Posted: Monday, 30 March 2009 11:22AM
Put Up Or Shut Up
Steve Corbett Reporting
Monday, March 30, 2009
Before 20/20 reporter Jim Avila had even finished his sentence, disgraced Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella cut him off.
You’d have thought the judge was back on the bench, lecturing children before violating their rights and sending them off to prison without so much as a lawyer or a chance to defend themselves.
Let me stop you right there, Ciavarella said in the Friday night broadcast on ABC.
Then he launched into another lecture, confusing the worldwide viewing audience that must have wondered what crime Ciavarella had pleaded guilty to committing.
Ciavarella has already stood in a federal courtroom and pleaded guilty to a multi-million dollar kickback scheme.
The ABC news magazine as well as The New York Times and other credible news organizations have characterized the scheme as a quid pro quo, accepting cash in exchange for filling prison cells owned by a participant in the scheme.
Federal government prosecutors also agree that Ciavarella took money in exchange for sending children to jail.
Most people see the crime for exactly what it is – a sordid deal that sold children for money.
But there was Ciavarella on 20/20 Friday night, adamantly telling Avila that taking cash for kids is not part of his admission of guilt.
The government disagrees and a pre-sentence investigation is already underway. Ciavarella should be in court soon to hear how many years he will spend in jail – a sentence that might be greater or even less than the 87 months to which he agreed.
The judge can change the deal.
And if Ciavarella keeps shooting off his mouth and denying what most reasonable people clearly see as part of his guilt, he might face many more years behind bars than he is planning to spend.
I would like to see the judge void Ciavarella’s plea agreement.
As long as Ciavarella continues to deny a quid pro quo, which in the minds of most people shaped the deal in the first place, he refuses to accept full responsibility for his guilt.
We cannot allow that to happen.
If Ciavarella wants to fight the government, the government should willingly accept the challenge.
But Ciavarella wants to have it both ways.
Prosecutors maintain that the more kids Ciavarella sentenced, the more money he received. The numbers rose as the cash kept flowing. Of course Ciavarella didn’t put an individual price tag on each child.
But he might as well have done just that.
Without kids in cells Ciavarella would not have received the money that kept rolling in – so much money that Ciavarella and his partner in crime Michael Conahan had to work very hard to hide the cash.
Conahan also once served as a Luzerne County president judge and actually shut the county juvenile facility so a private prison could be built – a slave market from which Conahan and Ciavarella profited.
It’s doubtful that the prison owner would have received the huge county contract he received for his institution had the county not kept sending him prisoners. And Ciavarella would not have received his huge payoffs if the prison only housed inmates who deserved to be there.
The arrangement is obvious for everybody except people who are deluded by Ciavarella’s deceit.
Ciavarella looked like a madman in the 20/20 segment. But I’ve seen his kind before. During the three years I worked in a state prison I encountered more than my share of convicts who blamed everybody but themselves for their demise. Ciavarella is a classic example of this kind of slick criminal.
But federal law enforcement officials must make sure that he’s pleading guilty to what they say he did.
Ciavarella needs to stop making lame excuses and making a fool of taxpayers who are paying for this so-called exercise in justice. Or he should withdraw his plea agreement and go to trial where he can show his evidence to counter the evidence that prosecutors guarantee will prove that he did, indeed, take cash for kids.
The people need to know everything we can about this child predator who savaged the public trust
And it’s the government’s responsibility to tell us.
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Corbett
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