Posted: Monday, 14 December 2009 11:30AM
Time To Call The Cops
Steve Corbett Reporting
Monday, December 14, 2009
The rumor hit the mark.
“Three judges,” people whispered.
Two years later we’ve got three Luzerne County judges charged with federal crimes of public corruption.
Funny, though, the rumored name of the third judge is not the name of the third judge arrested. I heard the name of another judge who is still sitting on the court of common pleas and has not yet been charged with a crime.
But anything can happen in hard coal country and usually does.
Meanwhile the rumors continue.
The feds have so far snagged 22 people in the ongoing public corruption probe that has taken us deep into the heart of toxic public service. Not only have three judges gone down, but so has a real estate millionaire, a big time local lawyer, school district officials and assorted other defendants awaiting trial or sentencing.
The scandal puts us in the running for the pound-for-pound, felony-for-felony championship of American small county corruption.
And the explosion might have only just begun.
But it’s likely that the feds will not grab everybody who needs grabbed. Some crooks will somehow slither way as FBI and IRS investigators and prosecutors somehow for some reason miss them.
Escapes always concern me.
Knowing that people in power allowed this mess to happen yet will somehow get away from taking responsibility for crimes and corruption committed in our name worries me greatly. Enablers who turned away rather than act to stop the madness will continue to poison the public trust and continue to ruin rather than save lives.
No greater accommodation of evil occurred than what went on in the courtroom of former Judge Mark Ciavarella.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court considered Ciavarella’s official behavior so egregious that they overturned thousands of juvenile cases he oversaw in which Ciavarella abused children and depprived them of their constitutional rights. Prosecutors accuse Ciavarella of selling the kids for cash into the slavery of a for-profit prison run by a buddy who was paying kickbacks to the judge.
People in power knew that something was amiss in Ciavarella’s courtroom. But they did nothing to stop the abuse.
Now, we must do something to stop them from ever again allowing such crimes to occur.
So far, though, little has been said about the school district officials, the local police officers and the magistrates who sent a steady stream of children into Ciavarella’s courtroom. Without their help, Ciavarella would have lacked the market from which to draw his victims.
Yet these public officials do not seem touched by the inquiry. Some of them aren’t even sorry. Some of them continue to defend Ciavarella.
County officials who stood silently or assisted Ciavarella are at least being called out by the state Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice and have been named in lawsuits filed on behalf of the children and their families.
But what about the school officials, the magistrates and the cops who helped feed the kids into Ciavarella’s clutches? Will they escape without consequences? Countless people might have been were complicit in aiding and abetting Ciavarella’s crimes.
What’s going to happen to them? Who’s going to hold them accountable? Will they continue to be on the lookout for another chance to violate the public trust and sell out children and others under the guise of “zero tolerance?”
They will if we allow them to continue their unethical and dangerous quest.
But what can we do?
Individual citizens should contact the U.S. Justice Department and request a civil rights investigation – an entirely new look into what went wrong in the Luzerne County criminal justice system. An independent civil rights investigation will compliment the ongoing criminal investigation into specific crimes among yet undiscovered row offices, county authorities and publicly-funded boards.
If our shame is about anything it’s about the abandonment of civil rights. Without those human rights, without liberty and justice for all, any hope for community character is lost. Our mission is to restore the soul of government service. Anything less than a full-scale Justice Department civil rights investigation is not acceptable. The future of public service in Luzerne County is more at risk now than at any time in its history. In a county as historically corrupt as Luzerne, that is a very scary statement.
Our whispers must turn to action.
Once again, it’s time to call the cops.
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