ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Pennsylvania’s highest court on Thursday overturned hundreds of juvenile convictions issued by a judge accused of taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send kids to privately owned detention centers.
The state Supreme Court ruled that former Luzerne County President Judge Mark Ciavarella violated the constitutional rights of youth offenders who appeared in his courtroom without lawyers between 2003 and 2008.
In one of the most egregious cases of judicial corruption ever seen, federal prosecutors charged Ciavarella and another Luzerne County judge, Michael Conahan, with taking $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in private lockups. The judges pleaded guilty to fraud last month and face sentences of more than seven years in prison.
The high court approved the recommendations of Berks County Senior Judge Arthur Grim, who advised expunging the records of low-level offenders who appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom without lawyers — a group he has said numbered “easily into the hundreds.”
Grim determined that “a very substantial number of juveniles who appeared without counsel before Judge Ciavarella … did not knowingly and intelligently waive their right to counsel.”
