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Old 02-12-2009, 03:13 PM
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Default Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

Please tell me they will go to jail, :pray:

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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 thousands 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.


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Old 02-12-2009, 04:54 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

This is why there should be no private prisons. :sadno:
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Old 02-12-2009, 05:06 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

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This is why there should be no private prisons. :sadno:
Exactly!
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Old 02-12-2009, 05:49 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

This is a very good reason why 'contracting out' in any form is just as bad, if not worse, than bureaucratic empire-building within government agencies.

Another aspect is that political types have the 'friends and family' program going on. This is where contracts with the government agency are awarded to those who know about them, when they are available, how, and to whom, to respond at the agency level...even as far as having bidder requirements written to match a specific contractor. Means are made for friends and family members to have preferential access to lucrative government contracts. Witness Halliburton; but this goes on at the local level in my municipal government. The players are different, but the game is the same.
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Old 02-12-2009, 06:15 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

The local papers have been all over this. One of the most amazing/disgusting aspects was that, initially, there was considerable reluctance on the part of judicial officials to review the cases of juvenile offenders who had been put into detention on the orders of Ciavarella and Conahan.

Due to public outcry, there's now talk to the effect that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to review some of those cases after all. Hopefully, some of the kids who never should have been sent to detention in the first place will be have their records cleared as a result.


Cheers,

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Old 02-12-2009, 07:02 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Crumb View Post
This is why there should be no private prisons. :sadno:
That's communist thinking. Look, son: Private good, government bad! Repeat ten times whenever these ideas pop into your head again.
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Old 02-12-2009, 11:07 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

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Originally Posted by Legs View Post
Please tell me they will go to jail, :pray:
Didn't read this article, but another said that they plead guilty to fraud charges and got 7 years apiece. 7 whole years for their crimes. :brooding:

One can only hope that there will be additional charges.
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Old 02-12-2009, 11:09 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

Any of them use a penis pump during a trial?
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Old 02-12-2009, 11:21 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

7 years is better than nothing :kickscan:
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Old 02-13-2009, 04:52 AM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Joshua Adams View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crumb View Post
This is why there should be no private prisons. :sadno:
That's communist thinking. Look, son: Private good, government bad! Repeat ten times whenever these ideas pop into your head again.
Correction. Government bad, private worse. Private companies have no business building prisons. Building, operating and running prisons is the responisibility of the government.
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Old 02-13-2009, 04:53 AM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

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7 years is better than nothing :kickscan:
Spending the rest of their lives in prison would be better. I'd also like to see the bribers placed in prison as well, preferably in a facility where they have to share their cell with Bubba.
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Old 02-13-2009, 09:16 AM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

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Originally Posted by Ymir's blood View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by Legs View Post
Please tell me they will go to jail, :pray:
Didn't read this article, but another said that they plead guilty to fraud charges and got 7 years apiece. 7 whole years for their crimes. :brooding:

One can only hope that there will be additional charges.
They should have been charged 7 years per offense. That ought to lock them away until the next millenium.
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Old 02-13-2009, 05:43 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

Ciavarella and Conahan plead guilty yesterday, and were released on $1 million bail. The bail was backed by the Florida condominium owned by their wives, which had been used to launder some of the kickbacks.

Under their plea agreements, they agreed to 87-month sentences, and to resign from the bench and the bar. According to the local paper, they'll be able to withdraw their "guilty" pleas if sentenced to more than 87 months. There's no word yet on how much (if anything) they'll be paying in restitution.

The editorial cartoon in today's paper:



Cheers,

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Old 02-13-2009, 06:57 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

If I was asked to arbitrate over this shit, I would say that all of the property and assets of those two goons and all of the property of those prison owners should be divied up between all of the kids that ever stepped foot in those prisons and all of the kids that ever stood in front of their benches.

If those two goons refuse my ruling, I think all of their privacy should be denied. All of private information (names, addresses, photographs -- including those of their family, friends and business associates) is fair game to publish anywhere in the world with a great big "Look how these guys profited from the "just-us" system!" plastered all over.

Heck, I think all of their privacy should be denied anyway.
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Old 04-02-2009, 06:43 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

It just gets better and better.

Technically, the plea agreement that Ciavarella (and Conahan too, I assume, though that's not entirely clear from the local newspaper accounts) agreed to does not include a guilty plea in the "kids-for-cash" charges scandal. Instead, Ciavarella's guilty plea was on charges of wire and tax fraud.

He refuses to speak to any of the local media, but he has been going around and insisting to the national media that he's completely innocent in the "kids-for-cash" scandal.

As if that isn't enough, he'd been loudly claiming that he should receive his pension, since he hasn't been convicted of taking money for improperly sentencing juveniles.


Needless to say, there are a lot of people around here who would dearly love to string him up. People are simply furious with him. So much so that Conahan (who has at least had the sense to keep a low profile) has all but been forgotten.


Meanwhile, State Senators Lisa Baker (a Republican) and John Yudichak (a Democrat) have proposed legislation that would create two state funds to which Conahan's and Ciavarella's victims could go for help. One fund would provide monetary compensation to defendants who had received "inappropriate or excessive detention." The second fund would reimburse parents who paid court and legal fees "for sentences that were improperly imposed or diagnoses that were inappropriate," according to Baker.

So far, where the money will come from is unclear, but Baker has said that possible sources are federal funding and restitution fees paid by Conahan and Ciavarella.



In the meantime, there was a "letter to the editor" just last week saying that, surely, any kid who had been sentenced must have been guilty of something, or they wouldn't have been in juvenile court in the first place. "So what's the big deal?" the writer asked [I'm paraphrasing here; I don't have the letter handy], "So some of them got harsher sentences than they expected; they probably didn't get harsher sentences than they deserved."

Oy!


Cheers,

Michael
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Old 04-02-2009, 07:52 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

The author has a point, though. If the juvies were dead they wouldn't be able to sue the state now would they?

:rolls:
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Old 04-04-2009, 07:19 AM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

Quote:
Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger View Post
The local papers have been all over this. One of the most amazing/disgusting aspects was that, initially, there was considerable reluctance on the part of judicial officials to review the cases of juvenile offenders who had been put into detention on the orders of Ciavarella and Conahan.

Due to public outcry, there's now talk to the effect that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to review some of those cases after all. Hopefully, some of the kids who never should have been sent to detention in the first place will be have their records cleared as a result. will sue the living shit out of the court system and local police departments. This will bankrupt several towns and counties, causing even inbred Pennsylvanians to wonder why the fuck they let the fox guard the henhouse.

Cheers,

Michael

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Old 08-17-2022, 10:02 PM
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Default Re: Have we talked about these corrupt PA judges?

Quote:
U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges, writing the plaintiffs are “the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions.”

Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care.
Both fuckheads received beefy jail sentences. All that's left now is hoping that they die slowly and in intractable pain.
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