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Juvenile Justice?
Feb. 17th, 2009 06:11 pmThis 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.
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.
