By: William Burke
As the son of a Luzerne County (PA) judge, I have vicariously experienced a small measure of the enormous stress my father has endured in his professional life for roughly the past year. You see, my conversations with Dad have reflected the fallout of a judicial scandal that has engulfed the Luzerne County court system during that time. This scandal formally ended on February 12th, when two county judges plead guilty to charges of tax evasion and defrauding the public of their honest services, each receiving 87 months in federal prison. And although my father was by no means implicated, you need not stretch your imagination to conceive of the angst induced in all county court employees as they watched and sometimes participated in the lengthy federal investigation that spawned the plea agreement.
The full scope and details of the scheme that landed these two jurists seven-plus years of hard time are still somewhat unclear, but the short of it is this: together Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan received some $2.6 million in kickbacks in return for illegally facilitating the development of two privately owned juvenile detention centers in Pennsylvania. They first helped ensure that the county entered a lease agreement to use the centers to house the county’s sentenced juveniles, and subsequently Ciavarella, who presided over the county’s juvenile court, incarcerated juveniles at a rate far exceeding the state average. In doing so, they attempted to guarantee the financial viability of the two centers, in which a business partner of theirs had huge stakes, in return for their own pecuniary gain. Of course, the countless indiscriminately sentenced youths were the scheme’s victims.
As we know, the path to moral righteousness in the legal world is under constant assault from various fronts, its assailants fueled by political influences, the rigid demands of legal formalism, and above all, money. If this incident does not prove as much, then I don’t know what does. However, in this particular instance, the moral result was not trampled by the bench’s inability to depart from ill-fitting precedent that demands overtly unjust but legally sound result; nor did the moral result fall victim entirely to the plea agreement, seeing as the publicity of this disgraceful story was unprecedented in its extent. Rather, morality was betrayed here, most shamelessly, with the backroom winks of the very individuals in whom the Luzerne County public had placed its greatest trust. Was it the first such incident? Certainly not. Will it be the last? Doubtful.
And yet, despite the history and prospective future of immorality in the law, I truly believe that the “myth of moral justice”, as unequivocally supported as it is by greed-inspired tragedies such as this, can only be remedied through recognition of its existence. For although the follies of human nature will remain timeless, and men will at times succumb to the enchanting pipe dreams conjured by the vision of a dishonest shortcut to success, I do think we learn and grow as a society, and as a legal system, when the moral bankruptcy of individuals in power is itself put on trial for all to see. Professor Rosenbaum is certainly doing his part in this endeavor, but it will be up to us, the future fabric of the American bar, to heed the wisdom gained through moral critiques of the law. Sometimes the learning process through which we gain this wisdom is, as here, quite depressing.
So while we may never know just how many youthful lives were irreversibly altered by the self-motivated sentences imposed by Judge Mark Ciavarella, my hope is that in light of this case and its national exposure – as evidenced by its appearance on the front page of the New York Times online – future cases in Luzerne County and elsewhere are now all the more likely to be decided within an impartial paradigm guided by integrity, honesty, and true moral justice. After all, that ideal is at the core of what Professor Rosenbaum and my father have strived to impress upon me as I near a legal career myself.
