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As folks sort the stack of Biden’s 1,500 pardons, some real stinkers have surfaced. Local WGAL Pennsylvania ran a story yesterday headlined, “Kids-for-cash judge's sentence commuted by Biden.” Get ready to get angry.
Michael Conahan, 72, a former Luzerne County judge, was sentenced to prison 10 years ago for running a “kids-for-cash” racket with former judge Mark Ciavarella. While receiving $2.8 million in bribes and kickbacks from developers, the two judges funneled kids as young as 8 into a harsh private correctional facility that was paying them under the table. Under cover of a “zero tolerance” policy, the two men unlawfully jailed thousands of children with shockingly strict sentences.
For instance, Judge Conahan sentenced one teenager with no prior legal problems to three months in juvenile detention for creating a MySpace page that mocked an assistant principal at her school.
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ultimately vacated over 4,000 juvenile convictions involving more than 2,300 kids after Conahan and Ciavarella’s schemes were finally put to a stop. Conahan got 17 years and Ciavarella got 28; the two judges were ordered to pay back $200 million in restitution to the victims. I found no evidence that any payments were ever made and I doubt it happened.
The story was a pretty big deal, although you can be forgiven not having heard of it before. Here is a link to one of the documentaries. Here is a link to one of the “Kids for Cash” books, this one published this year, titled “Shackled: A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town that Looked Away.” The scandal was widely covered by local media at the time (2010-11) and for years afterward, as the civil case worked its way through the system. For example, here’s a headline from the Morning Call, 2021:
'He screwed up my life': More than 300 survivors of 'Kids for
Cash' scandal tell horror stories in civil case against judges in
Luzerne County
Unsurprisingly, useless corporate media has shown little interest in the salacious story, which should be perfect media material. Why do you suppose that is?
Anyway, the notorious, disgraced judge Conahan —while he sat on the bench, “The Boss”— was fortunate enough to be jailed in blue Miami and have high blood pressure. Ciavarella was not so lucky. He was not in a covid “high risk” category and so remains in prison in North Carolina. (Judge Ciavarella’s application for compassionate covid release was denied.)
But Judge Conahan was “compassionately” released to home confinement in 2020 as part of Pennsylvania’s pandemic mitigation strategy.
Biden’s blanket pardon broadly swept up non-violent prisoners who were on covid home release, which included Judge Conahan. Conahan is now a free man, liberated even from home confinement. Judge Conahan received the leniency he never showed to the children who appeared before the “no-nonsense” judge in his “zero tolerance” courtroom.
Looking at the cast of criminals moronically swept into Biden’s pardon, my working hypothesis is there was one particular crook who Biden wanted to pardon, but the case was so ugly that Joe pardoned 1,500 of them, to hide the one he really wanted. You know, strategic ambiguity.
I don’t want to hear any complaints from Democrats over who Trump pardons or how many.
Ban private prisons because they bribe judges to feed them more prisoners.
The report falsely asserts that that the injections “saved millions of lives.”
Sickened Covid “vaxxers” know by experience, and non-vaxxers know by hearing from ill vaxxers, that the shots plainly failed, as had been firmly and repeatedly promised, to stop infection and spread. All of the dozens of injectors I know have gotten sick multiple times. Given that this infection-blocking pledge plainly failed, vaxx backers defaulted to the stance that the shots prevented hospitalizations and saved lives. But no uninjected person I know has ended up in the hospital. And as I’ve pointed out in previous posts, researchers have resorted to such cheesy tricks as counting the injected as “unvaccinated” until six weeks after their first shot; thus, the jabbed who died in those six weeks were counted as “unvaxxed.” Such chicanery, which includes but isn’t limited to, healthy vaccinee bias, nullifies such research’s findings.
The sole reference for the Subcommittee’s claim that “the shots saved millions of lives” is a single online—otherwise unpublished and not peer-reviewed—modeling exercise by a big-money, Med/Pharma promoting entity that calls itself “The Commonwealth Fund.” As public health physician David Bell has pointed out, the model’s “life-saving” estimates are based on the dubious assumption that Covid incidence would have been far higher in years 2 and 3 of the pandemic than in the first year; such an incidence curve would be highly unusual for a respiratory virus, especially one that creates natural immunity. The model also assumes that 2021 Covid variants were as potent as those found in 2019-2020. This assumption is plainly unsound: viruses typically evolve into less lethal forms. By 2021, SARS-CoV-2 had weakened into the Omicron variant, in accordance with basic biology.
No random clinical trials have been done to prove that, on a net basis, the shots saved lives over an extended period. It seems more likely that the shots have shortened lives. Many have noticed, as I have, that some of the vaxxers they know have sustained serious injuries or died of non-Covid causes, such as heart attacks, strokes or cancers. Sustained excess death rates in highly-vaxxed nations corroborate anecdotal evidence that, on balance, the shots have hastened, not delayed, death.
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"Stern and lasting message" my ass. Only life in prison will do. Singapore is a much better country than the US in this way.