$206 Million Verdict Against Two Judges Who Sent Children to For-Profit Detention for Kickbacks

For years, two Luzerne County judges ran a scheme that traded children's freedom for cash. Mark Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, and Michael Conahan, the court administrator, secretly accepted $2.8 million in payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit detention facilities, PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care. In exchange, they shut down the county's public juvenile detention center and filled the private beds.

Ciavarella imposed a rigid zero-tolerance policy to keep those beds occupied. Children as young as eight years old were hauled before him for minor infractions, including jaywalking and truancy, often without legal representation, and shipped to detention. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court later invalidated roughly 4,000 juvenile convictions affecting more than 2,300 children.

The civil case, 'Wallace v. Powell' (No. 3:09-cv-00286), was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in 2009. Over the following thirteen years, Anapol Weiss attorney Sol Weiss served as co-lead counsel alongside Marsha Levick of the Juvenile Law Center, building the class action on behalf of the detained youth and their families. More than 282 people testified at the civil hearing, including 79 individuals who were under age 13 when Ciavarella sentenced them.

On August 16, 2022, U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner issued his ruling. He found that the defendants had 'abandoned their oath and breached the public trust,' inflicting what he described as 'unspeakable physical and emotional trauma' on a vulnerable population. He ordered Ciavarella and Conahan to pay $106.3 million in compensatory damages, calculated at $1,000 per day of wrongful detention, plus $100 million in punitive damages, for a total of $206 million.

Ciavarella is currently serving a 28-year federal prison sentence with a projected release date of 2035. Conahan, who received a 17.5-year sentence, was released to home confinement in 2020. Weiss acknowledged after the verdict that the judges likely lack the personal assets to satisfy the full judgment, but said the team would investigate every available avenue for collection.