Kids for Cash: Pennsylvania Judge Convicted
Posted: Wednesday, July 27, 2011
by Jack H. Schick
Ex-Juvenile Court Judge Mark Ciavarella is probably going to jail. He was convicted for a “kids for cash” scheme that he and Judge Michael Conahan ran in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Ciavarella, 61, was accused of taking nearly $1 million in kickbacks from the privately owned PA Child Care facility in exchange for sentencing defendants to the institution. He was found guilty of 12 of 29 charges that included racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy. Prosecutors expect he will get the minimum prison sentence of 12 years for his crimes. After all, he was an elected official and an officer of the court himself. Ciavarella remains free until sentencing.
Levick said she found a disturbing trend in Ciavarella’s courtroom. He issued rapid-fire justice with many trials lasting only a few minutes. He lectured that the children needed to be held accountable for their actions. Some of the kids he ordered locked up were as young as ten years old. A college-bound high school girl was sentenced to three months at the PA Child Care facility for creating a web site that made fun of her assistant principal. A twelve year old boy who went joyriding in his mother’s car was sentenced to two years. Levick was appalled and turned her findings over to the FBI.
Federal investigations found that Ciavarella and Conahan caused the shut down of the old county-run juvenile detention center by first refusing to send kids there and then cutting off funding. At the time, Conahan was president judge of the County Common Pleas Court which allowed him to control the budget. The two judges then replaced the facility with the PA Child Care institution that was built and operated by cronies. The two forged a deal in which the county was to pay PA Child Care $58 million to use the lock-up for ten years. In his courtroom, Ciavarella saw to it that the facility always had plenty of inmates.
The two judges admitted that they took more than $2.6 million in payoffs between 2003 and 2006. They attempted to hide their income from the scheme by creating false records and routing payments through other parties. Ciavarella insisted, however, that he “Absolutely never took a dime to send a kid anywhere,” and that the payments he received were legal.
In January of 2009, Ciavarella and Conahanwere both charged by federal prosecutors with tax evasion and honest services fraud. When a plea bargain resulted in a light sentence a federal judge rejected the deal, ruling that Ciavarella had failed to accept responsibility for the crimes. Conahan pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy last summer and faces 20 years in prison, but hasn’t been sentenced yet.
Marsha Levick said, “I think what we have here in Luzerne County is probably the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the American legal system.” The Pennsylvania Supreme Court dismissed 4,000 juvenile delinquency cases that Ciavarella handled between January 1, 2003 and May 31, 2008, stating that it “cannot have any confidence that Ciavarella decided any Luzerne County juvenile case fairly and impartially while he labored under the specter of his self interested dealings with the facilities,” and called the judge’s actions a “travesty of juvenile justice.”
Ciavarella was acquitted on charges of bribery and extortion that stemmed from additional payments he received from the builder and owner of the PA Child Care facility. He continues to claim that he never incarcerated kids for money and that the payments he received were legal. He plans to appeal his conviction.
This Article has been viewed 429 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Thank you for sharing this story. I have friends who consider these things to be part of a conspiracy theory. The truth will stand when the world's on fire.Thanks for reading and commenting
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.