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  As Hillary and her mother approached the bench, Ciavarella put his palms on his desk, leaned over, and demanded, “What makes you think you can get away with this kind of crap?” The question seemed to fill the room. The words stung. There were no introductions, no greetings. Trembling, Hillary mumbled, “I don’t know.” Ciavarella sat back, bright certitude shining from his glasses. “Hillary, you’ve been charged with harassment, how do you wish to plead?”

  “Guilty.”

  “Based upon her admission, I’ll adjudicate her delinquent. Why would you do this?”

  “I have no rational explanation for that. I—”

  Laurene gently placed her hand on her daughter’s shoulder in a gesture of comfort and support.

  “Did [the vice principal] ever do anything to you?”

  “Not personally, no. I didn’t take into consideration that [the vice principal] is a person as opposed to just a school administration member at my school.”

  “How long have you been at Crestwood?”

  “A year and a half.”

  “What grade are you in?”

  “I’m in my sophomore year, tenth grade.”

  “You’ve been at Crestwood when I’ve been at Crestwood?”

  “Yes.”

  “You heard me speak?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say ‘sir,’” Laurene whispered.

  “Told you what type of conduct I expected from children in that school relative to the juvenile justice system?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Told you what conduct I . . . Is this—acceptable?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What did I say would happen if you acted in an unacceptable way towards teachers and/or administrators?”

  “I don’t recall, sir.”

  “You don’t recall? You don’t?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Were you sleeping?” Ciavarella bellowed, shaking his head in astonishment at his own patience with the world.

  “No, sir.”

  “You can’t remember that?”

  “No, sir.”

  Laurene felt Hillary pressing back against her, cringing in fear.

  “It’s going to come back to you because I didn’t go to that school, I didn’t walk into that school and I didn’t speak to that student body just to scare you, just to blow smoke, just to make you think that I would do that when I wouldn’t. I’m a man of my word. You’re gone. Send her up to FACT. Let her stay there until she figures it out.

  “Thank you,” Ciavarella said with a smile that never reached his eyes.

  “FACT” was Female Adventure Challenge Therapy, the wilderness camp in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania.

  Less than two minutes after she stepped before Ciavarella, Hillary was being led away without being able to say good-bye to her mother. As she was being handcuffed in an anteroom, she heard her mother wailing, “No, that’s not fair! That’s not what the officer said.” Hillary pleaded with the bailiff to let her say good-bye. But all the bailiff would say was, “Just listen to what you’ve done to your poor mother.”

  Back in the courtroom, Laurene Transue screamed hysterically between great gasping sobs. Like so many other parents—Angelia’s mother, Jeffrey’s father—she was beset by guilt and helplessness as she watched her child taken away. She begged Ciavarella to change his mind. Her voice grew shrill and desperate. She offered to take Hillary’s place. The bailiffs threatened to put her in jail or a mental hospital. Her family, so recently reconstituted, was suddenly and unexpectedly rent apart again. And by a judge who was duty-bound to protect children and hold families together. Laurene was overcome by a crashing wave of sorrow and collapsed in the courtroom.

  By this time, Hillary was in a holding cell with several other youths. After a few hours, she was placed in a van with two girls and driven to Wind Gap, some sixty miles from her home. Hillary arrived at Wind Gap about 3 p.m. It was raining and her new home looked like a desolate campground in the middle of nowhere, soaked and sodden under a low gray sky. She was allowed to make a one-minute phone call to her mother, and for the entire sixty seconds—it was carefully timed—they sobbed and apologized to each other—Hillary for causing her mother grief, Laurene for failing to protect her daughter. Then Hillary signed paperwork and removed all her jewelry and hairpins. Next she was led to a shower house where she was ordered to apply lice treatment to her hair. Her clothing was confiscated and replaced with sweatpants, a T-shirt, used underwear, and old sneakers. She felt like a convict.

  Laurene Transue made it home, but a pall of wretchedness hung over her. The house was like a stage without the lead actor. She felt Hillary’s absence so keenly it was a presence. She blamed herself for telling Hillary she didn’t need a lawyer. She was perplexed. How could this have happened? She had worked professionally with juveniles for sixteen years. Never had she seen anything like what happened to her daughter. Sometimes she had disagreed with a court’s decision, but never had she seen a judge show such disregard for the law and for the best interests of the juvenile. She felt a yoke of grief around her neck so heavy she couldn’t sleep.

  Then her father reminded her that before her long illness she would have been doing everything she could to rescue Hillary. The next day she was angry. Laurene Transue was different from most other parents of Ciavarella’s victims. She was not a local girl. She was born and raised in northern New Jersey. She didn’t buy into the Luzerne County “fear factor.” Moreover, she was educated. “I learned quickly that there were basically two kinds of people here—the well-to-do and the educated were one, the uneducated and poor were the other. I fit in neither group.” Laurene had a BA from East Stroudsburg University and was nearing a master’s degree in education from Wilkes University. She had been trained to be a social studies teacher, but like so many others before her, she could not get a job in Luzerne County. “They told us in graduate school that to get a teaching job in Luzerne County, you had to pay $5,000 to the school board. That was the going rate, and you showed up for your interview with your teaching certificate and an envelope with the money. I couldn’t afford it.” So she turned to social work, and after sixteen years working as a caseworker for children in Pennsylvania—working with Head Start programs, private foster care agencies, and Children and Youth Offices—she knew without any doubt that something was deeply wrong with the treatment of her daughter. So she picked up the telephone. She called the county Public Defenders Office, the state Public Defenders Office, the Governor’s Action Line, the American Civil Liberties Union, her congressman, state senator, state representative. No one was able to help. Ciavarella seemed omnipotent, untouchable. Then she contacted Sara Jacobson, an assistant public defender for Philadelphia, who in turn told her of a nonprofit organization that might be able to help—Juvenile Law Center.

  •••

  In 1975, like many young lawyers in those days, four recent Temple University School of Law graduates decided that they wanted to change the world. It was an age of can-do optimism rooted in the belief that you could accomplish anything if you marshaled enough talent and energy. Unlike most of these utopians, Robert Schwartz, Marsha Levick, Judith Chomsky, and Philip Margolis succeeded. They channeled their idealism into a novel project—a free, walk-in legal clinic in Philadelphia to serve local youths who needed lawyers to help them negotiate the myriad legal issues they might come up against in school, their families, the courts, and on the streets. They called their experiment Juvenile Law Center. It was the nation’s first comprehensive, nonprofit law firm exclusively for children.

  The early days were difficult. The overwhelming majority of their clients were runaways, truants, and troubled children—kids with thousand-yard stares, kids with deep scars on their bodies and souls, kids born with plastic spoons in their mouths, kids who had made a terrible mistake when they chose their parents. Chomsky’s husband was a cardiologist who had a part-time office where he did insurance examinations. This became Juvenile Law Center’s first off
ice. It was crowded, especially on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, when it served both medical and legal functions. Lawyers often used the top of an X-ray machine as their desk.

  But their timing couldn’t have been better. The legal rights of juveniles were expanding steadily because of a landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving Gerald Gault, who as a fifteen-year-old had been treated with stunning injustice by Arizona authorities. In its Gault ruling, the high court said that juveniles accused of crimes were entitled to the same due process rights as adults. These include timely notification of charges, the right to confront witnesses and, most importantly, the right to legal representation. “We were on the ground floor, and we knew it,” recalls Levick.

  Money was a nagging concern. Juvenile Law Center got some small grants that would run out in a year or two. They would reapply and go after new money sources. Everyone had outside jobs, writing briefs and doing legal scut work. Schwartz also picked up a few bucks as a basketball referee and baseball umpire. But Juvenile Law Center gradually gained momentum, and in the process it took each of its cases to the goal line. While defending a juvenile wronged at a detention center, it also pressed for changes in overall policies at that detention center and then all youth detention centers. This was a turning point that would transform the organization into an engine for national policy reforms.

  Juvenile Law Center chalked up legal victories that resulted in more alternatives to detention for nonviolent young offenders and improvements in foster care. It played a central role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision abolishing the juvenile death penalty. Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system became one of the nation’s best, and in 2004 the prestigious MacArthur Foundation designated Juvenile Law Center to lead its massive juvenile justice reform initiative in Pennsylvania. In 2008, Juvenile Law Center was named the recipient of a $500,000 no-strings-attached award from the MacArthur Foundation to continue its work as a “Creative and Effective Institution.”

  It was Hillary’s grandfather who made the first contact with Juvenile Law Center. He called the general intake number and talked to a paralegal screener, who routed the call to the voice mail of Laval Miller-Wilson, a staff attorney. Coincidentally, Miller-Wilson had done a survey of seventeen Pennsylvania counties on the question of access to legal counsel—and the major problem area was northeastern Pennsylvania. Then he listened to the voice mail, and when he heard the name Ciavarella, it floated up in his memory like a dead fish. Was this the same Judge Ciavarella who had been slapped down in 2001 by the state Superior Court, at the behest of Juvenile Law Center, for failing to inform a thirteen-year-old of her right to counsel? It had to be. He thought, I can’t believe this guy is still doing this.

  He dialed the Transues’ number in Luzerne County. Laurene answered, and immediately her eyes became glossy with tears. Finally, she had hope. Pursing her lips to make the tears stop, she haltingly told Miller-Wilson about the ninety-second hearing, that Hillary was a good student and had never been in serious trouble before, and how important her daughter was to her. He was stunned by the story, especially after Laurene told him that she was an experienced social worker and had been around courtrooms for many years.

  Miller-Wilson walked over to the office of Marsha Levick, Juvenile Law Center’s chief counsel. He told her about his twenty-five-minute conversation with Laurene Transue. Levick also remembered Ciavarella from the 2001 ruling. She agreed that it was time to step in. The only questions were how many resources could be invested in this case and what the extent of Miller-Wilson’s personal involvement should be. Under normal procedure, Juvenile Law Center would contact outside local counsel—but the Luzerne County Public Defenders Office didn’t seem like a promising avenue.

  Miller-Wilson said he would handle the case, but first he had to get permission to represent Hillary. He telephoned her at Wind Gap, introduced himself, and said he’d like to seek a new trial. Would she accept him as her attorney? She agreed immediately. She was earnest and polite, calling him “sir.” Miller-Wilson was very careful to avoid getting Hillary’s hopes too high.

  Miller-Wilson called a strategy meeting with Levick and Bob Schwartz, Juvenile Law Center executive director. It was unanimously decided to file a motion for reconsideration and a writ of habeas corpus seeking Hillary’s release in Luzerne County Court.

  Miller-Wilson made the two-and-a-half-hour drive up to Wilkes-Barre with Riya Shah, a staff attorney. They first went to the Luzerne County Courthouse, where they entered an appearance and filed motions on behalf of Hillary with the clerk of courts. They notified Ciavarella, District Attorney Jacqueline Musto Carroll, and Basil G. Russin, the chief public defender. Then they walked over to the Juvenile Probation Office in the courthouse annex and asked for the file of their new client, Hillary Transue. Miller-Wilson quickly scanned the transcript. He stared at the ceiling in utter disbelief. The record of the entire adjudication hearing that separated Hillary Transue from her home and family was two pages long—331 words! Ciavarella failed to explain to Hillary the consequences of proceeding without legal representation. He failed to provide a colloquy explaining to Hillary her rights and the consequences of waiving her right to a trial. And despite the fact that she had no prior record and was convicted only of a third-degree misdemeanor, this fifteen-year-old girl was immediately dispatched in shackles to a residential treatment facility.

  Events moved quickly after Miller-Wilson’s filings with the court. Within a few days a hearing was held before Ciavarella. Hillary, accompanied by a FACT counselor, was brought to the courtroom from Wind Gap. Laurene, her husband, and Hillary’s grandparents joined Miller-Wilson and Shah. The gathering was summoned into the courtroom, where Ciavarella quickly heard the motions and scheduled a hearing to be held in one week.

  Miller-Wilson and his Juvenile Law Center colleagues spent the following weekend preparing for the trial. It was a complicated case. There were discovery issues: Hillary’s name was not attached to the MySpace website in any way. Even after the police got the search warrant from Verizon and traced the spoof back to the Transue household, there was no certainty that Hillary was the author. There were four others in the same household. Miller-Wilson wanted to see if the search warrant was proper. And there was a glaring First Amendment issue: How can you criminalize what she did when she was just exercising her right to free speech?

  But when they got to Ciavarella’s courtroom, it was all over in a few minutes. No need for a trial. The writ of habeas corpus was granted, Hillary’s adjudication was vacated, and she was allowed to return home. That weekend was Mother’s Day.

  Miller-Wilson had expected to spend the entire day in Wilkes-Barre. The brief proceeding with the Transues left him with time on his hands, and so he asked Ciavarella if he could stick around for the rest of the day and watch the court proceedings. “Fine,” the judge said. Ciavarella was a model of jurisprudence. Juveniles were appearing with lawyers, and nothing appeared out of the ordinary. Later, he had a brief conversation with Jonathan Ursiak, an assistant public defender who was representing some of the juveniles. Miller-Wilson asked him if this was a normal day in Ciavarella’s court. “No,” Ursiak said, “the judge is acting very differently today.” An undertow of anxiety tugged at Miller-Wilson’s brain. Earlier that day, he had asked Hillary if there was anyone else at Wind Gap who had had a similar experience before Judge Ciavarella.

  “Oh, yes, sir, I know a lot of kids like that. One of them is my friend, Jessica Van Reeth.”

  Jessica Van Reeth was an immune-to-peer-pressure, misfit-by-design sixteen-year-old junior at Crestwood High School. Amid a sea of conformity, khakis, and polo shirts, she showed up every day in clothes that were usually black and with fingernails that were sometimes painted bright red, other times purple. She was outspoken. “You never had to wonder what was on her mind,” said Bill Kane, who had her in his political science class. “She was very liberal politically while most of her classmates leaned toward the conservative
side.” As early as 2006, Jessica had heard bad things about Judge Mark Ciavarella. On the days he came to Crestwood for his annual warning speech, she would find a reason to be absent. “Even then I knew he was a criminal—that he was sending kids away unfairly,” she recalls. “There were rumors that he owned the place he was sending them to. But no one thought this could be true. No judge could stoop that low.” Jessica worked at an Italian restaurant in Mountain Top, Ciavarella’s hometown. Whenever the judge came in, she would refuse to wait on him and left the job to a colleague.

  In October 2006 Jessica was in the girls’ bathroom at school when a friend asked her to hold on to a lighter and marijuana pipe. Just as the exchange was made, the vice principal came in the room. All four girls were escorted to the principal’s office. Out of loyalty to her friend, she told the school authorities that the two items belonged to her. She was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia. The next day Jessica and her mother went to the Fairview Township Police station and asked if they could get a lawyer: “A police officer gave us the phone number for the Public Defender’s Office, but we were also discouraged from calling because our family income was probably too high and we would not qualify. The Fairview Township Police also told us I would likely receive nothing more than probation.”

  She was interviewed in December by the Juvenile Probation Department, where she was told that because she had good grades and had never been in trouble before, the department would not recommend that she be placed in an out-of-home facility. It would, however, be necessary to appear at a hearing before Judge Ciavarella. She told her parents she needed a lawyer. They disagreed, reassuring her that she would only get probation.