When monsters emerge from judges' robes

Monday, February 16, 2009

By Ruth Ann Dailey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Ruth Ann Dailey can be reached at ruthanndailey@....

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09047/949434-152.stm

 

 

 

Fourteen months ago, Pittsburghers were recoiling from news of a horrific attack on a 10-month-old girl. Her mother had found her bruised, beaten and unresponsive after a day in the care of a boyfriend.

 

Medical evidence showed that little Daniyah Jackson had also been raped. She died a few days later, and the 30-year-old boyfriend was soon ordered to stand trial for her murder.

 

People who struggle with the morality of the death penalty agonized over this terrible deed: Are some crimes so heinous that they demand an eye for an eye, a life for a life?

 

Whatever the struggle to decide on appropriate punishment, there wasn't any question about the gravity of the offense; there was a child's battered body, and everyone was sickened and outraged.

 

It's different with this latest story of child abuse. There are no corpses, no bruises -- none that are visible, anyway -- but children, as many as 2,000 of them, were violated nonetheless. Two judges have just pleaded guilty to fraud for sentencing juvenile offenders to two detention centers where they had financial interests -- issuing their sentences sometimes against the recommendation of probation officers and without legal representation for the children.

 

Both judges -- Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan -- served in Luzerne County, in Eastern Pennsylvania, but one of the facilities from which they received kickbacks is located just north of Pittsburgh in Butler County. One teenager sentenced without a lawyer to represent him was held in shackles for 13 hours while awaiting a van to transport him across the state to Butler County. His crime? He took a stolen gun away from a 13-year-old who was threatening to use it and tried to return it to its rightful owner.

 

While the two judges accepted $2.6 million in bribes, the detention centers that benefited from their illegal scheme made tens of millions, all of it paid by Luzerne County and therefore by taxpayers. The federal investigation has undoubtedly cost millions more, as will the civil suits already being filed by families whose children may have been wrongfully sentenced.

 

Those of us whose good families and fortunate circumstances make a crime like the rape and murder of a baby unimaginable still need regular reminders about all the other ways we can betray each other -- from places of privilege like these judges enjoyed.

 

A cost that cannot be calculated is the damage done to kids with no criminal records, who were charged with minor offenses, denied a lawyer and sent away, some far from home, to spend months among far more troubled youthful offenders. How do they respect a justice system that did such injustice to them?

 

If only adults were involved, it would be easy to file this story away as just another white-collar crime; but because the wounded are children, the severity of the punishment needs closer consideration.

 

Fourteen months ago, when we grappled with the morality of the death penalty in light of a 10-month-old's rape and murder, Jesus's warning in the Gospel of Matthew (as well as Mark and Luke) sprang to mind: The judgment awaiting someone who would harm a child is such that "it would be better for him if a millstone were hung about his neck and he were thrown into the sea."

 

I'm not suggesting the death penalty for venal judges, of course, but disbarment and seven years in prison may not be enough.

 

Jesus always aimed his most scathing words at the "scribes and Pharisees" -- the lawyers and judges in his theocratic culture -- who used their power to hurt others. "They preach but do not practice," he said, as recounted in Matthew 23. "[They] outwardly appear righteous to others, but ... are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness."

 

When Mr. Ciavarella ran for the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas in 1994, he promised to "return to a time when values had importance" and announced "it's time for people who break the law to realize they'll be punished." This same judge tried and sentenced a 17-year-old without allowing him an attorney, and the boy served seven months at three different facilities -- for stealing a $4 bottle of nutmeg. We explain the unfathomable by telling ourselves that someone who would molest and kill an infant was most likely terribly abused as a child himself. But how do you explain a judge sworn to uphold the law instead violating teenagers' constitutional rights -- not out of blind rage, but in a cold scheme for money?

 

It's important to acknowledge that in their privileged, white-collar way, these judges are monsters, too.