lead is harrowing. Here it is, in full:

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

Both judges could serve 87 months in federal prison and will resign from the bench and bar. Lawyers for both men declined to comment.

According to the NYT story, the men shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.

“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center. “There was a culture of intimidation surrounding this judge and no one was willing to speak up about the sentences he was handing down.”