A legal advocacy group that sounded the alarm about unconstitutional practices in a Pennsylvania juvenile court wants to know if similar rights violations are taking place elsewhere in the state.

The Juvenile Law Center is promoting an online questionnaire for children or their parents to tell their stories anonymously. It's on the center's Web site, http://www.jlc.org/shareyourstory/.

The Philadelphia-based group is putting together a report for a state panel investigating the scandal in northeastern Pennsylvania's Luzerne County, where judges are accused of taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to place youths in for-profit detention centers.

The law center wants to hear from youths and parents from outside Luzerne County. Their responses will help the center make recommendations for improving the state's youth courts.

This story continues below
Advertisement

"Certainly the corruption and the bribery (in Luzerne County) were an aberration, but some things we know were not aberrations," said Robert Schwartz, the center's executive director.

In Luzerne County, young defendants routinely appeared in front of Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. without lawyers for hearings that lasted just a few minutes. After being found delinquent, the youths were often shackled and taken to private jails.

The owner of the jails was paying bribes to the judge, according to federal prosecutors. Authorities estimate that Ciavarella and another Luzerne County judge, Michael Conahan, took a total of $2.8 million in kickbacks.

The Supreme Court has overturned thousands of juvenile convictions issued by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008, saying that none of the young offenders got a fair hearing.

The Juvenile Law Center questionnaire covers a number of practices that emerged from the scandal. Among other youths who have landed in a Pennsylvania juvenile court, the center wants to hear from defendants who:

-were referred to juvenile court for an incident that took place at school;

-were shackled or handcuffed while in court;

-waived their right to an attorney;

-were sent to a for-profit detention center.

Since respondents will submit their stories anonymously, "we don't think that everything we'll see is statistically significant or gospel," Schwartz said. "But it will give us some sense of the culture in other counties. ... We're looking for broad issues that these stories will address."

The law center is preparing a report for the Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice, a panel created by the Legislature, governor and state Supreme Court in August to examine the causes of the Luzerne County scandal and to recommend changes to prevent it from happening elsewhere.

Ciavarella and Conahan pleaded guilty in February to honest services fraud and tax evasion in a deal with prosecutors that called for a sentence of 87 months in prison. The deal was rejected in August by a federal judge who said the two hadn't fully accepted responsibility for the crimes, and the ex-judges switched their pleas to not guilty.

A federal grand jury then returned a 48-count racketeering indictment against the judges, who await trial.