Kids for Cash Page 17

  Among the witnesses to the news conference was Jack Van Reeth, the father of Jessica, who said, “We feel that it’s a great day for the young people and the youth of this area to see the system really does work, the system really isn’t rigged against them. It’s just wonderful to see that the scheme of jailing-for-dollars has come to an end. Jessica is extremely happy. She said this is better than Christmas.”

  At Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, Schwartz and Levick had been alerted by Marie J. Yeager, the center’s public relations consultant, that a major development was about to occur in Scranton. Carlson’s news conference was streamed live, and they watched with mounting amazement as the story unfolded. Then, wide-eyed, they went online and read the list of charges. This wasn’t about five hundred cases. This was about thousands of cases! The amounts of money were huge and the scheme was brazen. Carlson connected the dots between the payoffs and the constitutional violations—a quid pro quo! This meant that from the time PA Child Care opened, Ciavarella had a financial incentive to place kids. All cases before Ciavarella were tainted!

  A hailstorm of phone calls and emails ensued from the media, parents, and other juvenile lawyers. For the next two days Yeager took calls from all over the world: the networks, cable news, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, the Economist, newspapers in Britain, France, and Australia. So many aggrieved families were contacting the center that it hired additional attorneys to handle the calls.

  Schwartz and Levick decided immediately that it was time to give the King’s Bench petition another try. This time they attached to it the federal information outlining the kickback scheme and amended it to challenge cases going back to 2003, when money first was exchanged between the judges and Mericle via Powell. The petition was re-filed on Thursday, three days after the Carlson news conference. The following Monday the Supreme Court, without outward sign of what could only have been an infinity of embarrassment, put out a press release saying it would take jurisdiction as Juvenile Law Center had suggested some ten months earlier. Another belated joiner of the anti-Ciavarella-Conahan bandwagon was the Judicial Conduct Board, which said it would file a petition seeking the immediate suspension of the two judges. This came two years and five months after it received the anonymous complaint against Conahan. Before the JCB could get around to acting, the Supreme Court stripped the two judges of all judicial power.

  Facing jeering, booing, hooting, hissing citizens and a gale of cameras and reporters from the local and national media, the two judges (who would resign in a few days) were back at the William J. Nealon Federal Courthouse in Scranton on February 12. Before going into the courtroom, they were fingerprinted and posed for mug shots. Then they sat at separate tables with their lawyers and listened to U.S. District Judge Edward M. Kosik, who said he wanted to be sure that, “regardless of the sophistication of the defendants,” each of them fully understood their rights. Each wore a dark gray suit. Ciavarella was slightly slouched in his chair. Conahan drummed the tabletop nervously with his fingers. Finally, Kosik asked, “How do you plead?”

  “Guilty, Your Honor,” said Conahan.

  “Guilty, Your Honor,” said Ciavarella.

  Under the terms of the plea bargains with federal prosecutors, the felonious judges agreed to serve eighty-seven months in prison, resign within ten days of their plea, and consent to automatic disbarment. Kosik released them on $1 million bail that was secured by their Florida condominium, which was legally owned by their wives and had served as the laundry for most of the kickbacks from Powell. At the rear of the courtroom, Ciavarella stopped to answer a question. “How do you think it would be?” he answered incredulously. “It wasn’t fun.” Then the co-conspirators strode out of the courthouse to a waiting car. One woman shouted, “Burn in hell!” That night on the CBS News, Katie Couric intoned, “Two judges in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty today to taking huge payoffs to send teenagers to privately run detention centers.”

  Among the courtroom spectators was Kevin’s mother, who admired Judge Kosik’s handling of the drama: “You felt like you were sitting in a place that was being fair and that he was being fair. It went as it should be. He was very forward in explaining things, in making sure they understood, in making them answer, in making sure that they understood what was happening.” She did not feel Ciavarella had extended the same consideration just ten months earlier when her seventeen-year-old son had appeared before him on a simple assault charge growing out of a fight outside a concert hall with a friend. Her frustration began when she tried to persuade court officials to change the date of Kevin’s hearing because she had to attend an important meeting involving her daughter’s education as a dental hygienist. Unable to resolve the conflict, she asked her seventy-five-year-old father to accompany Kevin to the courtroom. Since it was Kevin’s first offense, she was told by probation officials that her son did not need an attorney. Kevin admitted that he punched the boy, but when he tried to explain, Ciavarella cut him off and dispatched him to Camp Adams for ninety days.

  Kevin’s trauma began when he was handcuffed and leg-shackled, taken to a side door and placed in a van. After a ten-hour drive to Camp Adams, Kevin felt out of place with juveniles who were there for violent offenses involving guns and drugs. He was allowed to telephone only his parents, so whenever he called, his mother would run down the street with the mobile phone handing it to his friends so they could talk with her son for a minute. About a dozen of his classmates at Hanover Area High School organized a protest with T-shirts that said, “Free Kev.” They counted down the days until July 22, 2008, his scheduled release date. The Times-Leader and the Citizens’ Voice ran articles. Parental visits were limited to one hour on Sundays. “It was heartbreaking to watch Kevin in battered-up clothes, shoes that were too big, filthy, oversized sweats, sores on his feet, heavy boots in the middle of summer. It was just a horrible feeling to see your son unshaven with long hair. I couldn’t believe that they weren’t taking care of him in a better manner up there,” his mother said. She added that twice he was beaten by other boys out of range of the Camp Adams surveillance cameras.

  Juvenile Law Center intervened with an appeal to the state Superior Court asking that Kevin’s adjudication be overturned because Ciavarella failed to fully question him to ensure he understood the possible consequences when he opted to admit to participating in the fight. He was released in June after fifty-seven days at Camp Adams by Judge David W. Lupas, the former district attorney who had taken over from Ciavarella as juvenile judge.

  Among those most appalled by the revelations out of Scranton was Judge Arthur Grim, who was in his office in Reading, Pennsylvania, on February 12 when he received an unexpected telephone call from Ronald D. Castille, the chief justice of Pennsylvania. Was he aware of the Luzerne County situation? Yes, he said, painfully so. Would he serve as a special master to review Ciavarella’s cases for the Supreme Court? Grim hesitated. It shouldn’t take much time, Castille reassured. Grim said he needed to talk it over with his wife, but he already knew his answer. There was no way he could turn down a request like that. Grim had been a juvenile court judge for twenty years, and he was serving as chairman of Pennsylvania’s Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission and as a member of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Committee to the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. He called Castille back the next day and accepted. The task would occupy and obsess Grim for most of the rest of the year, and his painful findings would be permanently lodged in his memory like a thorn.

  Five days after his initial phone call from Castille, Grim and a law clerk assigned to him, William Ehrlich, drove to Wilkes-Barre and met with a group of key officials that included Muroski; David W. Lupas, the former district attorney who was now a county judge; Jacqueline Musto Carroll, who succeeded Lupas as district attorney; and Basil G. Russin, the chief public defender. It was agreed that Grim would begin with the cases that were most likely to be expunged because they involved minor offenses
. Grim and Ehrlich took the files back to the judge’s office on the third floor of the Berks County Courthouse and began their reviews. It wasn’t long before Grim felt a seeping, molten anger threatening to wash over him. In Ciavarella’s courtroom, the constitutional rights of children were nonexistent. Vulnerable kids were being coaxed by adults into waiving their right to an attorney and then advised to plead “guilty”—a word that wasn’t even supposed to be used in juvenile court. Kids and their parents were advised by probation officers that getting a lawyer would “only make matters worse.” When Grim sat as a juvenile judge, cases lasted for several hours. But in Ciavarella’s courtroom, the average case lasted about four minutes. One of the first transcripts he read involved an eighth-grade girl who was brought to Ciavarella by school authorities for possessing a small amount of marijuana.

  Ciavarella: “It says here that you have been charged with violation of the Controlled Substance, Drug, Device and Cosmetic Act. How do you wish to plead?”

  Juvenile: “Guilty.”

  Ciavarella: “Based upon her admission, I will adjudicate her delinquent. Where did this occur?”

  Juvenile: “School.”

  Ciavarella: “What grade are you in?”

  Juvenile: “Eighth.”

  Ciavarella: “Were you at the school when I was there?”

  Juvenile: “Yeah.”

  Ciavarella: “What did I say about drugs in school?”

  Juvenile: “That you’re going to get—well, you’re going to get arrested in school.”

  Ciavarella: “What else did I tell you?”

  Juvenile: “That you will get arrested and get charged.”

  Ciavarella: “What did I say I will do?”

  Juvenile: “Send us away.”

  Ciavarella: “Did you think I was kidding?”

  Juvenile: “No.”

  Ciavarella: “Very good. She will be remanded. Send her to [Wind Gap]. Let her stay there until she learns her lesson. I mean what I say. Thank you.”

  It was the same in case after case. Ciavarella was sending away kids with a routine that seemed coded in his brain. Not a single word about the right to counsel. Grim discovered early in his review of cases that Ciavarella often read probation reports about a child’s alleged offenses, past behaviors, and social circumstances before he held the hearing to determine whether or not they were guilty of the specific offense. This was an egregious violation of law and procedures that are designed to keep a judge impartial in reaching a decision. A juvenile judge, Grim believed, was supposed to follow the rules with the best interests of the child, the community, and the victim in mind. Ciavarella was perverting this idea in ways Grim had never imagined possible. Grim quickly realized that the abasement of constitutional guarantees was pervasive. Ciavarella didn’t just sometimes fail to protect kids’ rights, or even most of the time. He violated the law in every single case.

  The review of these easier cases—Grim called them “low-hanging fruit”—took a month. In his initial recommendation to the Supreme Court, Grim noted that Rule 152 forbade the court to accept a waiver of counsel from a child unless the waiver is “knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily made” and only after the judge “conducts a colloquy with the juvenile on the record.” With that preface, Grim wrote in his initial report to the Supreme Court: “My preliminary investigation points to the conclusion that a very substantial number of juveniles who appeared without counsel before Judge Ciavarella for delinquency or related proceedings did not knowingly and intelligently waive their right to counsel. My investigation also uncovered evidence that there was routine deprivation of children’s constitutional rights to appear before an impartial tribunal and to have an opportunity to be heard.”

  Grim also concluded that if these children had had competent lawyers, they would not have been adjudicated delinquent and would have received lesser sanctions, such as consent decrees that in effect provide juveniles with a second chance. Since these youth would not have had juvenile delinquency records, as they now did, Grim said these cases should be vacated and the records expunged. The Supreme Court agreed two weeks later, and the long process began to wipe out the records of about 360 kids.

  Grim now turned his attention to the more serious cases. Since a hundred of the easy cases had taken a month, Grim and Ehrlich knew they couldn’t plow through each individual case. So they asked the court officials for a cross-section. Even then, they knew they could not examine the entire file of the selected cases, so they focused on the charges, transcripts, findings, and dispositions. A realization came quickly to Grim: Every case heard by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008—perhaps three thousand of them—must be vacated and the records of the juveniles expunged. He made his recommendation for universal expungement on August 7. He said no child who appeared before Ciavarella could have had an impartial hearing because of the bribes and the routine denial of constitutional rights. On October 29, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which ten months earlier had refused even to consider the denial of constitutional rights in Luzerne County, adopted Grim’s recommendations in a nine-page order.

  There was a dimension to the Luzerne County tragedy that went largely unnoticed by the general public, but Grim was gravely sensitive to it: there was a large group of citizens who would be upset by universal expungement—those who were real victims of juveniles who came before Ciavarella. Many of the youths whose records were cleared did commit serious offenses against innocent people. They would now have clean records. Some of them even were paying court-ordered restitution to their victims. This would now be stopped. Grim said he understood how the victims felt, but the unfortunate situation was unavoidable. “The bottom line is when an order is vacated and a record expunged, it’s over. There is no ability for anyone in the court system to require anything further of these kids,” he said.

  But many, like Karen, were not consoled. On a subzero night in 2005, when she had just turned forty-one, Karen was working as a pizza deliveryperson in Wilkes-Barre. “It was very dark. I was making a delivery on New Street. I got out of the car, and suddenly four kids wearing hoodies were running at me. One of them pulled out a hunting knife and screamed, ‘Give me your money!’ I reached in my pocket to get the money, and another kid hit me in the lower back with a baseball bat. I didn’t know he was behind me, and I went to my knees. Then he swung at my head. I managed to block it, but then they started kicking me, and I shouted, ‘I can’t get to the money if you keep kicking me.’ I gave one of them about twenty-two dollars. They ran off. I wasn’t sure I could stand up, but I managed and got back in my car and dialed 911. They told me to stay where I was, but I was terrified and wanted to get away. Somehow I drove back to the restaurant, staggered in the door and fell on the floor. The ambulance came and took me to the emergency room.”

  Karen had suffered two herniated disks in her lower back, multiple contusions, and bruised ribs. Pain tore through her body like a jackhammer. Part of the attack was caught by a surveillance camera at a convenience store, and her assailants were arrested the next day. They were boys aged fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. The three youngest went before Ciavarella, pleaded guilty to assault charges, and were incarcerated for about a year. Karen had to identify them in the courtroom: “I didn’t understand how difficult it would be until I had to do it. I had to be in the same room as those people who had brutalized me. Now that I know what it’s like, I’m not sure I could ever do it again.”

  She said once the attackers were identified, her son and her husband wanted to go after them in retribution. “I said, ‘No, the court system will handle it.’ I swore to them that the courts were going to handle it.” She underwent physical therapy for about a year, and long after that she continued to suffer mental anguish. She was afraid to turn her back on anyone, even someone she knew: “I was phobic about going outside the house. Even today, if I see kids going down the road with hoodies, I get panicked. I am easily startled by loud noises and quick movements.”


  Then, in October 2009, she was stunned when she learned of the Supreme Court’s expungement order. “Okay, a lot of these kids were sentenced unjustly, but the guys who went after me deserved what they got. Expunging a criminal’s record is very un-validating to the victim. To just say it didn’t happen makes me feel like I don’t matter. I will carry this incident with me for the rest of my life, but the criminals who attacked me will not have to do the same.”

  Following their guilty pleas, Conahan withdrew into seclusion, but Ciavarella made some headlines. When ABC’s 20/20 did a twenty-five minute segment on the scandal in March, he was intercepted outside his home by reporter Jim Avila and a camera crew. He gave an angry, finger-pointing performance in which he denied that the payoffs had influenced dispositions of young defendants. “You take a look at their file and you look to see if this was the first time they had a run-in with the law,” he snarled at Avila. “It might have been the first time they were in front of me. You may be surprised that it’s not going to be as clear-cut as they would like you to think.”

  The Citizens’ Voice, which had been on the losing end of a $3.5 million libel verdict in a case heard by Ciavarella in 2006, asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to review the ruling in light of the corruption allegations. The high court ordered an unusual evidentiary hearing in nearby Lehigh County that was held on July 1 and 2. In a remarkable appearance on the witness stand, Ciavarella admitted to being a “corrupt judge” in the libel case, and he unabashedly admitted that he took the money from Mericle and Powell in connection with the construction and operation of the two juvenile detention centers. But he insisted that he did not think the payments were improper. “I did not consider what I did to be illegal,” he testified. “I did not consider the money that I was receiving to be illegal mob money. I was told it was legal money. I was told it was something that I was entitled to. And for that reason, I did not have a problem with where that money went or how it came to me.” He said he didn’t report the payments, which totaled about $1.4 million, to the Internal Revenue Service because he thought Conahan had paid the taxes. He said the federal charges about the kickbacks were the result of a “misunderstanding” on his part. And, most emphatically, he denied the payments had anything to do with his decisions to send children to the two juvenile centers.