Free Republic

Two Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200m to hundreds who fell victim to their crimes. US district judge Christopher Conner awarded $106m in compensatory damages and $100m in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges, writing the plaintiffs are “the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions”. In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8m...

SCRANTON – Aware he and fellow judge Mark Ciavarella were under investigation by a federal grand jury, Michael Conahan met with attorney Robert Powell in July 2008 and issued a dire warning: “I’d never do anything to hurt you, but I never got the cash from anybody. That’s the story, and you better stick to it.” It was July 2008, federal prosecutors say, and Conahan had met with Powell to discuss how they and Ciavarella could thwart the investigation into their alleged financial connections to the PA Child Care juvenile detention center that was then co-owned by Powell. He had...

Michael T. Conahan, a Luzerne County, PA Common Pleas Judge whom federal prosecutors charged last September with sending supposedly delinquent kids to a privately-run juvie hall in exchange for cash from its builder and former owner, has agreed to plead guilty to a racketeering charge as reported by Hank Grezlak and Leo Strupczewski for The Legal Intelligencer. Conahan's co-defendant and fellow Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. continues to maintain his own innocence. In any event, "news of the plea deal is likely to cause a great deal of unease among some in Northeastern Pennsylvania, sources told The Legal Intelligencer, because...