The New Kids-for-cash Judges on the Block
By: Shane J. Ralston
Tags: Prison, Child Welfare, Children, Corruption, Judges

The New Kids-for-cash Judges on the Block

Jennifer Rogers, Luzerne County’s newest Kids-for-cash judge

Chester Muroski, Luzerne County newest Kids-for-cash judge

BETWEEN 2000 AND 2007, two judges in Luzerne Pennsylvania’s County Court of Common Pleas executed one of the most elaborate judicial corruption schemes in U.S. history.

President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan took millions of dollars in kickbacks from local real estate mogul and youth detention center developer Robert Mericle. To maximize profits from these private prisons, their owners, including wealthy local attorney Robert Powell, bribed the judges with gifts and money so that they would impose harsh sentences on juvenile offenders for minor offenses.

Expansion of the for-profit prison-industrial complex to juvenile facilities is nothing new in the US. Pennsylvania has the second highest number of youth detention centers behind Florida. Pennsylvania’s private juvenile prisons account for 11 percent of the total number in the US, according to the Juvenile Justice Center of Pittsburgh, PA. As Henry Giroux argues, the growth of private, for-profit juvenile prisons represents nothing less than an all-out “war on youth.”

The kids-for-cash scandal became a national media event not only because it drew attention to the problem of for-profit youth prisons, but more importantly because it was a tragic real-life story of public corruption and greed. Two elected judicial officials enriched themselves and their associates by destroying the lives of children and their families. Also disturbing were the lengths to which some respected members of Luzerne County’s legal, political and law enforcement community would go to protect them. Many would also stand by and silently acquiesce to the arrangement. Kids for cash is a testimony to Luzerne County’s “culture of corruption” and the parade of horribles — including bribery, kickbacks, retaliation and conflicts of interest — that continue to afflict the region’s political and legal community. Unfortunately, a new batch of judges in Luzerne County Pennsylvania’s juvenile and family court system is at risk of perpetrating another kid-for-cash scandal.

Kids for Cash

In 2008, the kids for cash scandal came to light. Since 2000, Conahan and Ciavarella had been sentencing juveniles to extended periods of incarceration in two private detention facilities. In return for shutting down the county facility and funneling juveniles to the private facilities, the developer and owners gave the judges kickbacks. They had jointly paid Conahan and Ciavarella $2.6 million dollars, much of it in cash delivered to the judges’ homes in Fed Ex boxes.

Judge Conahan was able to stop funding for the county-operated juvenile facility, thereby shutting down the competition and providing an opportunity for two private youth detention centers, PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care, to fill the vacuum. According to Ciavarella, Robert Mericle, the detention center developer, persuaded the judges to accept the kickbacks, describing them as the equivalent of attorney finder’s fees, payments conventionally and legally given to lawyers who refer clients and cases to fellow lawyers.

Kids-for-cash judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan.

Ciavarella was a vocal advocate of harsh sentencing in the juvenile justice system. He gave talks at local colleges and civic organizations about his judicial philosophy, proposing stiffer sentencing for first-time offenders in order to reduce recidivism. He backed up his philosophy with actions, incarcerating a young woman in a wilderness camp for ridiculing a school principal on social media, sending a young man to a wilderness camp for trespassing and imprisoning another young man for five months after he stole DVDs from a local Wal-Mart.

Both Ciavarella and Conahan would regularly deny defendants their right to counsel, which caught the attention of lawyers at the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, leading to a class action suit against the judges and the county. When the Law Center filed a petition with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, requesting relief for violations of the imprisoned juveniles’ civil rights, the petition was initially denied. The legal establishment was threatened and thus its members closed ranks to protect the two judges. Only after the FBI investigated and filed charges of corruption against the judges was the petition reconsidered and eventually granted.

In 2009, a federal grand jury in Harrisburg Pennsylvania indicted the two judges on 48 counts, including fraud, racketeering, money laundering, extortion, bribery and federal tax evasion, and the judges were removed from the bench. In a filmed event outside the courtroom following Ciavarella’s sentencing, Sandy Fonzo, mother of a young man Ciavarella had imprisoned and subsequently committed suicide, confronted the disgraced judge:

“My kid’s not here! He’s dead, because of him! He ruined my fuck’n life! I’d like him to go to hell and rot there forever. […]

Sandy Fonzo confronts Mark Ciavarella outside the Harrisburg Federal Court Building.

You know what he told everybody in court? They need to be held accountable for their actions. You need to be! Do you remember me? Do you remember me? Do you remember my son? An all-star wrestler? He’s gone! He shot himself in the heart! You scumbag!”

While Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in Federal prison, Conahan received a lighter term of 17 years. However, their associates would get off with significantly less punishment. The part-owner of the detention centers, wealthy attorney Robert Powell, received only 18 months. The detention center developer Robert Mericle was sentenced to one year, though he would eventually serve 11 months. Many of Luzerne County’s elites defended Mericle’s lesser punishment on the grounds that he was a generous philanthropist and a Good Samaritan whose real estate company assisted the area’s flood victims. It is not known whether the Federal judges were influenced by these elites in their decision to dole out lighter sentences to Powell and Mericle.

In the Wake of the Scandal

After the scandal, many well-known figures in the legal and political community vowed that a similar scandal would never happen again. In its first session, the Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice, led by Judge John Cleland, announced its real purpose and how it would address the scandal’s fallout:

“Our concern . . . is not only the action of two Luzerne County judges. Our concern is also the inaction of others. Inaction by judges, prosecutors, public defenders, the defense bar, public officials and private citizens — those who knew but failed to speak; those who saw but failed to act. [ . . . ] Our concern is also the inaction of those who would have acted but did not have the tools needed to assess the information that might have been an early warning of the system’s breakdown. [ . . . ] All of those involved — whether by action, inaction or silence — whether by willful choice or benign ignorance — engaged in an assault on the fairness and impartiality of our legal system. It was an assault on the very rule of law.”

Cleland intended to put all the kids-for-cash scandal bystanders — “those who saw but failed to act” — on notice. However, within paragraphs of announcing that everyone who stood silent was complicit and therefore guilty of “an assault on the very rule of law,” he excuses a colleague of Ciavarella and Conahan’s: Judge Chester Muroski.

Luzerne County’s New Kids-for-cash Judges

Judge Muroski is not exactly a new judge in Luzerne County. Nevertheless, he claims that he was a victim, not a perpetrator of kids for cash. He insists that the two disgraced judges, Ciavarella and Conahan, retaliated against him in 2005. Under Ciavarella and Conahan’s leadership, youth incarceration became an overriding priority for the Luzerne County juvenile and family court system. Muroski objected that the two judges had diverted excessive county funds to the juvenile court, specifically youth detention, while his orphans’ court remained underfunded. After hearing Muroski’s repeated objections, Conahan reassigned his colleague from orphans’ court, where he had served for nearly a quarter of a century, to criminal court. Muroski opined that the reassignment was a tactical move intended to force him into retirement.

Although the decision to reassign Muroski was retaliatory, the squabble between him and the two judges was not about the morality of Ciavarella and Conahan’s actions. It was not, for instance, over whether their wanton disregard of juvenile defendants’ right to counsel was morally or legally justified. The dispute was political or prudential, not principled or ethical. It concerned whether Muroski’s court received adequate funding given the priority Ciavarella and Conahan placed on youth detention. Despite Judge Cleland’s politically deft move to excuse Muroski, there is no evidence that Muroski was retaliated against for trying to protect the juveniles Conahan and Ciavarella imprisoned. Judge Muroski was likely acting to protect his own interests.

Eventually Muroski would benefit from the corruption probe and outcome. With the two judges removed, he quietly retired in 2009 and returned two years later as a senior judge for a sizeable increase in salary. Despite Cleland’s attempt to excuse him, Muroski too was a bystander to the kids for cash scandal, a person with the power to step in and stop it who unfortunately stood by and did nothing.

Muroski is not the only sitting judge whose involvement in kids for cash and other Luzerne County child welfare issues warrants increased scrutiny. Another one is family court judge Jennifer Rogers. While elected to the bench in 2012, a few years after kids for cash, she worked as an attorney for Luzerne County’s Child and Youth Services (CYS) agency as the scandal unfolded. Similar to Ciavarella, she has been outspoken about her judicial philosophy, actively messaging it in her election campaign and giving extensive talks about it throughout Luzerne County. Similar to Muroski, she was a bystander with adequate knowledge and the power to intervene, but without the will to upset a corrupt system that she has benefited from.

Over the past year, CYS Luzerne County has had its license to operate suspended twice. by the state of Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services (DHS). The apparent reason for the suspensions was a case involving the death of a child, when the agency had failed to properly vet the maternal grandmother (who had a history of child abuse) before transferring custody of the child to her. However, DHS has also found procedural problems that pre-date the child’s death. Many of those procedures were initiated, approved or reviewed by Judge Rogers while she was the agency’s legal counsel.

Similar to the disgraced kids-for-cash judges, Judge Rogers has also committed ethical transgressions while on the bench. Similar to Ciavarella and Conahan, most of Rogers’ ‘ethical transgressions have gone unreported. One exception is a report, alleging that in a guardian ad litem case Judge Rogers ignored a clear conflict of interest. She treated the CYS case worker’s testimony as more credible, given that this individual was someone who she had worked with in the past. The aggrieved also claims that Luzerne County has a reputation for protecting corrupt judges and attorneys.

Rogers has stated in a media interview that she only takes campaign contributions from lawyers she personally knows, which is one method for fixing case outcomes through illicit payment transfers or bribes. At present, there is no system for disclosing whether a lawyer who appears before a Luzerne County judge has previously contributed to the judge’s election campaign.

Unreported Corruption and Little Remorse

Not only did so many bystanders remain silent as the kids-for-cash scandal played out, but they also failed to say what happened — even anonymously — to the media, watchdog organizations or ethics committees in the aftermath. While the legal and law enforcement community in Luzerne County were aware of Ciavarella’s denial of counsel to juvenile defendants, judges, attorneys, police and court staff never reported it to the Judicial Conduct Board of Pennsylvania.

In the years after the kids-for-cash scandal, little remorse has been expressed by Luzerne County’s legal and political community. By remaining silent, many hope that the tragedy will be forgotten. Nevertheless, Luzerne County has become synonymous with public corruption, as evidenced in the wealth of Federal corruption inquiries involving county officials, police, judges, lawyers and correctional officers. Average citizens complain that “corruption runs deep in Northeastern Pennsylvania” and this fact has tarnished the region’s reputation.

Conahan and Ciavarella have also shown little remorse for their crimes. Ciavarella persists in making legal challenges to overturn the charges (particularly the charge of accepting kickbacks) in order to reduce his sentence. Conahan has remained relatively silent, accepting a lesser sentence in exchange for his cooperation. The son of one of my former Penn State students was imprisoned by Ciavarella as a juvenile. The unjust sentence laid a heavy burden on the young man, setting the steps in motion for a life of drug abuse, theft, violence and eventually his own death at the end of a gang member’s blade.

According to some theories of corruption, the corrupt agent’s denial that he or she ever engaged in unethical behavior can reflect widely accepted patterns of institutionalized, rountinized and socialized behavior — so-called normalized corruption. If we are to prevent kids-for-cash scandals in the future, then it is incumbent on government officials, watchdog journalists and citizen activists to investigate and criticize the actions of elected judges, to expose their political and financial commitments, and to thereby remove the causes of future corruption and consequent harm to children.