No justice in pardon of jailed judge
Michael Conahan should be familiar with what goes into difficult decisions about crime and punishment and their effect on a person’s life.
Conahan was a Temple-trained lawyer, who spent 13 years as a Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas judge.
For four years, he was the county’s president judge — a position like the chief justice of a supreme court that adds administrative responsibility to the judicial load.
He was called upon to weigh what was done, why, remorse and regret then deliver appropriate consequences. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to a scheme in which he and another judge, Mark Ciavarella, funneled children as young as 8 years old into for-profit juvenile detention for crimes including smoking and skipping class. The two judges netted $2.8 million in kickbacks.
Conahan subsequently would withdraw that plea, then enter another. In 2011, he was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in federal prison and penalized almost $1 million in fines and restitution.
Ciavarella’s sentence was 28 years. Ciavarella has stayed in custody. The Bureau of Prisons lists him as an inmate at a federal facility in North Carolina. But in 2020, Conahan was released to home confinement because of COVID-19.
Recently, the now 72-year-old disbarred and disgraced former judge was included in a wide net of about 1,500 federal prisoners whose sentences were commuted.
Like him, they were serving their sentences at home since the pandemic.
Bureau of Prisons records show Conahan was set to stay in Residential Reentry Management Miami supervision through August 2026.
“As president, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses,” President Joe Biden said in his statement.
Did someone really look down the list of offenders and decide that Conahan merited mercy? Was his case shrugged off as a white-collar kind of crime? Was “removing sentencing disparities” considered a priority for someone whose crime was actually in the sentences he delivered?
While many may focus on Biden’s pardon of his son as his greatest misstep in the clemency process, it is hard to look at Conahan’s case and see that.
There is no “great privilege” in extending mercy to a judge who sold out children to acquire wealth. Conahan already was out of prison. Would 20 more months of the minimal confinement of his own home be an onerous burden?
“This pardon feels like an injustice for all of us who still suffer,” Sandy Fonzo told The Citizens’ Voice of Wilkes-Barre. Fonzo’s son was one of the minors caught up in the Kids for Cash scheme. He committed suicide in 2010.
The children who were traded like commodities while being branded as criminals are not granted a reprieve from their experience. The families still live with what happened.
But the person given mercy was the one who wielded the gavel. There is no justice in that.
— Pittsburgh Tribune-Review