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Student Satirist Gets 3 Months; the Judge, Likely More
ponraul writes "When Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58, sentenced Hillary Transue, 17, on a harassment charge stemming from a MySpace parody of her high school's assistant principal, Hillary expected to be let off with a stern lecture; instead, the Wilkes-Barre, PA area teen got three months in a commercially operated juvenile detention center. In a reversal of fortune, Ciavarella and his colleague, Judge Conahan, 56, find themselves trying to plea-bargain an 87-month sentence in Federal correctional facilities relating to a kick-back scheme that netted the pair $2.6 Million and PA Child Care 5000 inmates." True poetic justice would be for these corrupt, callous judges to serve their sentences in the same kind of environment to which they were happy to dispatch juvenile defendants.
A class action lawsuit being brought against the judges. Here is a link to the local paper, The Standard Speaker, about the pleas.
The judge has has his pension and pay terminated. I'm from around that area and it's actually big talk. If you search through the Standard Speaker site you'll see some comments from kids that were sent there.
An AC says before if these marks are still on the records for the kids. Well why wouldn't they be? Just because the sentencing was wrong doesn't mean the crime wasn't committed.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
There is a class action lawsuite.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Juvenile records are sealed when you reach the age of majority (18), and can neither be looked at (theoretically) nor used against you (again, theoretically) as an adult.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
2. Now every single case that ended with juveniles sentenced there should be reviewed. (Looks like they're only looking at the one judge's 5000 cases. They need to look at all of them.) The former judge should be billed for all expenses.
They are all being reviewed.
3. Whoever paid the bribes, and whoever authorized them, and whoever knew about this business model and kept quiet, also need to be tried.
They are actually the ones that turned them in.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Stephenson's Snow Crash had 'em in 1992. I'm sure he was far from the first.
Back when he was President, the Office of Management and Budget first cam up with Circular A-76. It describes what is, and is not, an "inherently governmental activity". If it is inherently governmental, then an actual government employee must do it. Things like signing contracts, signing checks or handing out money, formally making arrests, sentencing convicts. But other than those kinds of things, a contractor can be used, since the work is essentially just administrative and not decision making. It is a bit of a slippery scale, and politics jumps in there too, but that is the basis for it.
Usually A-76 is just used to decide if a US government agency should be closed, downsized and contracted out. But the flip side of it is that if an agency wants to expend, they can use it for justifying hiring a contractor to do the extra work. Ever since Reagan this has been the preferred way to do any sort of new work in the US government. The Iraq War took it to new levels, with paid contractors being deployed to do as much work as soldiers, marines, and airmen.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
I have a relative serving time in a commercially-run prison. Besides this being a totally repugnant concept to begin with, the way the prison corporation profits off the inmates and their families is unreal. For example, inmate phone calls to family are charged at $16 per half hour. Inmates must buy their personal supplies through a commissary run by the corporation at horribly inflated prices. Luxury items like TVs or guitars, and school supplies must be purchased through a special catalog, again at inflated prices.
You might say, "oh, they're criminals, they deserve to be soaked." But in reality it's the families who are being soaked, even though, in many cases, they are the victims of the inmate's crimes, or are suffering from lack of the inmate's income or parenting or whatever.
It's a completely immoral way to make a buck. The owners and executives of these prison corporations are no better than the inmates they are incarcerating.
No sig? Sigh...
Most states contract out almost all of their juvenile detention facilities to counties or private contractors. Very few states actually maintain centralized direct control over their juvenile justice facilities. I'm proud to say my state of South Carolina is among them (one of the few things we do right). In SC only a couple of wilderness camps and two small pre-trial detention facilities are not under direct control by the state. This has allowed the state to maintain a record of no juvenile escapes from long-term facilities for over 6 years and no allegations of abuse or lawsuits in any facilities since 2003 (very few juvenile justice systems in the country can claim a record of over five years without even an ALLEGATION of abuse or mistreatment).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Unless your Mayor is Rudy Guilliani. He will take your sealed record and expose it on TV, claiming the cops had a right to murder you after you refused to sell them drugs, because when you were a kid you once got is a fight over $.25. Then he will say you are "no choirboy," even though you in fact were a choirboy.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
Could it be I just got home from working all night and I was typing fast and every other fucking time I wrote suit in a comment in this story I got it right? Go away.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
That's a myth. Most states got rid of those kinds of expurgation laws back in the 1980's. A felony conviction will still follow you, juvenile or not (unless you get some sort of gubernatorial pardon maybe).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This sort of thing happens all the time. I did a technology contract for "Servo-lift Eastern" who is a big vendor for the prison system.
Privately run prisons are a big business in the U.S.A. Why do you think we imprison more of our population than any other western country? Because the good 'ol boys make money in jailing poor people who can't defend themselves.
Hey, I understand politics. I don't expect human beings to be pillars of integrity, everyone is corrupt on some level. However, if you are willing to knowingly cause material harm to another human being for money, you need to die.
You can't go after a judge for anything he does in court, except to impeach him. He could declare you guilty, pull out a gun, and shoot you mid-session and the only remedy would be impeachment. No criminal or civil penalties could apply. In this case, they can hit the judge for taking bribes, but there's no way to hit them for the over-sentencing.
While annoying in cases like this, this is actually an important feature of American jurisprudence. The only real way to guarentee judicial independence is to grant it to them unconditionally. If you leave a loophole to go after abuse, it will quickly be used to squelch unpopular decisions. Unfortunately, that means you occasionally have to live with the side effects.
Double-jeopardy doesn't apply to someone found guilty. Re-trying them would probably be the same as if they filed an appeal, which happens all the time. Even for those who actually were guilty of something, the sentence will likely be found to far outweigh what's appropriate for the crime.
Also, I believe that a judge is immune to prosecution for actions undertaken as a judge. However, courts may rule that accepting bribes to damage children for his own profit may be outside the scope of this duties, thus opening him to civil liability.
Of course, IANAL, so this is just a (semi-educated) guess, not a legal opinion.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
I'd rather have them put down because they're expensive to keep and likely to perform similar crimes in the future.
You should read some statistics. Turns out, between the appeals processes necessary to hopefully ensure you don't accidentally murder an innocent person, and the costs involved in actually killing them, it ends up costing *more* to execute someone than it does to just imprison them for life. And, as an added bonus, there's no take-backsies if it turns out you fucked up somewhere along the line.
Canada ***NEVER*** was a penal colony. And especially not during the french regime: every colonist had to show a certificate of morality signed by the priest and the lord in order to be allowed on the ship.
It says that Powell, a lawyer, was one of the co-owners of the detention facility? And he's claiming that "as a lawyer [he] was also particularly vulnerable to the pressures that these Judges could bring to bear on him and his clients"? As a lawyer, he's an officer of the court, he shouldn't have any business being that and simultaneously owning any part of a prison. It's a fairly obvious conflict of interest. I'm sure that, of course, he would have argued, and many would have agreed, that there wasn't a conflict of interest. But, now that he's obviously made some sort of deal to save his skin, all of a sudden he was "particularly vulnerable" in his position. i.e., a massive conflict of interest existed. Gee, what a shock.
You can't really "satire" your high school principle; they're unlikely to meet the "public figure" criteria that would protect the person who is making fun of them from legal repercussions if anything strayed over the line.
Of course the principal is a public figure - especially in the "world" of the high school students who were the intended audience of the satire.
Amusingly, it's high profile, geek-enraging cases like this that probably got him caught.
Nope. Somebody involved turned everybody in.
Personal exile isn't nearly as effective a punishment these days. In the middle ages, banishment was a handy tool for eliminating political rivals, preventing them from organizing against you or achieving martyrdom. It was also essentially a death sentence unless the individual in question had powerful allies abroad they could flee to: castle-town dwellers were rarely able to be self-sufficient and the majority of exiles were to remote or wilderness territories.
Now, banishment in the form of permanent disbarment is both reasonable and expected in this case. I shall be very disappointed if these individuals are ever again permitted to act as a judge in any district.
Bullshit. That would fall under "vulgar abuse"; that's not equivalent to defamatory.