‘He screwed up my life’
More than 300 survivors tell horror stories in civil case against judges in Luzerne County
WILKES-BARRE — The judge who heard testimony from over 300 plaintiffs in a weekslong civil damages hearing against former Luzerne County judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan called it “incredible, remarkable and very disturbing.”
Eight of the few remaining plaintiffs in the federal class-action lawsuit testified Monday via video call at the Max Rosenn U.S. Courthouse before Sol H. Weiss, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, delivered his closing arguments.
Among them was Melanie Petrillo, who said she was 12 when she first went before Ciavarella in juvenile court in 2002. Ciavarella, she said, wouldn’t let her speak in her own defense.
On Monday, Petrillo testified that a visiting friend set a small fire in a garbage can outside her house. She went inside to get a glass of water and police quickly arrived. She was arrested and later taken before Ciavarella, who sentenced her to a few months at the former Luzerne County Juvenile Detention Center.
“It was horrifying,” Petrillo recalled. “I had to put a blanket over my head so the cockroaches wouldn’t fall on me.”
Her second appearance was for a probation violation. This time, Ciavarella sent her to PA Child Care, the juvenile detention facility at the center of the judicial corruption case known as the kids-for-cash scandal.
Conahan and Ciavarella have already spent years in prison for accepting $2.8 million in exchange for funneling hundreds of juvenile defendants to for-profit detention centers.
Petrillo’s third appearance before Ciavarella was on a burglary charge after, she said,
she got in with the wrong crowd because of her reputation. She would remain in juvenile detention until she turned 18.
“He screwed up my life. I’m still dealing with trauma,” Petrillo said, adding that she goes to therapy weekly and is on medication for anxiety.
Elizabeth Lorent testified that Ciavarella sent her to PA Child Care for 32 days after she was found to have brought a few opioid pills to school. He sent her to Camp Adams, a juvenile boot camp, for a probation violation when she was 17. That cost her a college scholarship.
She started hanging out with a bad crowd after she lost good friends “because their parents didn’t want them to be around me anymore,” she said, her voice breaking.
When U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner asked Lorent if she remembered anything specific from her time before Ciavarella, she said the time before him was minimal.
“All I can remember is his coldness and his nonchalant demeanor,” she said.
In his closing argument, Weiss reminded Conner of testimony from other plaintiffs, showing their photos on courtroom video screens along with their ages, crimes and how they were affected by Ciavarella’s sentence.
Crimes ranged from fighting at school to the case of one boy who “stole a Hershey bar.”
That boy was Zachary Richards. His mother, Bridget DeFalco, testified on his behalf on an earlier day of the hearing. She was in the courtroom Monday and Weiss had her stand as he spoke of Zachary, who took his own life at age 27.
“I was very happy to be able to tell Zachary’s story,” DeFalco said after the hearing. “I wanted to make it very clear to Judge Conner that Zachary would still be alive today had this not happened, had he not been victimized by Conahan and Ciavarella. He was in and out of juvenile [detention] from the age of 14 to 18.”
Weiss also had Ryan Lamoreaux, one of the juvenile victims, stand when he reminded Conner of his story.
Later, outside the courthouse, Lamoreaux, 33, described the hearing as emotional.
“I kind of buried my emotional traumas and I tried putting everything behind me,” he said. “You can’t really move past something unless you either fix the problem or you bury it deep inside. I just kind of buried my problems. So, this kind of brought that back to light a little bit.”
Weiss listed some of the consequences many juveniles said they suffered because of their detentions — 65 dropped out of high school, many have been diagnosed with depression, anxiety and/or post-traumatic stress disorder, many others struggle with alcohol and drug addiction.
Weiss showed photos of juveniles at Glen Mills School, where Lamoreaux spent five years on a vandalism charge and which the state shut down in 2019 after investigators found a history of child abuse, followed by photos of Conahan’s Florida home and the ocean view from its deck.
“This is where Judge Conahan today serves out his house arrest because he got out early because of COVID in the prison system,” Weiss said. “That’s what he looks at. Contrast that.”
Weiss asked Conner to consider awarding punitive damages of nine times whatever he awards in compensatory damages in the case.
Conner said that in addition to emotional harm, many if not all of the juveniles suffered “reputational harm … by virtue of being labeled a bad kid.”
The impact of that label affected the way many plaintiffs were viewed in and treated by their community, “and the impact and the ramifications are far reaching as we heard. And that’ s another matter that I intend to take into consideration,” Conner said.
Because of the magnitude of the case, Conner said, he didn’t expect to issue a ruling until early next year.