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“We thought we could use the law to help kids, to make sure their voices were heard when decisions were made about them.” -- Robert Schwartz, of the Juvenile Law Center

By Terrie Morgan-Besecker tmorgan@timesleader.com
Law & Order Reporter
Terrie Morgan-Besecker on Facebook   |   @TLTerrieMorgan on Twitter

Robert Schwartz was fresh out of college in 1971 when he landed a job at a youth center that helped keep kids off the streets and out of trouble by providing structured activities.

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Attorney Marsha Levick, legal director of of the Juvenile Law Center, talks about center’s early years. She and three classmates from Temple University Law School founded the center in 1975.

Pete G. Wilcox/The Times Leader

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Attorney Marsha Levick, legal director for the Juvenile Law Center, discusses a painting at the center’s office that depicts the significance of a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ensured juveniles had a right to counsel.

Pete G. Wilcox/The Times Leader

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It was a great position that gave him the chance to follow his passion to help troubled youths, he said. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long.

“Kids set fire to the place about four or five months after I started,” he said.

It was an incident that could very well have crushed the idealism that drove the then-21-year-old Schwartz to public service. Rather than become jaded and angry, he remained determined to make a difference in the lives of young people.

Four years later and with a new law degree in hand, Schwartz joined with fellow Temple University Law School graduates Marsha Levick, Judith Chomsky and Philip Margolis to form the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, the nation’s first nonprofit public interest law firm to focus on the rights of juveniles.

Fast forward 35 years. Schwartz, 60, and Levick, 58, remain with the center, leading it as it tackles what many believe to be one of the worst juvenile justice scandals in the nation’s history in Luzerne County.

A judge last week dismissed the last of an estimated 6,500 juvenile cases handled by disgraced former judge Mark Ciavarella, the end result of an investigation prompted by legal action the JLC filed in 2008.

Its work in Luzerne County has brought national attention to the center. Schwartz, Levick and other attorneys have been interviewed by media outlets worldwide, including for a segment on the ABC News television program “20-20.”

But its efforts in Luzerne County make up only a fraction of the work the advocacy group has done in the past 3 � decades.

The group is actively involved in numerous issues impacting juveniles, ranging from fighting for improvements in the child welfare system to challenging laws in some states that allow juveniles to be sentenced to life without parole for non-homicide crimes.

It also produces multiple publications relating to juvenile justice and child welfare issues that are used by attorneys, social service providers and judges nationwide, Levick said.

Founded by four classmates

It all began with four idealistic young adults who came together in 1975 with a simple idea:

“We thought we could use the law to help kids, to make sure their voices were heard when decisions were made about them,” Schwartz said.

At the time, juveniles’ rights “wasn’t something anyone paid a lot of attention to,” Levick said.

The landmark Supreme Court decision involving Gerald Gault, which affirmed the right of juveniles to be represented by an attorney, had just come down in 1967.

“We had a new decision that was groundbreaking for the rights of kids,” Levick said. “We were on the ground floor of figuring it out.”

It truly was a labor of love for the four attorneys as they started the center with absolutely no funding.

Fortunately, co-founder Judith Chomsky’s husband was a medical doctor. He allowed the group to set up office in one of the rooms of his practice, Levick said.

“We were all young adults coming of age in the ’60s, which was defined by the civil rights and women’s rights movements. There was a notion that lawyers could make a difference,” Levick said. “Part of it was just naivety. We were so idealistic we didn’t think we needed to be paid.”

They weren’t the first year.

Schwartz supported himself by writing legal briefs for other attorneys. He also umpired baseball and basketball games. Levick got by working part-time at another law firm. They each kept their living costs down by rooming with other college grads.

“I don’t think we thought much about how much money we didn’t have,” Levick said. “We were all friends and were exited to be creating this project.”

Levick was born and raised in Philadelphia. Her father was a medical doctor while her mother has a doctorate degree in psychology. She always knew she wanted to dedicate her life to public service, she said.

“I was raised in a family that viewed public service and a commitment to helping others as a part of life,” she said.

Schwartz grew up in the suburbs of New York. His father was an engineer and his mother was a homemaker while he and his sister were in school. She later became an administrator for a medical group.

“They never questioned my decision to go this route even though on the surface it must have seemed like a lunatic move for someone who just finished law school,” Schwartz said.

‘One stop shop’ beginnings

The center began as a “one stop shop” for juveniles. In addition to representing youths charged with crimes, it provided legal assistance for civil matters, ranging from helping a child resolve special education disputes to obtaining security benefits, Schwartz said.

The group soon branched out to address larger issues that impacted juveniles, filing numerous lawsuits on their behalf.

One of its first major victories involved a lawsuit against several counties regarding shoddy physical conditions and abuse at juvenile detention facilities, Levick said.

In 1980, it successfully sued Montgomery County over the standards the county used to determine whether to hold a juvenile in detention pending an adjudication hearing.

In the late ’80s the center focused efforts more on child welfare reform. One of its major victories involved a lawsuit that forced the state Department of Public Welfare to provide foster care payments to relatives who took in a family member’s child, Levick said.

Attorneys also worked to establish standards that require children-and-youth agencies to make a reasonable effort to keep children with their biological parents before removing them from the home.

The center re-focused its efforts on juvenile delinquency court beginning in early ’90s. At the time, juvenile crime was on the rise. States reacted by adopting a “get-tough” attitude, Levick said.

“Every state legislature started to amend the juvenile code to push kids into the adult system,” Levick said. “In 1996 we had 200 kids in Philadelphia who were charged as adults and held in prison.”

The Columbine High School shootings in 1999 further fueled that atmosphere as schools nationwide adopted zero-tolerance polices that sometimes led to serious sanctions for minor offenses.

The center worked with various groups to try to turn the tide in juvenile justice away from punishment and back to rehabilitation. It held training seminars across the country and created a Web site devoted to zero-tolerance polices, Levick said.

Today the center maintains a balance between juvenile delinquency and child welfare work. Its attorneys still represent a small number of children in delinquency and dependency court, but its focus is on the larger issues that impact the juvenile justice system, Levick said.

It has partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union in a number of cases, filing friend of the court briefs regarding issues that impact children’s rights.

That includes the “sexting” case out of Wyoming County in which the then-district attorney threatened to charge students with possession of child pornography after partially clad photos of them were found on classmates cell phones.

“Every case starts with one kid’s story. It’s our instinct is to see beyond one child’s story to see if there is a bigger story,” Levick said.

Corruption scandal is big

For the center, few stories have been as big as the corruption scandal that has rocked Luzerne County.

Ciavarella and former judge Michael Conahan were charged in January 2009 with improperly accepting millions of dollars from the builder and one-time co-owner of two juvenile centers the county utilized.

The JLC had been investigating Ciavarella’s handling of juvenile court for more than a year before the charges were lodged. Levick said she and others were aware the judges were under investigation, but had no idea it involved the placement of juveniles.

Ciavarella had long been on the center’s radar. It first learned of concerns about him in 1999, when a mother called to complain her son was denied his right to an attorney at a juvenile proceeding.

The case, involving a youth identified as Anthony M., was overturned by the state Superior Court in 2001. At the time, Ciavarella vowed he would never let another juvenile appear before him without an attorney.

“They obviously have a right to a lawyer and even if they come in and tell me that they don’t want a lawyer, they’re going to have one,” Ciavarella said in a story published in The Times Leader on Jan. 6, 2001.

When Laurene Transue of White Haven called the JLC in the spring of 2007, they knew Ciavarella had not kept that promise, Levick said.

Transue’s daughter, Hillary, had been charged with harassment for creating a Web page that mocked a school official. She appeared before Ciavarella without an attorney and was sentenced to a wilderness-style juvenile delinquency camp.

“Our thoughts were, ‘This sounds too much like what happened in Anthony’s case,’ ” Levick said. “If this happened to Hillary in 2007 and another juvenile in 1999, who else was in the same situation?”

And so the center dispatched a team to stand outside Ciavarella’s courtroom and interview parents and children as they left.

They also asked the Juvenile Court Judges Commission, an agency that collects data from juvenile courts statewide, to gather statistics regarding the number of children who appeared without attorneys in juvenile court.

When they saw that Luzerne County’s rate was 50 percent – 10 times the state average – they knew something was wrong.

“All the red flags came together,” Levick said. “There was such a fundamental violation of kids’ rights. We knew we had to do something. The only issue was what were we going to do to fix it?”

What they did was file a petition with the state Supreme Court in April 2008 that sought to overturn convictions of all juveniles who appeared without counsel.

The high court eventually appointed a special master, Senior Judge Arthur Grim of Berks County, to investigate. His report led to the court’s landmark ruling in October of 2009 that overturned the convictions of thousands of juveniles who appeared before Ciavarella.

Another chapter is open

The Supreme Court’s order closed one chapter of the center’s work here, but another remains open.

The center is among several law firms that joined to file a federal civil rights suit against Ciavarella, Conahan and numerous others involved in the juvenile scandal.

The case is a mammoth undertaking that involves the review of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and interviews with hundreds of people. It’s expected to be several years before it’s resolved.

In the meantime, the JLC continues to work on other pressing matters.

The center has come a long way from those days in the back room of a doctor’s office.

Today its takes up several thousand square feet of a downtown Philadelphia office building. It has a staff of 20, including 11 attorneys, and a budget of just under $2 million, roughly 80 percent of which comes from foundations and private donors, Schwartz said.

The days of working for free are also over. Schwartz was paid $130,000 and Levick $127,500 in 2008, according to the center’s latest filing with the Internal Revenue Service.

Though they could earn far more money in the private sector, Schwartz and Levick say they have no intention of leaving.

“What’s kept me here is we’ve had a chance to reinvent ourselves to be more effective every year,” Schwartz said. “Our core is still the same. We’re a group of lawyers working on behalf of children in foster care and the justice system.”

Terrie Morgan-Besecker, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 570-829-7179.