John Baer: Why does Pa. Supreme Court tread so lightly around juvenile-rights tangle?
THAT JUDICIAL SWAMP up in Luzerne County, where judges are charged with warehousing kids for kickbacks in an ongoing investigation, splashes some muck on our state Supreme Court.
THAT JUDICIAL SWAMP up in Luzerne County, where judges are charged with warehousing kids for kickbacks in an ongoing investigation, splashes some muck on our state Supreme Court.
It's an ugly case.
First-time offending teen boys and girls with no lawyers, who weren't told that they had rights to lawyers, were sent away - some in cuffs and on the spot - for minor infractions such as snatching loose change from cars or writing online goofs about an assistant principal.
Why? For money.
If you missed it, Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella, 58, and Michael Conahan, 56, are charged with getting $2.6 million in payola to steer juveniles - sometimes over objections of probation officers - into private detention centers owned by the son of a former Supreme Court chief justice.
They allegedly did this for years, impacting hundreds if not thousands of kids and families, causing Lord knows how much psychological damage and threatening who knows how many futures in terms of getting into good colleges or jobs.
Ugly, in fact, doesn't quite cover it. Which is why I wonder what our state's highest court has been doing.
Last April, the high court was told in legal filings that something was very wrong in Luzerne County, and was asked to get involved. The Philly-based Juvenile Law Center, with data from the state's Juvenile Court Judges Commission, said that half the kids at the county bench were not represented by counsel - a rate close to 10 times the state average - and that 60 percent were sent away.
(State law says that kids charged under the Juvenile Act are entitled to counsel "at all stages of any proceedings," and Supreme Court rules require that courts question kids extensively to ensure that they understand that.)
Stats given to the court were so compelling that state Attorney General Tom Corbett and the Department of Public Welfare, which licenses juvenile facilities, joined the law center's application for Supreme Court intervention.
Corbett's filing says that the numbers "raise serious questions about the fairness and integrity of juvenile proceedings in Luzerne County." Apparently not serious enough.
The Supreme Court, after eight months of silence, on Jan. 8 issued a one-sentence refusal to intervene.
I ask Chief Justice Ron Castille what took so long. "We had to wait for everybody else to answer," he says.
That would be the county court, the local D.A., and so on. Plus, Castille argues, Judge Ciavarella, within weeks of the April filing, pulled himself off juvenile cases and issued new written notices to charged kids and their parents about right-to-counsel.
Since nothing was alleged about kickbacks at that point (the judges were charged Jan. 26), Castille felt that the right-to-counsel issue was resolved and saw no need for Supreme Court intervention. What about the statistics, I ask? Didn't they cause you concern?
"Well, you know statistics. . . . There are lies, damn lies and statistics," he says.
(I hope he's kidding; government policy is built on statistics.)
Questioned further, he says, "We are not an investigative agency."
When I ask if he'd considered referring the statistics to an investigative agency, he says: "They weren't our statistics."
I start to sense a circular argument. What about possible public perception that since detention facilities in question are owned by Greg Zappala, son of former Chief Justice Stephen Zappala, the court might be, uh, slowed or swayed?
He laughs, calls me a cynic and says:
"No, Greg Zappala is a legitimate businessman, as far as I know."
Zappala is not charged, and reportedly is not a target of the probe.
After the county judges got caught, the high court reversed itself, took over, dumped the chumps, their pay and pensions and appointed a master to sort things out.
This is good.
What is bad is that it took so long and came only after the Feds blew the thing up.
What is bad is that the high court, in its January order, failed to explain why it didn't take the case last year.
What is bad is that even if the right-to-counsel issue was resolved going forward, it wasn't addressed for kids and families whose constitutional rights were trampled in years past.
Any parent of a teen knows how easily trouble can visit.
It would be nice to know that the state's highest court - the court overseeing all others - is quickly, publicly and proactively engaged when abuse of rights, so evident in this case, comes to its attention.
But eight months of silence don't instill public confidence, and draining a swamp after a crime is not what I'd call proactive.
Send e-mail to baerj@phillynews.com.
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