Juvenile Justice?

[pameladlloyd]

This evening, my husband and I listened in shock as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reported on a Pennsylvania scandal involving the juvenile courts. According to the report, as many as five thousand juveniles were sentenced to jail time without legal representation and sometimes against the urgings of their probation officers by two judges who are accused of taking bribes from a couple of private juvenile prisons. The story is amazing and frightening. If true, it represents an amazingly heinous attack on our young people and on our justice system.

It's hard enough to believe that a single judge might take bribes on even a few cases, but to think of two judges in the same system systematically taking bribes to put young people in jail on a wholesale scale leaves me incredibly appalled. To make matters worse, the report suggests that when questions about the extremely high numbers of waivers of counsel and the judges' sentencing patterns were first brought to the attention of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court a couple of years ago, the court chose not to hear the case. Instead, an FBI investigation lasting years has finally brought this all to light.

Comments

why limit themselves?

[marycatelli]

Given that a judge takes any bribe, why would anyone expect him to limit himself to a few?

Re: why limit themselves?

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I desire all people to act ethically, but experience does not allow me to expect that all will, or that those who do will act with restraint or constrain themselves to minor infractions. That said, the scale of this particular set of bribes, the fact that it was children who were targeted, and the number of children who were affected by it, makes this situation particularly egregious, in large part because there were a large number of people who were part of the justice system who had to have seen the signs of corruption, but who were either unable to identify the problem, or unwilling to act upon their knowledge.

[catherineldf.livejournal.com]

How absolutely...words fail. Thank you for posting this - I'd missed this one. :-((((

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

How absolutely...words fail.

Yes. Exactly.

You're very welcome. I wish there had been nothing that needed posting, but could not keep silent when I learned about this.