Federal sentencing fall-out from juve sentencing corruption

Regular readers will recall last week's remarkable story of two Pennsylvania state judges who to plead guilty to taking millions in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.  This new local story reports on a fascinating federal sentencing echo from that case:

The fallout from disgraced Luzerne County Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr.’s handling of juvenile court cases has now spread to the federal court system.  On Tuesday, a lawyer for Justin Plesh, a Hazleton man awaiting sentencing in a marijuana trafficking case in U.S. District Court, asked that a marijuana possession case handled by Ciavarella in 2003 not be considered in determining Plesh’s sentence under federal guidelines.

Plesh was 16 in May 2003 when Ciavarella sent him to a juvenile detention center, according to a motion filed by his federal public defender.... If the juvenile court case is counted against Plesh in the federal case, the low end of sentence would increase by 13 months, the motion says. Plesh faces a maximum of five years in prison.

The motion argues that the federal court should nullify Ciavarella’s rulings due to his recent guilty plea to accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks in connection with juvenile-detention contracts and a review of all his juvenile court cases ordered by the state Supreme Court.  Ciavarella failed to inform hundreds of juvenile defendants of their rights to an attorney, according to a lawsuit filed by the Juvenile Law Center, a Philadelphia advocacy group.... “It is respectfully requested that this Honorable Court issue a ruling that unequivocally states that none of the actions of Mark A. Ciavarella while he was masquerading as an honest juvenile judge be given any recognition, force or effect,” the motion says.