Editorial: Order in the court

Even before two judges were charged with racketeering in the Luzerne County kids-for-cash scandal, most Pennsylvanians told pollsters they suspected state justice was for sale - since judicial elections were awash in campaign donations. Many judges agreed with that perception, other surveys showed.

So it's a challenge of the highest order for the state Supreme Court - which oversees the court system - to try to instill confidence in the judiciary the wake of the upstate scandal. If public cynicism was high before the scandal broke early this year, it has surely spiked since.

After a late start, though, the court, led by Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille, is making the right moves to reassure citizens.

Even with a politicized judiciary, the treachery of the conduct attributed to the former judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, is breathtaking. Federal authorities have charged the pair with taking $2.6 million in payments from the operators of two privately run detention centers where Ciavarella then dispatched hundreds of teens after perfunctory hearings.

So the court's Oct. 29 ruling tossing out 6,500 juvenile-court cases tainted by the alleged kickback scheme was a major step.

While deliberating over that ruling, Castille and his fellow justices also joined with Gov. Rendell and state lawmakers to launch an inquiry by a panel that began holding hearings last month.

The key question the 11-member Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice has been wrestling with is how Ciavarella and Conahan could get away with what was described last week as "an almost routine disregard for the rights of juvenile offenders."

At hearings over two days in Wilkes-Barre, the panel heard how a conspiracy of silence from lawyers, court employees, and school officials enabled the rogue judges to trample over the rights of thousands of teens.

The hope has to be that the eventual recommendations from the commission will prompt reforms that could prevent another such perversion of justice.

On a related front, the Supreme Court made it clear it will follow all of the tentacles of the Luzerne County scandal. The court overturned a multimillion-dollar defamation award last week against a Wilkes-Barre newspaper because the judges conspired with a reputed mobster to fix the case. Conahan, then president judge, had assigned Ciavarella as judge in the case against the Citizens' Voice.

The justices ordered a new trial "to remedy the pervasive appearance of impropriety in this case, and to give justice . . . an opportunity to prevail." All of the other judges' cases should be examined.

As Castille's court also noted, "A jurist is either fair or unfair; there are no acceptable gradations." Indeed, the state courts need such stirring words coupled with decisive action to finally tear down those "For Sale" signs.