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Pennsylvania Judges Take $2.6M in Bribes to Jail Children
Tallweirdo
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Reuters wrote:Two judges have pleaded guilty to accepting more than $US2.6 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 non-profit 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 US courts. But many of the juveniles appeared before Ciavarella without an attorney because they were told by the probation service that their minor offences did not 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," Ms 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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This is fucked up on so many levels and makes me glad to live somewhere where there isn't a profit motive for sending people to prison.
Are there any chances that between incidents like this and the chronic prison overcrowding in California and other areas that there will be a rethink of the way the US Justice and corrections system is incentivised?
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It isn't, and the fact that it's all that's being handed down is indicative of why we have suck a fucking problem with white collar crime.
Oh, and one reason they don't give these bastards longer sentences is because if they give a sentence beyond a certain length, they can't put them in minimum security facilities.
I wouldn't mind maximum security for these judges. "Jailed children for money" is pretty low on the decent human being scale.
its 7 years because it was a negotiated plea for 87 months. they agreed to plea guilty.
2000 times!?!
you know the whole 'i agree to plea guilty for a lesser sentance' thing right?
anyone who wants to read up on this can get all of the relevent articles here. http://www.timesleader.com/news/hottopics/judges
i've been hearing about this for the past month from coworkers so its kinda old news to me.
I think they should have made clear that they were seeking life and said the deal would be 20 years.
They never should have let him plead that unless they had no real evidence to convict.
Which doesn't make sense because then the judges would have never plead out.
Fucking DA's office.
I don't think life in prison would be even remotely unreasonable.
Needs more hangings.
I'm with you on this one. The penalty for selling someone's freedom away in America cannot be too severe.
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I believe one of the articles linked earlier (well, in that archive that was linked) said the maximum sentence would be 25 years and a $500,000 fine.
This sort of thing pissed me off so much in high school.
If we wanted it to be a deterrent, we'd be whipping it out right here.
Anything less is just a mockery of justice.
It was between 2003 and 2006. They tripped up, got busted, the hammer is brought down. But the 2,000 statistic is that 2000 of the 5000 cases they checked got harsher punishments than they should have.
Fuck that. Do it the other way around. The guys running the prison are scum but they aren't scum who worked their way into the position in our society with perhaps the highest individual responsibility for Justice.
They should be fucked (brought to Justice) by any means possible.
I agree, however, that the difference in punishment between white-collar and street crime is ridiculous.
Edit: I do, however, get creeped out by the suggestions that they should get prison raped, or tortured, or whatnot. That shit is barbaric, even when you ignore the possibility of false conviction.
This part probably doesn't even matter.