Justice served by high court
Font size: [A] [A] [A]
e-mail this
share thisFormer Luzerne County Judge Mark A. Ciavarella's abuse of the juvenile justice system was put in the correct perspective last week by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. It overturned every juvenile sentence passed by Mr. Ciavarella from 2003 through 2008 - as many as 6,500 cases.
Mr. Ciavarella awaits a federal trial on racketeering charges after U.S. District Judge Edwin M. Kosik's rejection of his guilty plea to related charges. Judge Kosik found that Mr. Ciavarella had failed to take responsibility for his conduct.
Indeed, even after pleading guilty in the case in which he and former Judge Michael T. Conahan are charged with accepting $2.8 million in kickbacks from developers of juvenile detention centers, Mr. Ciavarella claimed that he had not placed juveniles in the center in exchange for the cash.
During the period in question, Luzerne County's detention placement rate for juveniles was far higher than any other county in the state. Investigators found that Mr. Ciavarella regular denied juveniles access to counsel and inappropriately incarcerated some of them for minor offenses.
The Supreme Court's decision makes the point that Mr. Ciavarella refuses to grasp: His disgraceful conduct taints every juvenile case that he touched, regardless of its outcome.
"Given the extent of the taint, this court simply cannot have confidence that any juvenile matter adjudicated by Ciavarella during this period was tried in a fair and impartial manner," the court wrote, in a unanimous opinion.
Whether the decision will jar Mr. Ciavarella from his lingering state of denial is unclear, but the decision stands as definitive recognition, by the highest level of the commonwealth's court system, that the system itself had inflicted harm upon some of society's most vulnerable citizens.
Be the first to comment on this article!