Julian Dorey Podcast - 🫢 [VIDEO] - Judges SOLD Kids To Prisons. Until I Caught Them. | Marsha Levick • #131

Episode Date: December 24, 2022

Marsha Levick is an attorney, law professor and youth justice expert. Marsha founded The Juvenile Law Center in 1975 –– where she has worked on many cases over the years on behalf of child rights –– none more famous than her work exposing the horrific Kids For Cash Scandal in Luzerne County PA. The racket involved two elected judges who accepted cash kickbacks from private prisons in exchange for children (who were improperly found guilty of minor offenses that warranted no prison time). ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Kids For Cash Basic Facts; Ciavarella and Conahan shut down old prison 10:02 - The Private Prison Industry 15:20 - How Ciavorella & Conahan got started 20:10 - Ciavarella locks up teenage girl for MySpace Account 27:13 - The trauma kids suffer in prison; Ciavarella ran on locking kids up 34:44 - The public defenders & prosecutors were compromised 42:06 - Marsha files Supreme Court Petition & the FBI calls 51:01 - How did the judges get away with it for so long? 58:07 - Ciavarella & Conahan Case Results 1:05:10 - The sad story of the Ciavarella victim who committed su1c1de 1:14:11 - The Ethan Crumbley Schoo1 Shootter Case 1:22:14 - How Marsha would fix legal system today; Pandemic crime trends 1:28:25 - Gun regulation 1:32:11 - The story of the father who forgave his son’s killer 1:37:04 - The Incarceration Rate in America 1:45:19 - Current cases Marsha is working on Intro Credits: “Instant Family” (2018) “Dead Presidents” (1995) “The Guest” (2014) “Scarface” (1983) “Fracture” (2007) ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hillary appears before Shavarella. He just says to her, what makes you think you could do this? There's no, no one's presenting any evidence. No one is calling any witnesses. And within 90 seconds, Hillary has essentially nodded her head. Yes, I did create this parody of my vice principal. And in an instant, she is handcuffed. And Lorene, her mother, is both shocked and speechless and nearly hysterical at the sight of her daughter being let out of the courtroom. It's actually interesting because I was in the car of my friend Matt Cox, bringing him back from recording podcasts a few months ago and he was telling me about his legal team in prison when he was down there who helped him out with with his case and everything and he mentioned very casually like i'd known a couple of them but he mentions the judge i'm like the judge who's the judge he goes oh judge conahan i'm like that sounds awfully

familiar i'm like should I know him he's like yeah the kids for cash scandal and I like almost stopped the car I'm like that guy was helping you in prison he's like yeah yeah there's a lot of interesting people in there I'm like sure so I went back and I started looking through all this because I remembered that case and to me it's one of the worst crimes I've ever seen it It's like not murder or rape or something. And I went in and saw how it originally was reported because I just knew the case and was familiar with what happened. And we'll talk about that today. But you were at the center of blowing the whistle on this thing. I was at the center of blowing the whistle on how the judges treated kids in the courtroom, that the denial of kids' constitutional rights

were really pervasive and rampant in his courtroom. The way most people know about Kids for Cash is about the cash, is about the money that changed hands between Conahan and Shavarella, a private real estate developer up there who built a for-profit juvenile detention center and a former co-owner of that facility. That was a parallel scandal, it turns out, that was going on simultaneously with what was happening inside Shavarella's courtroom. And they were perhaps in one of those rare instances, a situation where two

parallel lines actually meet. Yeah. And so when you're talking about constitutional rights being violated for these kids in court, are you referring to, or what are you referring to? Shibarello kind of ran an assembly line of injustice. He essentially had a really a kind of scam going where he encouraged kids to waive their right to counsel. Kids who are charged with delinquent acts, which is a criminal act, except we call it delinquency when they're under the age of 18. Kids who are charged with delinquency in the US.S. have a right to counsel, just like adults have a right to counsel in criminal proceedings. And obviously, in most instances, counsel is really critical to not just protecting someone's rights, but making sure that the system works the way it's intended to function. a form that sat outside his courtroom when kids and their parents came to check in for their hearings, which was presented to them. And it was a very simple form that invited them to waive

their right to counsel. Is that a legal form? It is not a legal form. It is not wrong. It is not illegal for someone to waive their right to counsel. It was legal at a point in time, actually not legal anymore the kids who came before him, waived their right to counsel. And just to kind of help your listeners and viewers appreciate what that means, it meant that kids were going in front of a judge who held their fate in his hands, who was not constrained by any notion of due process or procedural safeguards. And so kids could be found guilty. We call that adjudicated delinquent in the juvenile justice system. Kids could be found guilty in a matter of a minute or two with the judge just looking at them and saying, did you do this? And the intimidation factor that lots of folks feel when they're down in a courtroom looking up at a judge sitting above them uh kids tend to nod their heads and that was the end of it and it is it happened as i said in more than in more than 50 percent of

the cases of kids who came before them it was literally thousands of kids over a period of years. And the consequences were dire. Kids were sent away, removed from their homes, removed from their parents, and sent away to juvenile correctional facilities. And they were sent away for some of the most minor shit too. Yeah, I think one of the things that's really striking many things striking about the kids for cash scandal um you know these were kids who did not commit rape did not commit murder did not commit assaults did not commit robberies these were kids who for the most part uh were found guilty of harassment of of petty theft, of nudging someone, just pissing somebody off, giving the finger to a police officer. Things that kids do, I think what's so remarkable when you look at the population of kids who got caught up in Kids for Cash is that so much of their conduct was just what we

would expect of teenagers yes of course that's what they did um and they paid a very high price for it and a lot of these kids were it seemed to me like the strike zone of kids who'd be in front of them was like 13 to 16 ish something like that i think yeah 13 to 16 ish i think that's probably about right okay so this was up i might have said this at the beginning, but this was in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which is – Luzerne County is Wilkes-Barreau. It's the county seat of Luzerne. So northeastern Pennsylvania next door to Scranton. Okay.

Scranton's in another county though? Yes. Is that right? Yes. Scranton is Lackawanna County. But it's up in – What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool.

Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. In that area. So for people who aren't familiar with the scandal itself and how it worked, Chivarella and Conahan, they were both elected judges right correct so they had to literally like anything else run for office have a campaign this is what we're running on and what years did they begin what we're gonna explain the whole

like kickback thing like how long did that go yeah so shiver Ella was first elected as a juvenile court judge and he really ran to be a juvenile court judge back in 1996 he was reelected in 2006. The terms in Pennsylvania are 10 years. The kickback scheme, the alleged kickback scheme, really started around 2003. county is that there was a juvenile detention center where kids were sent to be held pre-trial detention centers are like jails they're pre-trial facilities they're not long-term facilities um it was a pretty horrible place uh i had been there when it was in existence we sued the facility for some treatment of another child back in the early 2000s um so the fact that shivarel and conahan had a desire to close it uh was not the worst thing they ever did it was a really vile horrible rodent infested facility um that kids should never have been held in was there like abuse

there too from the guards there was um not the kind of abuse that I think we're sadly hearing a bit more about today, both for kids and adults in some facilities. But certainly, you know, as a country, we tolerate an enormous amount of mistreatment of, frankly, children and adults in our justice system. And I mentioned that we sued the facility in the early 2000s. It was on behalf of an 11-year-old boy who had been sent there, who was really kind of tormented by other kids and staff. He wasn't beat up, but he was made to suffer. And we ultimately settled that lawsuit. But Conahan and Shavarala had this idea of closing that facility. And by closing it and shutting down admissions from Luzerne County into that facility, they really forced the county commissioners in Luzerne County to go along with their idea of

building a new facility. As I said, that in and of itself was a good idea. It was a horrible facility that they were aiming to replace. What went wrong with that plan is that they actually gave the contract to a developer to build a facility for two individuals. Bob Powell, who was a criminal defendant in the Kids for Cash scandal, who was one of the co-owners of the facility. They built private for-profit facilities. And I don't know whether or not people can appreciate the bizarre notion that, I like to say, someone wakes up in the morning and says, I think I'm going to just start a business and make a living off of jailing kids.

I think of jailing anybody and like that business in and of itself is crazy to me that I definitely want to talk about with you today. But I didn't even know before this case that private prisons for kids existed. Yes, they are not as common as they are in the adult space. They are not as common as they are in the immigration space, which was something that certainly I think really blossomed, unfortunately, under Trump. But they happen in some jurisdictions. This was one of the first private for-profit facilities built in Pennsylvania. They're more frequent, probably not surprisingly, in the South. There are many private for-profit facilities in Florida and Mississippi. But this was a first for Pennsylvania. But that was the plan, that it was a business, that the individuals who created it

were in it to make money by having the judge place kids there while awaiting trial. How does a business like i this this is one of those things i really want to go down the rabbit hole on obviously i've always been it's just a disgusting idea to me like having a business of locking people up but how does this business work like how does it how does one prison that's a for-profit prison get assigned inmates versus like a public prison and do they have a say in that matter do they have an agreement like a subsidy with the state that says they need a certain number number of people at all times and like how do they make money on it

besides just like the state paying them uh so they make money by the state paying them that's it county paying them yes um that's how it happens. What's going on in this situation and in any situation where you have private operators running these kinds of facilities is that they are fulfilling a role that we assume the government will fill. And Chivarella persuaded the county commissioners to go along with them shutting down what was a county-run facility, a not-for-profit facility, and build a new one. They took over that function from the county running it to allowing a private provider to come in and run it. The county commissioners certainly could have said, no, that doesn't work for us. They didn't say that. They were persuaded by Conahan to go along with this idea. When the facility was first being contemplated, my recollection is that there was some kind of placement agreement that Luzerne County entered into with the facility and I think the developer to allow them to get loans construction loans to build the facility so there was a kind of guarantee we're gonna fill this facility and the state or the county are gonna they kind of split the costs pay your per diem for every child who is placed

there and you know they make a profit by doing that. So the placement agreement that you referred to, that term is just like literally the number that we're going to have guaranteed at all times. It's an agreement, yes, to put kids in there. Over time, I think the relationship and the legal relationship between the county and the facility changed. But the first exchange of money was in 2003, when the developer for the facility, the person who built it, Miracle, essentially gave a million dollars to Judge Chivarella, and he called it a finder's fee for putting him in a position to be able to build this facility. Chivarella took the million dollars, thanked him, I think, a lot.

Never reported it, which is your financial fraud never reported it to pennsylvania judicial commission about his receipt of a million dollars for building a juvenile detention center isn't that a crime anyway though like if he reported it yes yeah um and it's an extraordinary conflict of interest i mean again i think um you know as a lawyer, our entry into the Kids for Cash scandal was really about what was going on with kids' legal rights. And one of the things that we all have in this country when we go before a judge is that we have a right to assume that that judge is impartial and is not conflicted in any way. And Shavarella was unquestionably conflicted by taking money from a facility that he was also therefore going to send kids to. That was never disclosed, of course, to any of the children who appeared before him and so yet again another example of how shivarella um over and over and over again violated kids rights so the facility itself then broke ground at some point in the early 2000s but

that actually i assume if he got the fee then that's when they were building it so it opened probably a couple years later yeah i think that's that's right. And the Kids for Cash scheme in terms of the money coming into Shibarello's and Conahan's hands continued until 2008, which is when we filed our first petition with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. And I'm sure we'll kind of fill some of those details in. But once that was disclosed, the whole system, the whole scheme kind of fell apart. But between 2003 and 2008, Chivarella and Conahan received somewhere around $2.8 million. So you mentioned that it was Chivarella that got the million-dollar finder's fee. Does that mean that Conahan wasn't involved right away? He came in later? U.S. attorney identified as them having received was somewhere around $2.6, $2.8 million. It came – some of that came from Merkle, the developer. Some of it came from Bob Powell, who was the former co-owner of the facility.

There were stories of thousands of dollars being stuffed in FedEx boxes that were delivered to the courthouse. So between both the facility owner and Bob Miracle, there was literally millions of dollars that were forwarded to Shiberella and Conehan. That's just, it's so absurd to me that that was something that they could even sleep with at night to be able to do that. But that means that they're getting, they get the finder's fee, and then over those years, it sounds like pretty much per head.

Like per kid they send there, they get some sort of agreed-upon payment. Yeah. It's more nuanced than that. It was never you got three kids there, You owe me $300. But yes, by Shiberella continuing to send children to the facility, they made a per diem per day, a per diem for each of those kids, which was high, higher actually than any other detention center per diem in the state. Why? Because that's what they charged. And although there were red flags raised by an auditor in Luzerne County, for many years, they were able to charge that and Luzerne County, and then at some point, Pennsylvania paid a part of that per diem. That allowed them, of course, to be really really profitable that's the point about for-profit facilities and out of the monies that they brought in for each child who was placed there there were monies continuously paid over to shivarela and conahan hey guys if you're enjoying

this episode please be sure to share it around on social media and with your friends sharing the show and spreading the word is the best possible thing we can do to grow the show and continue to get great Guests like this so thank you to all of you who have done that and thank you to all of you who are gonna do It now and also if you haven't already subscribed and liked the video Please do that and if you're on Apple or Spotify Please leave a five-star review if you get a chance that is a huge huge help and thank you to all of you who have already done so now the original complaint that you were filing wasn't obviously you didn't know this was going on but it was you felt that constitutional rights were being clearly violated

by was it just shivarela at first yes okay so maybe the best way to go about explaining what your how you would come to be involved in this would be explaining how you founded this center back in 1983 and telling us all about the work you do there. 1975. 1975? I thought it was 1983. Wow, that's a long time. So you founded this center in 1975 then, and what is the full scope of what you do at the juvenile law center um so the full scope is that we advocate on behalf of kids in the justice and child welfare systems um we started out um decades ago as a kind of storefront representing individual kids in southeastern pennsylvania in juvenile delinquency and abuse and neglect hearings. The organization over time evolved into a national public interest law firm for kids so that our work is no longer limited to

Philadelphia or Pennsylvania. We do work all over the country. And for the most part, we're really focused on systemic reform. The way that we came into the Kids for Cash case was through a phone call that we received from Lorraine Transu, who was the mother of Hillary Transu. Hillary was a 15-year-old girl in 2007 who was clever and snarky and adolescent and put up a fake myspace page um which was a parody aimed at her vice principal in her high school and she posted and invited friends in her school to post uh snarky comments about her it wasn't violent it wasn't uh threatening but it was it was adolescent yeah and uh sounds very normal it was extremely normal and some of it was actually pretty clever and she was ultimately the vice principal principal found out about the page and one of the things that i think

is just kind of important to note about how we respond how we have come to respond to how kids can be adolescent and can be misbehave and can misbehave and what i think is very central to how Shavarella got Luzerne County to give him their children, is that she was never disciplined by her school for creating this parody of her vice principal on a social media page. Instead, they referred her to the police. To the police for a parody page. Yes, and the police charged her with harassment a misdemeanor and that led to her showing up before judge shivarela and what happened in her case was that she was encouraged her mother laureen was encouraged by both the

sheriff who initially reached out to them and let them know your daughter has been charged with something, as well as the probation department. Their message to Hillary's mom was, this is not a big deal. You don't need to get a lawyer. She's probably just going to get a slap on the wrist, which is entirely accurate in the in any other place and instead because this was luzerne county and this was chivalrous courtroom first thing that happens is they show up outside his courtroom on her hearing date uh they do sign the form to waive her rights because her mom has been told not a big deal nothing to worry about here and hillary appears before shivarela everything is over in 90 seconds he just says to

her what makes you think you could do this um there's no no one's presenting any evidence no one is calling any witnesses and And within 90 seconds, Hillary has essentially nodded her head, yes, I did create this parody of my vice principal. And in an instant, she is handcuffed and let out of the courtroom. And Lorene, her mother, is both shocked and speechless and nearly hysterical at the sight of her daughter being let out of the courtroom in handcuffs. What was her sentence? Her sentence was 90 days in a different facility, not in the private for-profit facilities that Shavarela was also filling up, but in a different facility that shivarelli used um yeah 90 days for a 15 year old kid who had done something that was um predictable for an adolescent who had never been in trouble before on her record

forever too uh potentially yes so uh her mother called us um got to us eventually she called a few other agencies and they eventually led her to us. And when we heard the story and heard the details of how, the limited details of how quickly Hillary had been sent away, we were deeply troubled. We knew Shavarella because we had been involved in a case of a young boy who had appeared before him about six years earlier under very similar circumstances, also unrepresented, a very speedy resolution, and he had also been placed by Chivarella. And so we both took on the representation of Hillary, got her out of the placement that she was sent to, but then decided to dig deeper and wanted to know how pervasive Shavarella's mistreatment of kids was in his courtroom. And she – so she does 90 Days in there and the point – I don't want to get lost in all this because it is a common thread among all these stories. You see these kids. People can Google this and watch the video of them being interviewed is that it is on a whole other level when you are 14, 15, 16 and sent to a prison, right? Like the psychological damage of that is, I think, pretty immeasurable,

provided that you didn't do something like awful. Like, yeah, you know, if a kid like kill somebody, obviously they got to go somewhere where they're locked up. That's different. But when someone's going in there for creating a parody account online, you know you didn't really do that much wrong. And yet you're sitting here like,

wait, why is society locking me up? it's it's dramatizing it's it's evil it's it's like taking a case like that i i gotta think that you know you're you're a lawyer you're used to seeing the worst of the worst things you're used to getting in there and doing your job but i gotta think like as a mom you're like what if that was my kid so well that's a great point since at that time, I had a daughter who was 15 years old. Oh, my God. So I had a daughter who was the same age as Hillary. And despite decades of doing the work that I do, it also felt very personal for me because I could instantly understand as a mother what would this feel like to have my daughter taken away from me under these circumstances and placed in a juvenile correctional facility because we took on hillary's

case she didn't spend the whole 90 days there she spent i think about four weeks before we were able to get her home how did you do that um we basically went back to Shiberello. We filed a petition in front of him asking for a rehearing because she hadn't been represented by counsel. He granted us that rehearing, and we negotiated an arrangement for her where she was able to come home, and her record was essentially erased after six months. So Hillary was one of the lucky ones who benefited from that. But I don't want to lose your point about the harm that kids face and experience in these facilities. And even for children who commit murder, the issue here isn't about whether we hold kids accountable for what they do. I think the issue has to be how do we hold them accountable? And the kinds of places in which we place kids, which many of them look like prisons, if they don't look like prisons, they feel like prisons to these kids. We are pulling kids out of their homes, out of their communities, out of their schools, all of the things that are essential to kids developing and to making that very critical transition into adulthood. And I think that it's unquestionably deeply traumatic

and deeply troubling to think about kids who have essentially done nothing other than act like a kid being placed in what is essentially a correctional setting and having to confront the isolation and the loneliness and the frightening circumstances sometimes and being away from home. But that's traumatic for any kid. And that's another conversation we can have about how we ultimately think about what justice means both for victims and for the kids who do hurt other people. But yes, I mean certainly what was going on in Luzerne County, you had kids who were charged with the most trivial of offenses who were being ripped out of their homes and ripped out of their communities. When you took her case right there, were there instantly some other parents who maybe heard about that who then contacted you? There were not.

And I think that that's a great question to ask and something to just take a moment to reflect on. Luzerne County was a community that was struggling economically and financially. And I think that the people who live there, the families of kids who came before Shavarella, were made to feel powerless. And to feel that whatever public authorities told them, whatever they did, that they should trust that and they did trust that and while i don't think their pain and their fear for their children was any less than what lorraine trans who was able to express to us directly when she called us um they they did not feel that they could make that phone call and i think it's important for us to understand how uh how how much of a role i think that played in shivarela being able to get away with what he

got away with yeah and you had hinted at this earlier but with the whole election that he had to go through i guess in 96 and 2006. my understanding i've seen video of it i don't know i can't remember if it was in 1996 2006 or both but this guy literally ran on locking kids up like he wasn't hiding it he would say and i'm paraphrasing but he'd be like if you don't parent your kids i will and the connotation was that this is you are electing me to get dangerous kids out of your community Again, like if someone does something very wrong, okay that has to happen But why are you focusing on kids and and not it like if I were a voter? Hearing that in hindsight is 2020 but still if I were a voter hearing that and be like what the fuck is this guy saying?

This is nuts So a little context which will in no way justify or rationalize what happened there um but the context in 1996 when he first ran was that we were in the midst of the so-called super predator era oh yeah and there was fear stoked in the country, and Luzerne was not immune from that, that we were on the verge of a generation of super predator teenagers who were going to terrorize our neighborhoods and our communities. That all proved to be false. The researcher who first alarmed – sent out the alarm, literally retracted his research in 1997. But the lie stuck, as is so often the case, it tends to trump the truth. The lie stuck. And so when Shavarala first ran, he was running in a climate in which fear of crime and fear of kids was heightened.

I think that it's really important, and I'm glad that you made this point, that the notion that Shiberella took that environment in which she was running and turned it into we have to worry about the kids who are in our high schools, just everyday kids in our high schools who might be misbehaving in some way. And what I want you to do is to send those kids to me and I will take care of them, was to take what, you know, any community has a right to want to be safe. We all want to be safe. We want to be safe in our homes. We want our kids to be safe in school, in our workplaces. He took that to a degree that was extraordinary

because he literally focused on kids who were just mostly acting like kids and persuaded an entire community, persuaded the high schools and the middle schools in Luzerne County to make those referrals to him, to his probation department, and everybody went along with it. And when Conahan ran, because obviously he had to get elected as well, I wasn't familiar with that. Was he saying similar things? Conahan never sat in juvenile court. He was handling civil and criminal cases, so he't uh putting himself out there in making the same kind of pitch to the voters that shivarela was very directly making so how how did conahan get maybe that's a good thing to go to then now how did he get caught up in this

like we talked about they probably split that finder's fee but if he wasn't as focused on like handling the cases in court how does he have value to this he was um you know he was an administrative and president judge uh in luzerne county and his leadership position in the luzerne county court uh he was in a position of course to make things happen and he was able to as i said convince the county commissioners to let them essentially abandon the old juvenile detention center and build a new one friends with shivarella and was this just became a literally a joint criminal enterprise for them it's crazy how fast it all happened to to me because they you know this this is very i want to use the

wrong term here but this is very like kind of run-of-the-mill daily court hearings you know you're talking about 90 seconds for some of these for again what should be like all right you get a 200 fine or something or maybe like all right we'll let you go exactly maybe it's like all right you get a warning because it's kids. But it's like – what did you call it? An assembly line? It was an assembly line. That's exactly what it is.

Yes, an assembly line of injustice. That's absolutely insane. created a MySpace account. And then you were explaining that other kids' parents did not call you up because they were afraid to and they had trust that this is just how the system works, unfortunately, in their case. So does that mean that you started personally digging on him and on each case and taking a look and then contacting parents of kids who you felt had been given severe injustice? We did a couple of things. One is that, you know, we actually first reached out to the public defender in the Zurn County. Because as an organization, Juvenile Law Center, because we're really looking at opportunities to push for systemic reform. We work with public defenders all the time who are

in the courtrooms daily and have a sort of direct line of vision on what's happening in the justice system and how kids are being treated. And they will often be a source of information and insight for us. And that allows us to think about, are there particular issues that we should be taking on? So we call the public defender in Luzerne County. And unlike every other public defender office that we've ever had any communication with, they were reluctant to assist us. And so, you know, this is the next part of how does this happen, right? That's the question everybody wants to know. It happens when even presumably good people look away.

And the public defender in Luzerne County was complicit in what went on in that courtroom because there was knowledge on their part. They were in the courtroom when scores of children appeared before Shavarela in any given week without lawyers. They observed the assembly line of injustice that passed before them, and they never raised their voice, and they never raised their hand. Do you think they got paid? I do not think they got paid. I think that what happens all too often in our justice system is that there is a term that Amy Bach, an author, coined and wrote a book about it called ordinary injustice. And what that means is that people essentially succumb to the environment in which they find themselves every day. They become complacent.

They are in front of the same judge every day. And they worry about, if I put up a fight here, is that going to affect my next client down the line? This is their livelihood. They're not interested in rocking the boat. And all of those kinds of, in a way, cliches that we hear about how it is that people allow bad things to happen in front of them was going on in Luzerne County. And the same is true for the district attorney. So I don't want to let the district attorney off the hook here. In our system of justice, when someone pleads guilty, there is a very rigorous legal process that has to take place between the judge and the person pleading guilty to ensure that it is a knowing involuntary plea of guilt. That's what we call it, knowing involuntary.

Quick question just for clarification so that I'm not off here. When you were explaining that the judge would talk to each of these kids quickly, it would be 90 seconds in and out, there's always a prosecutor at the – Correct. Right? Yes. And they never said anything. Correct. That's exactly my point. The prosecutor is sitting there. The prosecutor is sitting there, you know, adding another checkbox to their one that case file. Yep.

And they never said anything. They never raised a hand and said, you know, this actually isn't how this is supposed to be done. So it's not surprising when you have the very officials, the legal officers in the courtroom, district attorney and public defender, who are expected to, and who frankly have professional obligations to honor the constitutional rights of the people who they are dealing with. When they are looking away, the fact that parents trusted the system, assumed that this is how it was supposed to operate, is hardly surprising.

Sad that it is hardly surprising, but it does go back to the numerical top-down system that we live in. You know, like when I had Brian McMonagle in here, who's obviously a major league attorney on the criminal defense side, has represented guys like Bill Cosby and Meek Mill and stuff like that. You know, we had a really great conversation about all the moral arguments within the – moral and ethical arguments within the legal system but one of the things that that we were both saying and agreed on heavily was that a lot of these cases where you have a prosecutor making a government wage usually more often than not they're younger people who are waiting to get the next job or whatever, they are just a piece of what will eventually become a political ad that someone way above them runs to gain election where they say, and I was tough on crime and my records. So when they're in there trying a case, there is a gamification thing where they're not personally in any way incentivized to say like, you know, we think this guy's innocent, which then presents, I mean, you want to talk about an ethical and moral quandary.

I mean, it shouldn't be a quandary, but you get into that system where the person coming in front of you is just the next job. Like if someone's a cashier at wawa and they're checking people out every day someone comes up they pay for something they leave they come up they pay for something they leave and you don't think anything of it they're getting what they want you you're doing your job you're getting paid they probably have the same like psychosis in a courtroom but what you forget is that that's a human being right there who may very well like have their freedom taken from them today and like so on one case like i empathize with oh you can get caught in the run and mill of it on on the other hand though especially when you take it down to kids like it should be the same way with adults too don't get

me wrong but like when you take it down you have a 15 year old standing next to you and you still don't have like a light click off like okay maybe i don't need to get a checkbox here for somebody's fucking election like that. Just there's nothing about that that that sits excusable with me. Well, and keep in mind that in so many of these cases, you probably had both kids and parents crying at the end of those 90 seconds um so the prosecutor again is there in that courtroom checking off a win and witnessing kids being torn from their parents so yes they are complicit in what happened in luzerne county the public defenders were complicit in what happened in luzerne county so i would imagine though especially in speaking with the public defender when you mentioned that had never really happened before where they don't help you. That's in your head got to be a time where you're like, okay, there's – we're going to war here.

This is crazy. It was – I mean it was honestly stunning that they took the position that we can't help you. And so we did two – kind of two main things at that point. One is that we really wanted to know how many kids were in this assembly line of injustice coming before Shibarela week in and week out, year after year. And we had the benefit actually in Pennsylvania of having pretty good data that is collected about how kids pass through our juvenile justice system. And so we were able to get good numbers from the Juvenile Court Judges Commission that did tell us that the rate at which kids were waiving their right to counsel, which allowed them to be processed so swiftly in front of Shavarilla, was really off the charts in luzerne county the average rate at which you might have kids waiving counsel you have 67 counties in pennsylvania um the average rate

was around three four percent a year of kids in any other given county waiving their right to counsel in luzerne county it was between 50 and 60 percent not even close when you got that first case did you have access to that form? Did she give you that? Very quickly, yes, we got it. And the form, you know, again, this is kind of in the weeds of what the Constitution requires, but there are rules. And when someone waives their right to counsel, there are things you have to tell someone that they're giving up when they waive such a profound constitutional right as their right to be represented in a criminal trial or a delinquency trial. The form was very simple. The form was essentially, I understand I have a right to counsel.

I hereby waive it. So it didn't check any of the boxes that you need to check in order to even consider that to be a legitimate waiver. Again, this went on day after day, year after year in Luzerne County. So we were able to figure out that the numbers were crazy, that the numbers of kids affected were going to be staggering as compared to anywhere else in the state. And then the other thing that we did was we did try on our own to actually be present in Luzerne County, try to see what was going on in the courtroom, hang outside in the halls, hang out in the parking lot, see if there were parents that we could talk to as they were coming out of the courtroom.

We ultimately, just to sort of give you a sense of the timeline, when we first were contacted by Hillary's mother, Lorraine called us, I think, in the spring of 2007. In that fall, we did have one person working for the Public Defender Office who kind of very surreptitiously finally agreed to help us and give us some information. And eventually we were able to get in touch with a couple of other parents whose kids had also been in front of Shavarella, had very similar experiences. And that allowed us to essentially put together in the spring of 2008 this extraordinary petition for relief that we filed with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. A petition for what? For extraordinary relief that we filed in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that had nothing to do with money. We didn't know about the money then. then um this was a petition to ask the pennsylvania supreme court to step in and to allow us to

get all of the names of the kids who had appeared before shivarela in a specific number a specific time frame so that we could then petition to have all of their records expunged and their convictions reversed because they were not represented by counsel so when you file this though because you didn't know about the money did you have suspicion of that yet we didn't have suspicion because that's a serious filing right there yes um and the pennsylvania supreme court um ultimately denied that request. But there's a series of things that us about our filing and wanted to know what we knew about Judge Chivarella and why we were filing the petition and what concerns we had about Chivarella.

And that was both eye-opening and also confusing because it was very clear when you get a call from the FBI asking you a lot of questions about a juvenile court judge against whom you've just filed a petition that there's something else going on. It's also all in secret. There was a grand jury that had been sitting actually for a couple of years at that point. A couple of years. That had been investigating what became a very scandalous financial and tax fraud that Chivarel and Conahan were involved in. And so we could only – we could suspect and imagine and speculate that there was another story here um but we did not appreciate the nature of that story until the federal indictments came down in january of 2009 yeah that's i mean how often have you gotten a call from the fbi before um never i was gonna say yeah yeah so it was um

it was clear something else was happening um but it took a while for that information to be made public. Yeah, so they must have – if that was sitting for a couple years, that means that obviously they were looking at some form of fraud going on there. So they probably saw your case come through and I would assume it probably had some things in there that they didn't know. They were following the money. And what they ultimately did when they filed the for that uh which was really there acknowledging that the flow of money was tied to a scam going on in the courtroom that allowed shivarela to do with these kids what he wanted because there was no one to stop him right and there was also during this time i wasn't really sure what the full context was here, but there was another judge, Anna, I don't remember her last name, but... Lakuta.

Anna Lakuta. It wasn't Anna. What was her name? It was Ann Lakuta. Ann? Okay. So Ann Lakuta was another judge on the Luzerne County Courts. Correct. judge on the Luzerne County Courts who had some sort of complaint brought against her and was, there was a ruling that said that she was removed from the bench, that she was appealing or something. And so she had some beef with, not Chevrolet, with Conahan, who was the head of the courts and apparently became a source for the fbi so she remembered yes she knew something hypothetically like as another judge on the court wasn't involved with

these cases or getting money for it she even knew about the judges taking some money from a private prison for these kids there were lots of things that apparently the judges were involved in. There were allegations of, on the civil side, Conehan kind of fixing cases in terms of kind of making sure that awards in civil cases were what the plaintiffs wanted. So when Shiberella and Conehan were ultimately indicted, they were indicted along actually with several other people. But there was a fair amount of corruption going on in Luzerne County. It wasn't limited to the court.

It spread out through actually the school administration in Luzerne County and certain other public officials. But yes, Ann Lakuta also, I think, was a source in terms of other information she had about what was going on on the Luzerne County bench. It's the ultimate fear for a lot of people thinking about the legal system here and how hypothetically, when you compare it to the rest of the world there's a lot of great unique things and I would say it's it is the best legal system in the world still has a lot of a ton of flaws and one of the things that's just beyond scary is when the people wearing the black robes up there who whether they're elected or unelected who earn this right to be called your honor and sit there in judgment of fellow

citizens when they are not biased when they're literally criminals themselves up there making decisions on other people's fates it's hard to not question the integrity of the whole system because people see a case like this and they go oh my god i wonder how many other places this is happening we just have no idea yeah um it's always a fair question um i think this was i i do think i don't think it's unique i think it was unquestionably unusual um i think it was a perfect storm uh you had all of the following things happening that allowed something horrible to then unfold. First of all, juvenile court is a closed court. You and I cannot walk into that courtroom if we don't have a reason to be there. Even as a lawyer, I'm not generally allowed to walk into another juvenile court hearing if I am not directly involved in that hearing.

Members of the public can't go in. The media can't go in. That means that there is very little transparency. There are no eyes on what's happening behind the closed doors of a juvenile court, and that it is very difficult, therefore, to have accountability for what goes on behind those closed doors. So that's number one. Number two, you had prosecutors and public defenders who were more concerned about job security than they were about the rights of the children who appeared in that courtroom. And number three, you had a community that was down at its heels and that trusted people elected to serve their interests to serve their interests. And when all of those things come together, it allows for something that happened in Luzerne County. You also had

two individuals in Conahan and Shavarella who it turned out were, you know, I guess pretty easy marks to engage in the kind of criminal conspiracy and criminal conduct that they engaged in. They were greedy. Turned out they were easy to be corrupted. Turned out they didn't care very much about kids. And all of those things allowed what happened in Luzerne County to happen. That's not to say there aren't similar stories unfolding, and we should always be vigilant about ensuring that our systems serve us in the way that they're supposed to serve us. But Luzerne County was a perfect storm of

lots of things going wrong all at once. See, the top-down approach you guys had though to really blow this open is so important because it could be replicated by a lot of people and that is you went in and looked at the data. It's available. You can see, all right, the state has 3% to 4% waiving the attorney in child court and kids court and these guys guys got 50 60 something's wrong you know like you also mentioned the fbi line and my guy jim diorio from the fbi is in here all the time says it all the time as well and that is to follow the money you know there's no reason to not follow the numbers on things too that can get you the money right it's such a good point here because to me the fact that it went on for several years and you know these guys had they had a condo in florida and it's a yacht and a yacht they're they're public

servants too it's like they're not making a ton of money as as that kind of judge in that case it's like i don't know man there's i'm glad that the the FBI at least sounds like they were on it somewhat early to look into it. But why did it – why do you think it took so long to be able to get smoking gun stuff? Because again, hindsight is 20-20, but there were – just start with the condo. That whole thing was sketchy as hell. You know, we could take a moment and think about the current situation we're in. Why does it take so long for the Justice Department perhaps to issue some indictments in some cases that some of us are watching? It takes a long time to put all of the information together and to connect all the dots. What was going on here was that money was going in to Shivarela's and Conahan's pockets, but it was being given to them in surreptitious ways. It was being put in accounts

that were not their own personal bank accounts. I think some of the money was put in accounts that were controlled by their wives at the time. It was wired in very specific ways with very specific instructions. And then you had literally just cash being stuffed in boxes. to ultimately put the pieces together that you need to put out an indictment that you think you have a certainly a better than even chance of prevailing on um and so yes sadly um it took years for the story to be pieced together uh during those years we had kids who suffered greatly as a consequence of their coming before Shiberella. And, you know, that trauma that they experienced can't be undone. Some kids lost their lives as a consequence later when they became adults because of lingering trauma that they experienced. And that can't ever be brought back um and so yeah i mean we can we we can and we should look back and wonder why um

why it feels so hard to uncover uh what what is these kinds of um schemes that are unfolding in front of us but the process demands a certain level of um of some certainty i guess and there to be frank and fair i there is a degree to which i i do understand that it's not you can't always find that literal gun with the smoke coming out of it i get that so good thing they did find it and went through this but when they brought this indictment you know these guys didn't just like fess up right away or anything they did well hold on i'm sorry they they started to because they thought the punishments were going to be low and they were worried they weren't going to win the case in court. But then they stopped at least for a time, and I think Chivarella stayed out forever and went to trial where they said, you know what?

We did nothing wrong. So indictment – let's just start at the beginning. Indictment comes down January 2009. And how many counts was that thing? It was a lot, right? No, the original indictment was actually technically called information because the original announcement of the charges against Chivarel and Conahan included their agreement to plead guilty to a handful of charges that would give them both a seven-year prison sentence. That's not a particularly long time and that was the original deal and the setup was that they would officially go to court for sentencing in August of 2009 so what happens between January and August of 2009 is that Shavarella talks too much and

Conehan doesn't talk enough. And let me explain that. Shavarella gave interviews to the media, including national media in which he insisted that he had done nothing wrong, that there was no quid pro quo. There was no kids for cash scheme. He was just doing what he thought was in the kids' best interest. And although he had technically pled guilty to something in order

to get his seven-year sentence, he denied, denied, denied for the next eight or nine months. Conahan didn't speak at all. And the assumption was in exchange for the plea deal that there would also be cooperation between Chivarel and Conahan and federal probation. And this was an ongoing investigation by the FBI and the U.S. attorney. And Conahan was completely uncooperative. And so by the time they both come before the federal criminal sentencing judge in August of 2009, the plea is pulled because Chivarrola talked too much and Conahan didn't talk enough. And that put them in a position of two things happening. One, with the pulling of the plea deal, the U.S. attorney actually then issues like a 40-count indictment and charges them with way more financial tax, wire fraud, mail fraud crimes than had been in the original document. What was the original?

Were you saying the original is not an indictment? It's called an information because they already had a plea deal with Conahan and Shiberella. When that gets canceled out in August of 2009, they issue a new indictates a plea deal, and he ultimately is sentenced to 17 years in prison. And Shavarella never renegotiates any plea deal and insists on going to trial. And Shavarella ultimately is found guilty of several counts not all 40 counts several counts of federal financial crimes and he is sentenced to 28 years where he remains yeah and belongs but that was another question there why did he he was found guilty on 12 of 39 charges how how did they not find him i mean i assume there's going to be some charge here and there that like even the most guilty people, like they don't get convicted of, but that seems excessive. Like they didn't find found guilty on frankly could have put him in prison for life.

So in a sense, did it matter that they didn't find him guilty of the other 20? The thing about juries, and this was a jury trial, and this is a good thing, juries take their job seriously, and they're charged with what they need to find beyond a reasonable doubt with respect to each count that Chivarola was charged with. And I think we should assume they did their homework and they found 11 counts and they didn't find the rest of them. But those counts on their own, of course, led to a prison sentence of 28 years. And that included like racketeering. It included absolutely racketeering charges, conspiracy charges, again, lots of financial crimes kind of examined through the lens of mail fraud, wire fraud, tax fraud.

Okay. And what about the other two? So there was the builder, Miracle, and then one of the co-owners was that lawyer, Powell? Powell, yeah. They were both charged as well? They were both charged as well. They both received very, very light sentences. I think that Merkle only received a period of time of house arrest. I think that Powell served a couple of years. They were more cooperative. Powell actually wore a wire pre-trial, pre the trial of Shavarala. He did

wear a wire, which certainly was used in Shavarala's trial, which kind of, you know, the wire, I don't recall the exact, you know, conversation. There was a transcript of it somewhere, you know, but it's kind of revealing Shavarala really kind of shaking Powell down for more money, more money, talking about how he knows how many kids he's sending there. He knows how much money they're making. He expects to get more money. So there was just more cooperation from them. And as we all know just from reading the newspaper or watching Law & Order, you get benefits for cooperating with the feds. And they did that, and so they

were treated much less harshly than Chivarro and Conahan. But they obviously closed these private prisons, right? Yeah, they essentially are not really functioning anymore. Yeah, because it's just like – Certainly not in Luzerne County. I understand the cooperation mechanism because the key to this case is is the the public officials who were corrupted because they hold they hold the power to set law basically law and order right there so i'm with that but i don't know i when when i look at symbolism of stuff yes i think it's great that

he was found guilty of a lot of very serious charges and everything and obviously was sent to prison for a long time as he should be talking about shivarela right now but you know you'd like to think that again maybe there's a few charges in there that they might have just been going for but at the end of the day you'd love to see full justice i'm just thinking of from being one of those parents and and seeing what the official record of the court says because you know there's one very famous case of all the many that was exposed to the public right after he was found guilty because you had sandy fonzo the the mother of her son ed kensakowski ed kensakowski whose son was going to college he was slayedayed to go to college on scholarship for wrestling.

And I think he was caught with a weed bowl or something, which, let's be honest, we all had that at that age. I'll speak for myself there. But he gets caught and sent to prison for four months, has a scholarship pool, doesn't go to college, ruins his life, and he commits suicide four years later. And when you watch this video of shivarela on the steps like given some impromptu press conference after being found guilty and you

see this woman i mean it's righteously show so lose her mind at this guy it's like you see the effect of that and and nothing's ever going to bring her kid back or get back the trauma the other kids suffered or the setbacks they had in life but like you know you want to see if if i'm a parent there i want to see a clean box score if you know what i mean yeah um yeah i mean i that's a heartbreaking story and there are some other heartbreaking stories of kids who um likewise uh took their own lives some accidentally. But I think that, you know, there's, the justice system is imperfect in many ways, and it can never fully redress or compensate, I think, the harms and the grief often that victims experience. I suppose, you know, in a way, it sort of tries

to do the best that it can. But it's whether we put people in prison or whether we pay people large sums of money, it's difficult to put everything back in the box. We can't bring lives back. We can't erase trauma. We can't resolve grief. We have imperfect mechanisms for dealing not only with the harms that one individual might cause another harm, but with the individuals that are public officials cause the citizens whose lives and well-being are entrusted to their care one of the things that you had mentioned a little bit ago but i didn't want to get sidetracked because you were talking about something with with the story with shivarela was how and i think i'm getting your words right here you had said justice is a very complicated thing something like that to that effect in in talking about what you just mentioned there though it's like the line to me especially someone who's not a lawyer and doesn't have to think

in some of the ways you do the line to me as a citizen with justice is a really fine one that's almost bizarre in some ways because in order to meet out justice per se, you want to accomplish a couple things. You want to accomplish deterrence and a form of reimbursement for whoever was victimized by whatever it is, whether it be in civil or in criminal court but i feel like sometimes in society we have a a stance of of two eyes for an eye if you know what i mean where you know we don't think about these things in the context of what they actually are which is like time and time in a place you don't want to be especially when you're talking on the criminal side. So even when I hear something like seven years for those judges,

which I agree was definitely not long enough, but even just that, it's like, that's seven years. That's a long time. You know what I mean? And someone's in a box for that time. So to me, I guess what I'm trying to get at is how as someone who has given your life to representing in this case kids which I think is incredibly honorable by the way but in representing kids where you know they're they're caught up in a legal system where yeah sometimes they did do something very very wrong how do you balance justice for them to try to give them a chance at life with also recognizing that there does have to be a level of justice that is still meted out for those two main things I mentioned a little bit ago?

Yeah, I think that in America it's hard because I think the culture in America really supports our thinking about the justice system as a zero-sum game. I win, you lose. And losing is not nuanced. It's a total loss. And I think that particularly when, certainly in my work, thinking about the kinds of conduct that kids can become involved in from the trivial to the most serious to homicide um i don't think there's any question whether it's as citizens or as parents um or as having been kids once we we all understand the the notion of being responsible for the actions that we take being held accountable, understanding that there are consequences maybe for some of the dumb choices and bad choices that we make.

But I think that the thing that has really, I think, been front and center, certainly for our work in the last 20 years, is I think the scientific understanding that there really are legitimate developmental differences between kids and adults. We've all seen the commercials about kids' brains. It's true. Kids' brains develop more slowly than adult brains, and they continue to develop in very pivotal ways in critical areas of the brain into the mid-20s. But it's also true just as a matter of psychology. Developmentally, kids are immature until they become mature adults. And that immaturity is manifested often in the kinds of decisions and choices that they make and the way they make those choices, which is often subject to a lot of influence from peers. And it can be very negative influence and all of that is

to say that kids are not in the words of the US Supreme Court they're not just miniature adults and when we think about even the most serious crimes that kids might become involved in and that they might commit we still have to treat them differently we still have to treat them I believe in accordance with their developmental differences between them and adults. And so that's where, for me, it's not about I win, you lose. It's about recognizing that the kids who are involved in our justice system can't be thrown away, can't be tossed aside. They have a right to grow up. They have a right to grow up they have a right to demonstrate that kind of maturity and sophistication that comes with age they can come back into their communities they can be productive members of those communities they're entitled to second chances again because they're the choices

they make are not made with the same level of intentionality that you and I make choices. So it is more complicated, particularly when we think about kids. Again, this is true for adults as well. The brutality with which our justice system often imposes consequences on both children and adults. Yes. Yeah, and it's like – I always make the joke, but it's also dead serious. They call it Department of Corrections, and there's not a lot of correcting going on. Correct. there's not a lot of correcting going on correct it's you you go into systems and look it's an environment thing more than anything i had my friend dan thayer on here who's an amazing guy who you know you wouldn't have thought he would have ended up amazing put it that way he was put into the system when he was 15 years old in an adult prison that was like going to college he was there for seven years because a cop grabbed

him from behind. He was a big kid and he turned around and then, you know, can't do that. Turned around, punched the cop, gave him seven years at 15 for that. So then he's, you know, he's committing crimes and then out of prison for the next 15, 20 years of his life. And he is the exception to the rule. He figured it out himself. He was not given any resources to do it. He just kind of had a coming to Jesus moment, so to speak, and then turned his life around as this unbelievable guy all these years later. But like, you can't count on that for people. And then when you're talking about putting kids into an environment like that, they become hardened by it. That becomes their identity. And they're also, there's no hope for the future.

And you talk about like these – the cases that are even most serious pointing out the child homicide. I believe you wrote a paper to the Supreme Court about life without parole sentences for child homicide, right? Actually, before I keep going on, can you explain the background there and when that was and what that was all about? Well, yeah. I mean one of the good things that came out of the Supreme Court in the last 15 years was that we were able to successfully challenge really severe sentences for kids who were being charged as adults and being placed in prisons with other adults. The Supreme Court in 2005 banned the juvenile death penalty. In 2010 and 2012, the court issued a couple of decisions in which it both banned life without parole sentences for kids convicted of non-homicide crimes and also banned mandatory life without parole for kids convicted of homicide. And the rationale for those rulings was we have something called the Eighth Amendment in our Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. And the court recognized in the case of children, because we do allow the death penalty for adults still in

this country, and we do allow life without parole sentences for adults still in this country. But the court recognized that when we're talking about children, that we just can't hold them accountable in the same ways that we hold adults, even for the most serious crimes. And so we have succeeded at the extreme end of the spectrum in eliminating those kinds of extreme sentences. It doesn't mean kids aren't still facing decades in prison because of the nature of our justice system, which again can be ruthless in seeking retribution. Is what you're talking about at the federal level, state, or both? It's both. Yeah, it's both. So a case I was going to bring up in this commentary now is even more relevant. Are you familiar with the Ethan Crumley case?

The kid who was the school shooter like a year ago? 15-year-old? In Pennsylvania, right? I think it's Michigan. Oh. This is like last November. Right. He was 15 years old.

He killed. It was awful. I mean, he killed a few students. The case was just resolved somehow, right? Yes. He pleaded guilty. And I ask this because he is facing life without parole now obviously with the school shooter thing is a whole nother conversation but without going into that detail of it right away you know this kid's crazy

you know he he killed several other kids it's like like the worst type of crime. It's a homicide. It's a multi homicide, multiple homicide. But I had end up doing. And the second thing was that they were going to be looking for life without parole. Let's start with the trying as an adult. That's actually a good place to start. I have a real issue with not having a black and white line in the sand, as imperfect as it is sometimes. To me, an adult, as it's legally defined as of right now, I guess like psychologically agreed upon for the base level cases of things, is 18 years old. So my line is that if this is going to be a legal system that doesn't have slippery slopes, if someone commits a crime at 17 years and 364 days, you technically need to try them as a juvenile and not an adult. Why do people still get tried as an adult? How can a state decide, oh, we're going to try this person as an adult, and a court says yes?

The reason they can do it is because there is no so-called right. There's no constitutional right to be tried as a child in the United States. It's not guaranteed by the Constitution implicitly or explicitly. Juvenile justice systems for the most part are creatures of state law. There is a federal juvenile justice system, but it's tiny compared to the tens of thousands of children who are involved in state-level juvenile justice systems. And every state has a mechanism for trying kids as adults. I agree with your central premise, though. I mean, certainly my own view, the view of Juvenile Law Center, is that we should not be trying kids as adults if

they're under the age of 18 for whatever crimes they commit. The issue with respect to life without parole sentences is that in cases of homicide, the Supreme Court rulings did prohibit a mandatory sentence but does not prevent a sentencer from exercising their discretion following some steps, some process to make sure that the sentence is appropriate to that individual. individual but there are going to continue to be life without parole sentences even for kids convicted of homicide tried in the adult system as a matter of a judge's discretion or potentially a jury's discretion. That's kind of where we are left with the Supreme Court cases. So it hopefully will be few, rare, uncommon but the sentence has not been absolutely categorically prohibited yeah see a lot of the school shooters we've seen the profiles are usually pretty similar 18 19 years old right and a lot of them kill themselves before they the cops get their hands on them and the ones that don't we see what's happening with nicholas cruz right now it is very hard for me to have empathy

there i there's you know as a human being you want to look at things and say okay how why did this happen and how can we take steps to prevent this again by learning about that person and maybe what went wrong in their life but you know it's like one of the worst things ever this case with ethan crumbly was a little different for me because he was so much younger he was 15 his his environment failed him his parents failed him his parents like encouraged him with the gun the school system had signs of it and didn't do anything about it other than i think they called his parents in once and it was like i forget exactly what the evidence was but this was like crazy stuff he was doing it

was very very clear where his head was and so everything around him failed and like yes this is a person who has severe mental problems and needs to go away for a while and and hopefully be corrected but that's my point i'm like i don't get how you could have like life without parole on the table for someone at that age with that environment because there's no way that that that someone like that had any form of a decision-making mind to have any true concept in my opinion of what they were doing well that's right and you know we're also pretty much the only country in the world that would sentence a 15 year old to life without parole um we stand out for our willingness to impose that kind of a sentence

on a child for all the reasons that you said. I mean, obviously, if you look at his individual circumstances, his age and his home and what was going on in his life at that time, the many ways in which family, community, school failed him. We, yes, some of us imagine a different way of meeting out justice in that case. But unfortunately, you know, we currently operate with a justice system that is much too quick to really elevate retribution above every other concern, such as rehabilitation or deterrence. It is very much an eye for an eye that drives our justice system. It is this eye when you lose. And until we are able to, I think, really as a society, have a cultural shift about how we think about what justice means. We're going to continue to see these kinds of sentences. How would you – I mean this is like the billion-dollar question right here, but what are some steps that you see on the table right now that could be accomplished over the next five, ten years to move things in the right direction? Like if you had your choice and didn't have to go through all the bullshit of government

and laws and all that, how would you adjust the legal system? Well, it's interesting. In the last 10 years or so, we actually saw some extraordinary, I think, positive steps that feel like they're threatened right now in this somewhat hyped up narrative about crime that we're hearing. So in the juvenile justice system, the numbers of kids who are incarcerated as kids in juvenile facilities has dropped by 50 or 60 percent in the last 10 years. Arrest rates, by and large, yes, there have been some legitimate spikes in crime and some serious concern about spikes in violent crime by kids. Even so, arrest rates

remain historically extremely low. In Pennsylvania, just to talk about Pennsylvania, there were 10 years ago, 26 juvenile detention centers that serve 67 counties, there are now 14 juvenile detention centers. And the population numbers, the rate at which kids were being put in juvenile detention has dropped by 80%. Those are good numbers. That shows that the system was moving in the right direction, was using custody less, keeping kids in their communities, diverting kids out of the justice system. All of that right now feels fragile. Because we are, I think, coming out of COVID, a couple of things are going on. One is, I don't think there's any question question but that disruption at every level of society caused by COVID is a piece of the increases in crime that we're seeing from family disruption, school disruption, community disruption for kids.

It's also true that COVID had a really interesting effect on employment patterns. And what is also happening across the country is that a lot of the correctional facilities, both juvenile and adult, but we'll talk about juvenile facilities, are really understaffed. And that creates a very combustible situation where you have more kids being put into placement because of a fear of crime and renewed reluctance to send kids home, reduced staffing in these facilities so that they cannot manage overpopulation and overcrowding in the facilities. And this is a story that we're now starting to see in states across the country, in local jurisdictions across the country.

And these things feed on themselves. So they start to, again, make a case for, oh, maybe we need to lock more kids up. So when you ask the question, you know, sort of what's my vision or what do I think can happen? Part of me is looking backwards and saying, well, actually, we kind of did it. We succeeded in drastically reducing the numbers of kids that we were putting into custody that we were incarcerating without an increase in crime. The increase in crime is all in the last couple of years. And as I said, I think it's very COVID related and criminologists are going to write books and articles about of course um and i haven't heard them talk about on a specific in a specific sense i haven't heard them like talk about kids with the crime about it it's that's hasn't been a narrative that right i've seen um so so i'm i worry that the the wisdom that we were able to put out there and to act on in terms of better ways to deal with kids who come into the justice system will fall by the wayside as we get kind of sucked back into this tough-on-crime narrative.

We know how to do it differently. We know how to do it better. We know how to keep kids home and communities safe and my hope is that we can hold on to those experiences and that reality and continue to march down that path i also think the country owes a great debt to the kids in particular with covid almost more than anyone else because you know I thought about it at every level all the way up to college but down from the smallest pre-k and kindergarten and the earliest developmental years these kids lost most of like a year and a half or two yeah

exactly and and now we're seeing it and the test score is coming out and the people who are surprised by that I'm like are you dumb like what did you think was going to happen here? You have kindergarten teachers teaching on Zoom. Like has happened as a result of mass unemployment you know loss of hope all that stuff i don't think like i said i haven't seen it dragged on the kids and and i would strongly hope that that does not happen i i do think there are you know there's some legitimate concerns with adult society with that for sure um i i don't think the answer is broken windows policing so to speak or something like that but yeah I mean when you see for example what was happening in San Francisco where they won't even like respond to a call if a robbery is less than 750 bucks it's like all right well this is this is getting out of control it's like when you when you don't do the common sense stuff well

that's where then people who may be motivated to crack down on crime then have a political case to come in and you know swing the pendulum all the way back and i i do try to at least in the conversations we have keep the pendulum here things in society it's just so so goddamn hard well you know common sense um is a great word. Think about common sense gun regulation controlling group, whether it's a majority or not. It's actually not a majority but a controlling group of individuals to resist common sense gun regulation and gun controls that would keep guns out of the hands of kids. That seems like a relatively smart thing to do. You know, I think the prevalence of guns in this country also makes us different from other countries in the rest of the world that don't see the kind of crime that we have here

and the kind of violent crime that we have here. So that's a whole other conversation, but it is a piece of the culture in which we live that we have to be responsive to. I agree that that is a central question that, you know, we need to at least talk about because it feels like that that's not what happens. It feels like there's just complete opposite interests here. And so it's just a yelling match on social media and nothing ever happens. And I do think, especially when you look at mass shootings in schools and stuff like that, the data doesn't lie on those things in that we do have a tragedy problem that other places see a lot less of. one of those issues that probably a year ago i would have thought i was like really conservative on but i've been corrected on that narrative because i'm i'm not apparently because i do look at some common sense things that i i think should at least be bipartisan brought to to the

table to discuss where i definitely have the what i would call more conservative leanings is that I do worry about the slippery slope of where things end. So, for example, I don't worry all about about background checks. I know for a fact that there's plenty of states in this country where, yeah, a 12 year old walks up to a gun fair and walks away with a gun that's insane to me absolutely insane but i also know that looking at it across like law-abiding society and whatever you know criminals do get their hands on guns and they will do that regardless of what it is if there's less access to some things it'll get more expensive i think there's an argument to make there but when when we're talking about the regulations of continually banning specific weapons as much as i agree like yeah i don't see a need for me to own an ak-47 i understand the deterrence factor that was written into the constitution about that and i really i really understood that looking at countries that

did not have rights to guns during covid and what the governments did to people there that made what some of the restrictions here look absolutely like nothing so to me it's a very very difficult problem to solve but a very common sense solution to start with that is being prevented by you know the narrative of either take all guns or nra like put them all on the street and carry them to the to the festival you go to that is preventing the conversation of all well, how do we make sure that even like the federal level, we increase the ability of law-abiding citizens to have to prove that they are able to get a gun? It just seems like a very obvious place to start for me, and I don't hear that conversation happening. Yeah, so we'll see how it goes i guess i i guess so but you know on on the to to stay with with the topic of justice and and meeting it out and and things like that i mean did you ever see

the the video of the man whose son was murdered in a it was like a he was a delivery driver and he's speaking at the sentencing of the 19 year old kid who did it who's facing life without parole and he argued against it yes yeah yeah very very powerful video and one thing i don't fault is when victims' families are upset and are calling for the worst thing. They are emotionally biased, and I get that completely. And part of the system is that you're supposed to be objective outside of those people to be able to mete out the correct justice and not just what they want. But not that I would ever expect people to have the grace or understanding that that guy did. I think that's quite unique it that really got to me because the judge was still able and the judge was emotionally moved as well but the judge was still able to hand out significant justice like that kid got he got like

a 25 25 to 30 year sentence and he's going to serve over 20 years for sure so yeah 19 20 year old kid right now he's getting the whole middle of his for sure. So yeah, 19, 20-year-old kid right now, he's getting the whole middle of his life taken from him and has that on his record and is a murderer and all that. But the father looked at it like, I can't bring my son back. Why not? This kid never had a shot.

My son had a nice home. He had two parents. We loved him and everything. This kid, his father wasn't around. His mother didn't give a shit about him. He was taken in by kids on the street who came from similar situations and he didn't premed it being the father that's the kind of thing that when you're the defense and the prosecutor and you were trying to line up in front of a judge who's also part of the process here to meet out justice it's like severe because it's long but also hope and and potentially like giving someone a reason to exist too to want to improve themselves because like that father hugged that guy and as a human being like the defendant as a human being you look at that that was legit

you know that kid had never been seen before and the first person to see him is the guy whose kitty killed you know that's it that's i would recommend everyone go watch that video on youtube because it's a powerful thing and i know it's a ideal situation, I guess you could say, but something about that struck a chord of the balance of justice and hope that I feel like we should have more of in the system. victims speak with only one voice and this is an example of a victim who is stepping away from the traditional path that we associate with victims which is again retribution retribution no sentence is too long I do think that there is again kind of culturally we have fostered and tolerated what I call a kind of toxic dance between prosecutors and victims, which is prosecutors delivering a message to victims that the only kind of redress you can get here, the only thing that will make you feel better, is if we put this person away for as long as possible. There's not a conversation going on at the same time that is looking at what do you need here? Putting someone away in prison doesn't

bring your loved one back. It doesn't necessarily end your grief. Is there another way to think again about what does justice mean? What do we want justice to mean? And I think for the father, in the case that you talked about, it was brave and courageous. It was an act of extraordinary compassion and empathy in the face of the most extraordinary grief that someone can experience. And we need to honor that in the sense that he is more open-minded in trying to understand not only what he has experienced, but what the person who caused his loss has experienced. And that's very rare. Yeah, it's incredibly rare. But it's, like I said yeah it's incredibly rare but it's like i said it's certainly very powerful and you know it it leads to another i mean that's that's an extreme case

in the sense that that was a murder so of course we know how those things have to go people have to go to prison for a very long time but you know you mentioned it a little bit ago the the overall incarceration rate in this country so i'm glad to hear we have some nice trends on the kids' side. I wasn't aware of that, and I share your hope that that continues to be the case. But I don't remember off the top of my head exactly what the numbers are in the United States. I know it's in the millions as far as people who are – Around 2 million right okay so it's in that area there's three roughly 335 340 million people in this country so our rate the average number of citizens or of people per hundred in our society is significantly higher than anywhere else in the world for incarceration what do you think led to this like how did we get here because we're supposed to lead the world and freedom and justice and things like that you know yeah we don't um yeah so the numbers you know that

we hear quoted all the time are that the u.s represents about five percent of the world's population but we have 25 of the incarcerated population in the world um i think there are a number of things that lead to it certainly one one of them, frankly, has to be rooted in slavery and runributive in how we think about the purposes of our justice system. It leads to two things. It leads to the highest incarceration rate in the world and the highest racial disparities in the world. We are a justice system for both kids and adults that is largely black and brown and you know we had arguments in the u.s supreme court this week talking about affirmative action that will probably lead to ending affirmative action uh which is you know a reflection of a changing view that all of a sudden uh we want to deny uh the racism that is at the heart of hundreds of years of American history and if if we allow people to deny that we

will perpetuate the kinds of disparities that um drive our system right now yeah it does feel like between what we've seen publicly whether it be like the kanye west has been saying which is about it's about jewish people in that case and then seeing how certain people respond to that not necessarily in the way of like obviously that's all wrong they they don't say that But it just seems to me like society is post-pandemic really teetering on this, on a new level of tribalism that's unlike what we saw in the 2010s and it is coming back to race and things like that. And I think it actually also prevents having these conversations properly because there are now people who are so pissed off

regardless of what their background is about their reality that even bringing up the idea that like something's not equitable for other people shuts them down and i don't want to be a part of the conversations where it's like you know we just say okay no problem go about your life i i think these are things that that have to be talked about because like you said, when you're talking about like minority populations in prison especially, it's a generational thing. Because people can look at it and say, okay, well, how could it go back to something that was 150 years ago or something like that. Well, when you take a father out of a household for something minor, and then that just kind of keeps going down the line, or then you take a mother out of the household, you're creating, you're removing any chance for a normal environment and you're perpetuating situations that are going to encourage poverty. Because the other problem that we haven't discussed today is that, you know, to me, when you pay a price that was meted out by court for justice, once your debt is paid, it's paid, right?

So what I see too much of is people go to prison and then they can never get a job again or something like that. Or they can't vote. Right? Sure. Plenty of other rights as well it's like not just those things but where do you where do you draw the line on that because i will say you know when it comes to like the sexual predators list or something like that i do think there's an argument there even if i have to hypocritically say there might be something anti-constitutional about that but

i'm gonna be honest like yeah i want to know if a rapist is living next door you know what i mean so like where do you draw the line with where people have to have something show up on the record that prevents them from even getting hired anywhere versus like no that kind of has to be on your record and society is going to do with that what they will well the problem with sex offender registries is that we put kids on them as well. And there is great research that has not been refuted that kids who commit sex offenses when they are teenagers, their recidivism rates are in the neighborhood of 2 or 3 3%, maybe maximum 5% in terms of ever committing another sex offense. A lot of sexual behavior that kids engage in when they are teenagers is, again, kind of normative for adolescents. And so to the extent that we take that same view, I want to know if there's a rapist in my neighborhood,

and impose that liability and disability on a child who 15 years later is living in your neighborhood and did something when they were 14. What is the point of that? That's something that Juvenile Law Center has actually done a lot of work on. We've actually – we succeeded in getting rid of juvenile sex offender registration in Pennsylvania by winning a case in our Pennsylvania Supreme Court. We have also fought for legislative reforms in other jurisdictions. What was that case you won? It was, well, it's in initials. It's JB because we don't use names of kids. But, you know, whatever your position may be, and I'm not going to speak to that because I don't represent adults. Whatever your position may be with regard to sex offender registries, they make no sense for kids.

They don't keep communities safe. They harm kids enormously by creating precisely the kinds of challenges that you identified. They can't get jobs. They can't live in certain places. They can't be around other children um and it can lead to really dire consequences for them and profound depression obviously and uh for for what purpose it's not keeping communities safer because these individuals are not threats yeah i wasn't even talking i didn't even know kids could be on that so i wasn't even talking about them i'm talking about in general

in society because i don't you know you'll always find an exception where someone's like oh well he definitely should be but again that's not how the law works you have to have overall what's the good versus bad and where does it weigh most of the goods so i i agree with your your point there that they shouldn't be on there but like at high level society including adults that list is one thing for everything else though it's like to me okay a guy guy robs a store or something does has a gun on him does five six years in prison or something like that hopefully is corrected that's another problem separate conversation because that's not really happening but like you know that dude struggles to ever get a job again. Right. And yet he served his time, paid his debt. Right.

I don't know how to fix that because like it's on society to be like, you know what? Yeah, we'll hire him. But at the same time, there's legal liability that businesses are thinking about. There's all these different things. And we know that these people have these records because it's on there and it's not expunged or anything once they're done right right yeah um i mean it's it's again a part of our unwillingness to let them back in yeah yeah is there anything else that you're specifically working on right now that you know you're looking forward to making a change on or some sort of legal paper you're writing for the Supreme Court maybe?

We've done a lot of work actually in the area of fines and fees for kids. The idea of charging people administrative fees, charging them fines, seeking financial restitution, which I think is incredibly common in our justice system. There are many challenges going on in the adult criminal justice space to those kinds of economic charges for kids. Again, as I said, with respect to kids involved in sex offender registries, it makes no sense. Kids have no financial means. They are dependent upon their parents if their parents have financial means. And so we are kind of carrying over from the adult system a system of financial penalties that kids cannot fulfill. failure to pay fines or probation costs or administrative fees or even restitution can actually be used to put them in a custody situation to actually incarcerate them for being unable to do that. So we are aggressively challenging fines and fees. It's more through

legislative reform than it is through court reform. We have some, a few cases where we're raising these issues as well, but we've had some success across the country in actually getting rid of fines and fees in juvenile court. It's just, it's another, you know, kind of holdover of how we think about what we're supposed to be doing to hold people accountable, that when you drill down and think about wait does this make any sense for kids it makes no sense for kids yeah and like you said a lot of it will come back on the parents and stuff i think it's really sad even with adult cases where you know government comes with a case that's not the greatest and in a lot of situations the person

is innocent and then they have to spend their family has to spend their life savings just to get a decent lawyer to defend them i mean that's just like it's far too common and and it's a problem with the courts because then you also to be fair you know there's some attorneys out there and i'm thinking more on the civil side with those kinds of things who you know they're they make it about like, well, let's charge as much as we can, you know? And so then people who, you know, aren't an attorney themselves and have a case that they believe in, they don't understand all the minutiae happened being thrown at them. And suddenly they, you know, they don't have any money to pay for what they need in court. I mean, there's so many different angles you can run into it from both sides of it between the people who are making the laws to the people who are upholding the laws to the people who are in court fighting the laws as lawyers, whatever it is. It's

like, you're never going to have a full answer that everyone has every problem solved. But I do, when we have these conversations with someone like you, who's devoted their life to fighting for justice on things that you view as wrong, I think it's good to be able to point out you know the the little things here and there where you can make you know that next layer of progress and hopefully make it as perfect as you can right yep well thank you for for all the work you do i i think it's a great thing and where where can people find out more information about the juvenile law center and and how they can help jlc.org okay and do you guys do like donations or uh we are entirely supported through uh donations um whether it's private philanthropy foundations private individuals um is essentially how we survive. So by all means, take a look.

Awesome. All right. I will send people there. And thank you so much for discussing the case today and everything else. This was great. Thank you for having me. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.