Judge to serve 28 years after making $2 million sending children to jail
rollingout.com
rollingout.com
Perhaps the DA and Public Defenders office should have equal budgets.
I am hoping some very smart lawyer figures out how to sue the prison company for these children. I am sure their is a corporate veil, but it can be pierced in the cases of criminal activity. Public-private partnerships work in a lot of cases, but this one needs a serious hammer to show that pulling this crap is bad and will put some scheming folks in jail.
1) http://www.npr.org/2012/03/03/147876810/after-scandal-new-ru...
I do wish the $ were closer, but your idea would basically fix that.
This has largely historical reasons; until not so long ago, England did not have designated prosecutors (in fact, well into the 19th century it often fell to private citizens to initiate prosecution, until the police started to take over that role).
That said, the CPS will likely still have more resources at its disposal than public defenders.
[1] http://www.euro-justice.com/member_states/england_wales/coun...
http://web.archive.org/web/20130523171557/http://blog.simple...
Bottom line, there are advantages but also downsides to this approach.
(non-Wayback Machine link, where unfortunately the comments are no longer threaded: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2013/01/23/response-to-radleyba...)
It seems that if you hide behind corporate structures and contracts you can transform the nature of charges against your actions. In this case, the offenses committed involved enslaving children for personal financial gain. If there is any offense worse than that, please inform.
The plea deal is light for the two developers probably because the prosecutor didn't have as much evidence to pin on them, and because they needed their cooperation to get the judges. Remember, news articles about a crime are not admissible as the factual record in a trial. Just because it's obvious from a news article exactly what happened does not mean that the prosecutor didn't need to bargain for certain peoples' cooperation to bring all those facts to light.
Umm .. they paid bribes to judges to enslave children. This isn't some tech startup recruiting employees.
It sounds ridiculous, but remember, the standard of proof at a criminal trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt." In a situation like this with four people pointing fingers at each other, giving the owners a plea deal probably ensured the prosecutors' ability to get the judges.
From the article you linked ..
"Even though they were in positions of power and influence, I had the ultimate ability to do the right thing and say no. I was wrong for giving in and paying them and will forever bear the burden of having done so," he [Robert Powell] wrote.
Whether or not they "extorted" him (though he still managed to profit in the millions), doesn't change the seriousness of what he did .. which was to enslave children.
Later
The appeals decision upholding Ciavarella's conviction suggests that he was still a sitting judge at the time Powell began cooperating.
Adding to that the time they lost outside of the school system, the social stigma that goes along with having been to "jail" and you've got yourself more a more explosive cocktail than anything described in the anarchists cookbook.
If you're socially sidelined and have no options for a career, crime is enticing. Especially since you've been stamped a criminal allready, and you've been locked up (yes, they were aquitted, but they won't realize that, and their peers won't either).
Assuming they just took problem kids across the whole spectrum, assuming 500 non problem kids, you have 3500 problem kids. A rough guess of mine would be that 1-2% are too smart for school kids that cause trouble out of sheer boredom. So you've got 70 bored hacker type kids that suddenly have someone who's mistreated them, and I'd want to get back at them. A couple of them proably took the frugal coping mechanism of sociopathy.
If your school system gets kids to come to school armed, prepared to kill, how the hell will that play out?
> ... forced to pay $1 million ...
Moral: crime pays.
> ... He was also forced to pay $1 million ...
We don't know his cut of the $2.6M or what the other guy's fine is/was (assuming other guy also has to pay). But yes... they basically just had to give the money back. (And go to prison for a bit)
this judge, Ciavarella, got 28 years;
the other judge, Conahan, who not only sold kids but also helped prevent use of the county's facility, got 17.5 years in prison; [2]
Robert Powell, an attorney that passed the bribes and part owner of the facility, got 18mos in prison and $60k in fines (it is unclear how much he will serve), plus he gets to serve in Miami to be close to his family. He did apparently cooperate and wear a wire. [2]
Robert Mericle, the real estate developer who built the two facilities, paid $2.15MM to fund childrens' health programs and will likely serve 1 year or even just probation;
And then you read, from the wiki article [1], "Sandy Fonzo, whose son Edward Kenzakoski committed suicide after Ciavarella gave him a jail sentence, despite Kenzakoski's first-time offender status" and I sit here amazed. Millions of dollars of theft, bribes accepted not only for children but in cases as well, children sold for cash, children pushed into suicide... I'd say all of them got a slap on the wrist.
The other thing, unremarked upon by the wiki article, is I wonder who else knew about this? Just like Annie Dookhan, who was faking drug test results in Boston and sent hundreds at least to prison, possibly tainting thirty four thousand verdicts, or Jonathan Salvador, who was doing similar things in texas [4], tainting five thousand convictions, I'd bet good money there where people who saw this happening. Did you read some of the convictions? "He once sentenced a teen to three months in jail for creating a MySpace page that mocked her school’s assistant principal." Many of these fucking pigs knew what was going on, knew how to fuck a kid who was mouthy or didn't kiss their asses and send them to the judge that would send the kid up the river. Moral: never trust a pig.
from [4]
Worse yet, the lab Salvador worked for knew he was doing a bad job for
years. A DPS investigative commission found that Salvador was asked to
correct mistakes in about a third of all the tests he ran. Periodic job
evaluations noted that Salvador struggled with an overall understanding of
chemistry and that his problems were very systemic and his work right on the
edge of tolerable, though not catastrophic.
It could probably be described as catastrophic now. Twenty cases have been
overturned so far, voiding almost 160 years of prison sentences. If all of
Salvador's cases are thrown out, which is looking more likely, the lost
sentences will total more than 10,000 years.
In Walker County, DA David Weeks has already given up. His
office tried to retest evidence from Salvador's cases, but the results were
haphazard, Weeks told the Hunstville Item. In a case where [Salvador] said
there was drugs, there wouldnt be. And when he said there were no drugs,
there were drugs. "Its clear that all the cases [Salvador] worked on are
irreparably damaged, Weeks said. He's already making arrangements to expunge
the records of every affected defendant. It blew up in our faces.
sources: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
[2] http://citizensvoice.com/18-month-sentence-for-powell-kids-f...
[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210168/Boston-state...
[4] http://www.texasobserver.org/fake-lab-results-endanger-thous...
[5] http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Drug_War_Eats_Itse...
edited: I accidentally clicked submit while still editing
The message being sent here is, if YOU own a prison and YOU do this, it might cost you some extra money if you get caught (and some token prison time).
Echoing x0x0's general point, it's pretty clear the county's political machine knew what was happening and looked the other way.
ADDED: It's telling it took the Feds to bring them to justice; the county and state level officials just don't seem interested in this atrocity.
Was this proven in court?
The two judges are in their 60s. They'll probably die in prison. I'm satisfied with that.
The other two fuckers, yeah.
Our society sometimes looks like something Charles Dickens wrote about (or worse). Bringing back the old punishments (drawing & quartering, hanging, etc.) might help, but I doubt it.
A Brit once told me that it was very effective in helping one to focus. He claimed that his caning in mathematics class was responsible for his Ph.D. in math.
The court's role here should be to sentence in a way that a) offsets the incentives that exist for corruption, and b) provides restitution where possible.
The problem is not evil individuals, but that incentives for corruption exist in the first place.
It's exactly this kind of harsh desire for repercussions that enabled the judges to get away with what they did in the first place.
Those are not light nor trivial sentences, and characterising such long sentences as such gives us things like decade-long 'three-strikes' sentences for stealing pizza.
All others involved on the other hand got a slap on the wrist.
"sometimes referred to the States’ immunity from suit as "Eleventh Amendment immunity[,]" [that] phrase is [a] convenient shorthand but something of a misnomer, [because] the sovereign immunity of the States neither derives from nor is limited by the terms of the Eleventh Amendment. Rather, as the Constitution's structure, and its history, and the authoritative interpretations by this Court make clear, the States’ immunity from suit is a fundamental aspect of the sovereignty which the States enjoyed before the ratification of the Constitution, and which they retain today (either literally or by virtue of their admission into the Union upon an equal footing with the other States) except as altered by the plan of the Convention or certain constitutional Amendments."
Also this: the State of Pennsylvania has committed grave injustice against thousands of its citizens. If they cannot get justice done through the courts what are they supposed to do instead? Take recourse to Direct Action? That's not desirable in civilized society. You can't be your own judge and executioner.
Can you name any of these countries so we can do a fact-check?
This is what government IS! Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary.
States have some subservience to the Federal government, as well.
The question really is "should the judiciary have power over the executive in this case, or should the executive or legistlature decide what compensation is appropriate." It's still "government" either way.
And let us remember which branch of government was the original villain in this case!
One shouldn't think of laws as something that exists to be obeyed - laws are (or should be) the written down consensus of We the People about how we want our society to be, and any [lack of] such law can and should be fixed.
I'm not sure who else other than the families would get that.
"The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care."
The prison sentence was the punishment of the wrongful imprisonments.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?pagewanted...
He should pay punitive damages though.
This whole problem stems from the movement to privatize prisons. It's a disgusting abuse of power. The lives of many at-risk children (and their families) have been turned upside-down due to greed.
Actual privatization removes centralized decision-making. We should be able to opt-out of governments and opt-in to alternative sovereigns. The fact that governments are allowed to claim authority on the basis of geography is why they're still in business, and it's why these messed up situations occur.
Everybody agrees that what has happened was illegal and should not have happened, and that it is the sovereign's responsibility to create a system in which the risks of such events are minimized, simply because the consequences can be so far stretching. This can be done by ensuring financial independence of judges; eliminating the role of parties who benefit from outcomes that are not necessarily aligned with society's benefits.
I don't yet see how decentralizing decision making reduces this risk.
> the possibility of an unjust justice system due to commercial interests.
There's no such thing as a non-commercial interest. Money is not the only thing that is directly in demand. Power is valuable. Regardless of how the government labels its activities, it has things people want; labeling those things non-commercial is just marketing. Trying to plug the holes with regulations and endless "reforms" is a distraction meant to saturate your time.
> ensuring financial independence of judges; eliminating the role of parties who benefit
"Oversight" is a hand-wavy solution to a never-ending problem. The feedback loop is too long.
> how decentralizing decision making reduces this risk
Competition provides alternatives. Lack of competition reduces incentives for providing great service. The state has no competition, and it raises revenue by force, it's silly to expect a good outcome from that.
Yes it is. The definition of privatization is simply "denationalization: changing something from state to private ownership or control."
The thing is that when commercial incentives come into play, companies will go out of their way to find ways to increase profits. Privatization essentially starts a race to the bottom; a race that can only be slowed down by regulatory institutions. In the end, the company always wins and society loses. Banks have showed us that.
The problem with having an independent body provide oversight is that in the worst case it's just another level of corruption. Even in the best case they have an incentive to keep the prison system larger because it means more work (aka money) investigating and auditing.
I'm not a big fan of the government, but I think prisons are one thing the government should do itself.
1) do some reading on prison worker unions and you'll see the perversity isn't restricted to private enterprise
2) we will pay you a fixed X for your Y number of cell facility
And really, that's what a well-running oversight function should be doing in the case of prison management, adjusting metrics to drive the system toward good whole-society outcomes. Public vs private prisons theoretically doesn't matter, except that introducing private prisons introduces a dynamic where corruption of the oversight function and metrics is used for optimization of profits.
> Public vs private prisons theoretically doesn't matter, except that introducing private prisons introduces a dynamic where corruption of the oversight function and metrics is used for optimization of profits.
Read up on some of the campaigning done by the prison worker's union in California and you will see public has its own profit motives that are just as bad.
That said, this is hardly a fair sentence. He should have to serve time equal to all those lives he destroyed. How about surrendering the money and life in prison?
(It's going to be really weird if life extension tech becomes pervasive, and can't be denied to inmates. People who were sent away for 200-300 years, thinking that would be "well more than life" might end up released after...200-300 years in prison. That's going to be...interesting.)
The cost of prison goes up dramatically if people are there for hundreds of years. I think society might reconsider the death penalty. (In addition to moral reasons, one decision for not pursuing the death penalty is the cost - the cases drag on for so long that it's usually cheaper to put someone in jail for life.)
Meanwhile, in the USA...
To do that without any personal gain requires hate.
People like to blame evil for evil things, yet evil would be able to do much less without reasonable, supposedly good, people actively helping evil things to happen.
"President Obama turns 52" (... with a photo from way back when he looked like a completely different man) http://rollingout.com/politics/happy-birthday-president-obam...
"[Tavis] Smiley’s hate of President Obama" (... really absurd if you know the history) http://rollingout.com/politics/funniest-twitter-responses-to...
"Cornel West’s rampage against President Obama" (... same) http://rollingout.com/politics/twitter-blasts-cornel-west-fo...
So...
"...received more than $2.6 million from privately run youth centers owned by PA Child Care. In 2011, Ciavarella was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 28 years in prison. He was also forced to pay $1 million in restitution..."
I would have thought that at least somebody in the company would be thrown under the bus for signing the expense report for the bribes (regardless of the line item description used instead of "bribe"), though. This will allow the company to hire a new patsy to bribe new judges to continue their operation.
Private prisons are a disgrace to the justice system.
looks like one of his latest appeals was denied recently.
Considering the number of people sentenced, good luck keeping their identities a secret. Neither of the judges is going to enjoy their stay.
20,000 folks who start an action group might start some change!
Wow...
"Shock the Judge".... Now there's a game show I'd watch.
Ordinary citizens don't have the power to deprive citizens of their civil rights at such a scale, it requires the extraordinary power of the state. The trust we need to have in judges makes such corruption not only more likely, but much more dangerous. So for cases like this, the punishment ought to be as extraordinary as the power needed for the crime.
I personally oppose the death penalty, so the suggestion is only half-serious, but I find the reasoning for reserving executions for egregious political corruption to be more compelling than for more common crimes.
I'm with you there. The way I see it, crimes like these threaten the very premise of our justice system. It is hard for me to imagine a worse crime than destroying our ability to handle crime at all. Punishment for all those other horrible crimes relies on the system people like this are threatening.