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U.S. judges admit to jailing children
for money
Friday, February 13, 2009
Two judges pleaded guilty on
Thursday to accepting more than $2.6 million from a private youth
detention centre in Pennsylvania in return for giving hundreds of
youths and teenagers long sentences.
Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael
Conahan of the Court of Common Pleas in Luzerne County,
Pennsylvania, entered plea agreements in federal court in Scranton
admitting that they took payoffs from PA Childcare and a sister
company, Western PA Childcare, between 2003 and 2006.
"Your statement that I have
disgraced my judgeship is true," Ciavarella wrote in a letter to the
court. "My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish
and I have only myself to blame."
Conahan, who along with Ciavarella
faces up to seven years in prison, did not make any comment on the
case.
When someone is sent to a detention
centre, the company running the facility receives money from the
county government to defray the cost of incarceration. So as more
children were sentenced to the detention centre, PA Childcare and
Western PA Childcare received more money from the government,
prosecutors said.
Teenagers who came before
Ciavarella in juvenile court often were sentenced to detention
centres for minor offences that would typically have been classified
as misdemeanours, according to the Juvenile Law Centre, a
Philadelphia nonprofit group.
One 17-year-old boy was sentenced
to three months' detention for being in the company of another minor
caught shoplifting.
Others were given similar sentences
for "simple assault" resulting from a schoolyard scuffle that would
normally draw a warning, a spokeswoman for the Juvenile Law Centre
said.
The Constitution guarantees the
right to legal representation in U.S. courts. But many of the
juveniles appeared before Ciavarella without an attorney because
they were told by the probation service that their minor offences
didn't require one.
Marsha Levick, chief counsel for
the Juvenile Law Centre, estimated that of approximately 5,000
juveniles who came before Ciavarella from 2003 and 2006, between
1,000 and 2,000 received excessively harsh detention sentences. She
said the centre will sue the judges, PA Childcare and Western PA
Childcare for financial compensation for their victims.
"That judges would allow their
greed to trump the rights of defendants is just obscene," Levick
said.
The judges attempted to hide their
income from the scheme by creating false records and routing
payments through intermediaries, prosecutors said.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court
removed Ciavarella and Conahan from their duties after federal
prosecutors filed charges on January 26. The court has also
appointed a judge to review all the cases involved.
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