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Times Leader staff and wire reports

SCRANTON – Thousands of juvenile offenders could lose the ability to recover damages from a corrupt judge because the state Supreme Court has refused to preserve key juvenile records, attorneys for victims of the scandal say.

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Ciavarella

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In a harshly worded legal filing, the attorneys accuse the high court of sabotaging the federal claims of children whose constitutional rights were allegedly violated by former Luzerne County juvenile court Judge Mark Ciavarella.

The high court’s actions are “characteristic of its apparent and persistent insensitivity” to the needs of victims of what is likely “the most significant child-related judicial corruption scandal in the nation’s history,” David Senoff and Sol Weiss, two of the lead attorneys for the juveniles say in the court filing.

A spokesman for the Supreme Court declined comment Tuesday on the attorneys’ claims.

The attorneys have asked U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo to reconsider his July 2 order that denied their request to halt the potential destruction of hundreds or thousands of juvenile court records. The judge scheduled a hearing for Monday.

Ciavarella and former Judge Michael Conahan pleaded guilty in February to accepting millions of dollars in kickbacks from the builder and former co-owner of two juvenile detention facilities the county utilized.

Based on those pleas, the Supreme Court ordered that the convictions of hundreds of juveniles charged with low-level crimes be vacated and their records expunged, or erased.

That created a problem for hundreds of juveniles who, alleging they were wrongly incarcerated, have joined in two federal lawsuits against the judges and multiple other defendants.

Attorneys for the juveniles say the records are crucial to the suits because they contain critical information about the charges against the youths.

They argue that destroying the records before the civil case is resolved could jeopardize the juveniles’ ability to recover damages and result in a “manifest injustice” to the affected children.

“Destruction of juveniles’ records pursuant to an expungement order, without also preserving a copy for use in this litigation, risks denying juveniles a meaningful day in court — an extraordinary irony in light of the wholesale violations of their due process rights at the hands of Mr. Ciavarella,” the attorneys wrote

But Caputo denied the attorneys’ request to preserve a single, sealed copy of each youth’s record, deferring to the wishes of the Supreme Court, which opposed the preservation request.

In a June 25 letter to Caputo, Pennsylvania Court Administrator Zygmont Pines, writing on behalf of the high court, said youths who have not joined any of the lawsuits may not want to have their records preserved. The court’s main concern is “to ensure that tainted convictions of affected juveniles in Luzerne County be undone as expeditiously as possible,” Pines wrote.

The Supreme Court did give juveniles the option of requesting that their records be preserved, but ordered that any youth who went that route would not immediately have his or her conviction vacated — meaning the conviction would stay on the juvenile’s record at least until the end of the federal lawsuit, which is probably years away.

That creates a “Catch 22” for the juveniles, their attorneys say. If they seek a copy of their records in order to protect their rights in the civil case, they will be denied the right to have the record immediately expunged in the state court proceeding.

That choice “serves neither the interests of Luzerne County children and families nor the interests of justice,” the attorneys wrote.

“A preservation order would eliminate the ... choice forced on Plaintiffs by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court – to choose between vacatur and expungement in state court or money damages in federal court, neither of which alone affords a complete remedy,” the attorneys wrote.