Revenge Must Have Been Sweet For These Kids!

when the judge that sent them to jail was convicted of receiving bribes to send them there by the jail owners! like many other 15-year-old schoolgirls, Hillary Transue was not quite as respectful as she might have been towards the teachers at her Pennsylvania school, yet she was a clever, computer-savvy pupil who had good grades and had never been in serious trouble, one day, for a joke, she published a spoof article on the MySpace social networking website, mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, the teacher complained and, to the astonishment of her family, Transue was charged with harassment and hauled into juvenile court, that was where the family’s surprise turned to horror, after studying the case for two minutes, Judge Mark Ciavarella sentenced Transue to three months in juvenile detention, she was led out of the court in handcuffs, two years later it is Ciavarella’s turn to go to jail and Transue is among several hundred former inmates of local juvenile detention centres who are suing for compensation after one of America’s most sinister judicial scandals of recent times, Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, a fellow judge from Luzerne county in northeastern Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty last month to pocketing more than $2.6m (£1.8m) in kickbacks from the operators of two privately run juvenile detention centres, both men face more than seven years in jail for their roles in a bizarre kids-for-cash scheme that flourished despite local newspaper investigations and complaints by families that children were being denied access to lawyers, between 2002 and 2006 Ciavarella is thought to have jailed a quarter of the defendants who appeared in his court, compared with an average for other judges of one in 10, in many cases he first persuaded the parents to waive their rights to legal representation on the grounds that the process would be cheaper and quicker, among the judge’s victims was Jamie Quinn, a 14-year-old girl who got into a fight with a friend and ended up slapping her, her punishment: nine months in juvenile detention, Chad Uca was 15 when he pushed a boy at school, causing him to cut his head on a locker, Uca got three months, another child was jailed for shoplifting a $4 jar of nutmeg, all were first-time offenders, I can not help thinking that it would be so nice for these judges to bump into some of the more serious miscreants they have sentenced in the past in jail!