APNow this is dark: An attorney who owns private juvenile jails, pays juvenile judges under the table to sustain petitions against alleged juvenile offenders (in other words, children), and then sentence the poor kids to serve time in the very same jails—at a tidy profit for attorney. So much so that the attorney was able to support a yacht and a corporate jet from the kiddy-jail-bribery revenues.
BTW, the attorney got caught, he pleaded guilty today, and he faces a 5 year sentence—except he is not going to a kiddy jail.
Robert Powell, 49, pleaded guilty to concealing a felony and being an accessory after the fact for his role in paying two judges who sentenced juvenile offenders to a pair of private detention facilities he owned.
The Hazleton attorney was charged after former Luzerne County Judges Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella pleaded guilty in February to accepting the payoffs. The judges' admissions of wrongdoing prompted the state Supreme Court to overturn hundreds of juvenile convictions issued by Ciavarella, ruling the disgraced judge violated the constitutional rights of youth offenders who appeared in his courtroom without lawyers between 2003 and 2008.
Powell's attorney, Mark Sheppard, issued a statement saying his client accepted responsibility for his actions and promised full cooperation with authorities.
Among the offenders ordered into Powell's detention centers were teenagers who were locked up for months for minor offenses, including petty theft, prank notes and possession of drug paraphernalia. Many of the teens had never been in trouble before, and some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.
Prosecutors said that Powell paid $772,500 in kickbacks, disguising the payments as rental fees to the judges for docking his yacht at their Florida condominium. Under a plea agreement with the U.S. attorney's office, he will give up his ownership stake in the 56-foot yacht, named "Reel Justice," as well as a corporate jet.
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