Just the tip of the iceberg

This is what happens when
prisons are set up for profit

Found guilty on 12 counts of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, mail fraud, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and filing false tax returns.

So where is he now?

Released pending appeal.

Incredible!

Missing from virtually every press report: Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. was not just any judge. He was the chief judge for the entire county when he engaged in these crimes.

By the way, I don't buy Michael Moore's rap that this is an example of capitalism. The is judicial criminality - a plague in the US today - and the same thing could very easily take place under a "socialist" system as well.

It would be nice if criminal psychopaths like Ciavarella were rare in America's courts.

Unfortunately, they're as common as grass.



The problem runs deep

Whatever Mr. Ciavarella's eventual sentence, the footnotes of his trial reveal a hard truth: His sins were committed in broad daylight and finally checked by outsiders.

It was the Juvenile Law Center, a Philadelphia-based advocacy group, that initially blew the whistle on kids facing him without legal representation.

It was auditors at the state Department of Public Welfare who noted that Judge Fagin was jailing kids at twice the state average. He and his co-conspirators were caught because they got too greedy. They created an anomaly that was simply too grotesque to ignore.

Many of your neighbors stood silent as children were imprisoned for money.

Some of those neighbors were and are judges and district attorneys.

Maybe they're being truthful when they claim they didn't know about the "kids-for-cash" scheme, but anyone with eyes could see that young defendants were facing Judge Fagin without legal representation, a clear violation of their civil rights.

And what of the lavish lifestyle Judge Fagin and his cohorts enjoyed? Or that Mr. Conahan regularly dined in public with reputed mobster Billy D'Elia? Or that just about anyone walking into the courthouse seemed to be carrying a bag of money?

These bystanders either knew these judges were crooked and said nothing or were clueless to what was going on. They were either accomplices or incompetent.

Which is acceptable?

Mr. Ciavarella has been brought to justice, but hundreds of unindicted co-conspirators walk free, and it is them we are supposed to entrust with seeing to it that nothing like the Dickensian nightmare he helped author will ever happen again.

- CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist




http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/1048.html


Kathyet