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Clean Slates for Youths Sentenced Fraudulently

It will be interesting to see
how much jail time these judges actually
serve.

By John Schwartz

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on Thursday
ordered the slate cleaned for hundreds of
youths who had been sentenced by a corrupt
judge.

The young people had been sent to privately run
detention centers from 2003 to 2008 as part of
a judicial kickback scheme that shocked
Pennsylvania and the nation. The judge in the
cases, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. of Luzerne
County, is one of two who pleaded guilty last
month to wire fraud and conspiracy for taking
more than $2.6 million in kickbacks.

The exact number of records to be expunged was
not stated in the court’s order; a special
master is investigating the cases.

Judge Ciavarella and the other judge, Michael
T. Conahan, admitted that they had agreed to
send teenagers to two privately run youth
detention centers that paid them for the
business. Under their agreements, the judges
will serve 87 months in federal prison and will
resign from the bench and from the bar.

The judges worked in tandem, beginning in 2002,
with Judge Conahan controlling the budget and
Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile
courts. They shut down a detention center run
by the county and began sending the youngsters
to newly built detention centers run by PA
Child Care and a sister company, Western PA
Child Care.

Judge Ciavarella has said he did not sentence
juveniles who did not deserve the punishment,
but the numbers suggested a different story: he
sent one in four of the juvenile defendants to
the detention centers from 2002 to 2006, while
the rate elsewhere in the state was 1 in 10. He
also routinely ignored requests for leniency,
even when they were made by prosecutors and
probation officers. His record for harsh
treatment of juveniles had already made him a
focus of complaints by youth advocacy groups.

The court on Thursday authorized the master to
vacate judgments and consent decrees and to
expunge the records where necessary. The
special master had submitted an 11-page report
that found “there was routine deprivation of
children’s constitutional rights.”

The special master, Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim
of Berks County, was appointed last month by
the State Supreme Court to investigate whether
a “travesty of juvenile justice” had occurred.

He recommended vacating judgments and expunging
records in cases from 2003 to 2008 in which the
youth was not represented by a lawyer and did
not knowingly waive the right to counsel, and
which included relatively minor offenses like
third-degree misdemeanors.

“Today’s order is not intended to be a quick
fix,” Ronald D. Castille, the chief judge of
Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “It’s going
to take some time, but the Supreme Court is
committed to righting whatever wrong was
perpetrated on Luzerne’s juveniles and their
families.”

The Supreme Court’s order on Thursday should be
only the beginning, said Marsha Levick, a
lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law
Center.

“Our view is that every kid who appeared before
Judge Ciavarella was denied an impartial
tribunal,” Ms. Levick said.

Michael J. Cefalo, a lawyer representing
hundreds of the juveniles, said in an interview
that “this is a great step” for his clients.
The teenagers, he said, have been “pretty well
smashed here” by the system, and so “it’s a
reassurance for them that the system works.”

Ruby Cherise Uca, whose son Chad was sent away
by Judge Ciavarella for three months in 2005,
said that expungement would be welcome, but
that her son expresses anger over the length of
the judge’s sentence. “He wishes that they
added up all the days that he had convicted
each of the children wrongfully, and give him
that sentence,” she said.

— John Schwartz
New York Times
2009-03-27
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/us/27judges.html?ref=todayspaper

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