There has been another example of how broken the justice system is – a pair of state judges from Pennsylvania have just been ordered to pay over $200 million in punitive damages, after sending children to for-profit prisons.
According to the Associated Press, the “kids-for-cash” scheme involved over 300 children and as a result a civil suit was filed against former judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, who have been now ordered to pay after U.S District Judge Christopher Conner ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, saying that they were “the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions.”
The Associated Press reported:
In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care.
Ciavarella ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for petty theft, jaywalking, truancy, smoking on school grounds and other minor infractions. The judge often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to put up a defense or even say goodbye to their families.
“Ciavarella and Conahan abandoned their oath and breached the public trust,” Conner noted Tuesday in explaining his judgment. “Their cruel and despicable actions victimized a vulnerable population of young people, many of whom were suffering from emotional issues and mental health concerns.”
After the scheme was discovered, over 4,000 convictions involving over 2,300 juveniles were wiped by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Even though victims are unlikely to see any of the settlement, Marsha Levick – co-founder and chief counsel of the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center and a lawyer for the plaintiffs – said “It’s a huge victory” in a statement to the AP.
“To have an order from a federal court that recognizes the gravity of what the judges did to these children in the midst of some of the most critical years of their childhood and development matters enormously, whether or not the money gets paid,” she added.
According to the AP, 282 people contributed their testimonies to the case, along with 32 parents – many of the children who appeared in Luzerne County juvenile court between 2003 and 2008, some under the age of 13, were sent to juvenile detention.
“They recounted his harsh and arbitrary nature, his disdain for due process, his extraordinary abruptness, and his cavalier and boorish behavior in the courtroom,” Judge Conner noted in his ruling.
One plaintiff said Judge Ciavarella “ruined my life” and “just didn’t let me get to my future” according to court documents – another plaintiff said, “I feel I was just sold out for no reason. Like everybody just stood in line to be sold.”
How many other judges are on the take?
So where is the money going. Obviously a huge chunk of it is going to the lawyers who filed the suit, but $200 million dollars isn’t pocket change and to read that “victims are unlikely to see any of the settlement” is infuriating! Who the hell else should get this. Even with up to 40% of the settlement going to the law firms that brought the suit, where’s the remaining $120,000,000 going. Good to hear these guys got caught and the convictions were overturned, but these kids were the ones who had their lives ruined and they get NOTHING from this verdict??? That $120 million dollar difference split among the 2,300 kids is a little over $52,173 each. The better not be going to some government agency or supposed “non-profit”. Get this money to they kids whose lives were ruined. It’s not hardly enough compensation for them, but they are the ones it happened to and they should get the money! $120 million doesn’t just disappear.