Fornits
Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform => News Items => Topic started by: wdtony on February 04, 2009, 06:26:55 PM
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State may compensate juveniles sentenced by judges in Luzerne
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
By Tracie Mauriello, Post-Gazette Harrisburg Bureau
HARRISBURG -- State lawmakers are seeking ways to compensate children sent to detention centers by a pair of Luzerne County judges charged with taking kickbacks for sending juvenile defendants to facilities in Luzerne and Butler counties.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Stewart Greenleaf said yesterday he would hold a hearing to find ways to help the children and their families. One option is to provide money from the crime victims compensation fund, said Mr. Greenleaf, R-Montgomery.
The hearing, which has not yet been scheduled, is at the request of Republican Sens. Lisa Baker and John Gordner, whose districts include parts of Luzerne County.
They made the request yesterday, the same day a third Luzerne County court official was arrested in the ongoing corruption probe.
Court Administrator William T. Sharkey Sr., 57, of West Hazelton, yesterday agreed to plead guilty to embezzling more than $70,000 in illegal gambling money seized by authorities between June 1998 and June 2008.
Two other county court officials were charged last week with fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.
Judge Mark A. Ciavarella and former Senior Judge Michael T. Conahan are accused of taking $2.6 million for sending children to two facilities owned by Pittsburgh businessman Greg Zappala.
Judges Ciavarella and Conahan each could face prison terms of up to seven and three months, according to the terms of plea agreements they signed last week.
No charges have been filed against Mr. Zappala, who is the brother of Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. and son of former state Supreme Court Justice Stephen A. Zappala Sr.
Meanwhile, the state Supreme Court has agreed to review all juvenile cases adjudicated in Luzerne County during in the last five years.
That's good news to parents such as Susan Mishanski, whose 17-year-old son was sentenced by Judge Ciavarella last year to 90 days in a juvenile facility in Carbon County.
She said the punishment was excessive and that it traumatized her son, a first-time offender who was expecting community service or a fine for punishing another boy last year. Instead, he was taken from the courtroom in shackles and brought to Camp Adams, where he was beaten by other teenagers, forced to wear ripped clothes four sizes too big and permitted visitors only twice a month for an hour, she said.
"He was humiliated and he was scared," said Ms. Mishanski of Luzerne County. "I'm absolutely thrilled now that [these judges] got caught."
Judges Ciavarella and Conahan are scheduled to enter pleas Feb. 12 in U.S. District Court in Scranton.
Mr. Ciavarella, who stepped down as president judge but remains on the court, is continuing to receive a salary of $161,850, although he has been stripped of his judicial powers. Under the terms of his plea agreement, be must resign within 10 days of pleading.
His salary had been $163,260 but was reduced by $1,410 when he stepped down as president judge.
The Supreme Court last week revoked Judge Conahan's certification as senior judge, a designation given to retired judges who agree to temporary fill in at county courthouses as needed.
Judge Conahan retired in January 2008. He received $39,387 in per-diem pay for work between June 2008 and January 2009, according to records of the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts. It was not clear if he received payments in the first half of last year.
Mr. Sharkey could face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 in fines. As part of the plea agreement, he also must pay $71,000 in restitution and resign within 10 days of entering a plea.
Tracie Mauriello can be reached http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09035/946743-454.stm (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09035/946743-454.stm)
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Pa. judges accused of jailing kids for cash
By MICHAEL RUBINKAM and MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – 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.
No company officials have been charged, but the investigation is still going on.
The high court, meanwhile, is looking into whether hundreds or even thousands of sentences should be overturned and the juveniles' records expunged.
Among the offenders were teenagers who were locked up for months for stealing loose change from cars, writing a prank note and possessing drug paraphernalia. Many had never been in trouble before. Some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.
Many appeared without lawyers, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1967 ruling that children have a constitutional right to counsel.
The judges are scheduled to plead guilty to fraud Thursday in federal court. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years behind bars.
Ciavarella, 58, who presided over Luzerne County's juvenile court for 12 years, acknowledged last week in a letter to his former colleagues, "I have disgraced my judgeship. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame." Ciavarella, though, has denied he got kickbacks for sending youths to prison.
Conahan, 56, has remained silent about the case.
Many Pennsylvania counties contract with privately run juvenile detention centers, paying them either a fixed overall fee or a certain amount per youth, per day.
In Luzerne County, prosecutors say, Conahan shut down the county-run juvenile prison in 2002 and helped the two companies secure rich contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, at least some of that dependent on how many juveniles were locked up.
One of the contracts — a 20-year agreement with PA Child Care worth an estimated $58 million — was later canceled by the county as exorbitant.
The judges are accused of taking payoffs between 2003 and 2006.
Robert J. Powell co-owned PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care until June. His attorney, Mark Sheppard, said his client was the victim of an extortion scheme.
"Bob Powell never solicited a nickel from these judges and really was a victim of their demands," he said. "These judges made it very plain to Mr. Powell that he was going to be required to pay certain monies."
For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Ciavarella was ridiculously harsh and ran roughshod over youngsters' constitutional rights. Ciavarella sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a statewide rate of one in 10.
The criminal charges confirmed the advocacy groups' worst suspicions and have called into question all the sentences he pronounced.
Hillary Transue did not have an attorney, nor was she told of her right to one, when she appeared in Ciavarella's courtroom in 2007 for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal.
Her mother, Laurene Transue, worked for 16 years in the child services department of another county and said she was certain Hillary would get a slap on the wrist. Instead, Ciavarella sentenced her to three months; she got out after a month, with help from a lawyer.
"I felt so disgraced for a while, like, what do people think of me now?" said Hillary, now 17 and a high school senior who plans to become an English teacher.
Laurene Transue said Ciavarella "was playing God. And not only was he doing that, he was getting money for it. He was betraying the trust put in him to do what is best for children."
Kurt Kruger, now 22, had never been in trouble with the law until the day police accused him of acting as a lookout while his friend shoplifted less than $200 worth of DVDs from Wal-Mart. He said he didn't know his friend was going to steal anything.
Kruger pleaded guilty before Ciavarella and spent three days in a company-run juvenile detention center, plus four months at a youth wilderness camp run by a different operator.
"Never in a million years did I think that I would actually get sent away. I was completely destroyed," said Kruger, who later dropped out of school. He said he wants to get his record expunged, earn his high school equivalency diploma and go to college.
"I got a raw deal, and yeah, it's not fair," he said, "but now it's 100 times bigger than me."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090211/ap_ ... _kickbacks (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090211/ap_on_re_us/courthouse_kickbacks)
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I wonder how many other judges participate in this kind of thing.
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Hey it is the same judge as in this story:
A family’s nightmare - Plymouth girl, her parents upset with treatment she’s received in her nine months in state custody (http://http://www.isaccorp.org/visionquest/vision-quest.10.29.06.html) - (Reprint from ISACCORP).
Are Visionquest also involved in this scandal?
Either way, I believe that there is something rotten in Denmark also. I have made a blog entry about it (http://http://rotsne.wordpress.com/) and also posted several thread in Danish message boards.
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I hope Elizabeth and her family sue the judge and get her record expunged. I imagine that there will be quite a few lawsuits with those judges. Hopefully the IRS charges the facilities that paid the judges as well.
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Hey it is the same judge as in this story:
A family’s nightmare - Plymouth girl, her parents upset with treatment she’s received in her nine months in state custody (http://http://www.isaccorp.org/visionquest/vision-quest.10.29.06.html) - (Reprint from ISACCORP).
Are Visionquest also involved in this scandal?
Either way, I believe that there is something rotten in Denmark also. I have made a blog entry about it (http://http://rotsne.wordpress.com/) and also posted several thread in Danish message boards.
This has probably been going on in the U.S. for decades. Synanon used to get court-ordered kids too. Interestingly, Visionquest -- which works closely with the juvenile justice system -- was founded shortly after the time that this began to get real popular. (Come to think of it, Hyde School was too; not sure how many court-ordered kids they got though.). The thinking was something along the lines of saving kids from juvie or jail by sending them to a program instead.
Judges also sent kids to mental institutions, usually as a means of eliciting cooperation from kids deemed too independent or in need of "a lesson." Over the years, a number of scams regarding this phenomenon have come to light, usually leaving the insurance companies paying the bill, and various individuals associated with said institutions profiting greatly. It would stand to reason that there might be involvement coming from the bench as well.
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IT's not much different here asking for handouts and donations. You are all profiting off the same industry you blood suckers!
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IT's not much different here asking for handouts and donations. You are all profiting off the same industry you blood suckers!
The only profit is that the hosting bill gets paid.