Posted on 12/15/2013 5:48:11 AM PST by Renfield
(Black News) Mark Ciavarella Jr, a 61-year old former judge in Pennsylvania, has been sentenced to nearly 30 years in prison for literally selling young juveniles for cash. He was convicted of accepting money in exchange for incarcerating thousands of adults and children into a prison facility owned by a developer who was paying him under the table. The kickbacks amounted to more than $1 million.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned some 4,000 convictions issued by him between 2003 and 2008, claiming he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles – including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea. Some of the juveniles he sentenced were as young as 10-years old.
Ciavarella was convicted of 12 counts, including racketeering, money laundering, mail fraud and tax evasion. He was also ordered to repay $1.2 million in restitution.
His “kids for cash” program has revealed that corruption is indeed within the prison system, mostly driven by the growth in private prisons seeking profits by any means necessary.
90% of law enforcement gives the rest a bad name.
All too often cops kill the family pet when it has nothing to do with the story...
You and iscool prove my point. Thanks!
Yeah, God forbid that anyone should criticize blatant abuses of power and discretion by an increasingly militant LE sector.
http://www.dunwalke.com/
It's a long read, and you have to click "next page" frequently (which is slightly annoying), but it's well worth your time. One of the most informative (and, unfortunately, apalling) exposes I have ever read. It discusses the origins of for-profit prisons, investment banking, and a whole lot more.
I know that most folks here are aware that Washington is corrupt, but Fitts' article will give you the sense that it is much, much more corrupt than even we had imagined.
the story is a horrible one
it is also at least two years old, in spite of the date it was posted on the web site used for this thread
How many judges are there in the US?
One has been shown to send children to jail for his own profit.
Could others be doing the same, possibly even all of them, in theory? Sure, but an example of one does not prove that this is the norm, or indeed even that there is more than one.
JW Booth killed A. Lincoln. Booth was an actor. Does this prove all actors, or even many actors, are assassins?
I hadn’t heard of it before, and didn’t realize that this happened 2 years ago.
I care because if he were a Republican it would have been the first word of the write up and repeated twice. That is the media trick, and another of a long history of articles that we document here.
I know. I get it.
Their breath stinks from the bias.
Prisons for profit, and privatization of these kinds of things carried this risk. This judge should hang.
Life imitates art. There was an episode of Leverage that covered this kind of crime.
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