Mom’s Outrage Over Biden’s Presidential Clemency for Corrupt Kids-for-Cash Judge and Cohort
Among the 1,499 people granted clemency by President Biden on Thursday was a disgraced county judge who was denied early release in federal court not five months ago.
“Defendant held a position of power and trust, he abused both when he schemed over an extended period of time to personally benefit from children being sentenced to a private detention facility,” the July 15 ruling in Pennsylvania federal court said of President Judge Michael Conahan of the Court of Common Pleas of Luzerne County.
Conahan had hoped to be spared the last two years of a 17-and-a-half-year sentence for joining juvenile court Judge Mark Ciavarella in pocketing $2.8 million in a “kids for cash” scheme. The two jurists had conspired with a real estate developer and a lawyer to shut down the existing county juvenile detention facility and built two new private, for profit lock-ups, PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care.
The judges turned minors into money by instituting a zero tolerance policy and remanding even juveniles facing minor charges. The kids were often kept from calling their parents before they were shackled and led from court to incarceration.
Eddie Kenzakoski, 17, was one of the kids converted to cash in 2003. The son of a single working mom, Kenzakoski was a star wrestler on his way to an athletic scholarship to college.
“He had a good life ahead of him,” his mother, 55-year-old Sandy Fonza, told the Daily Beast.
Kenzakoski was then arrested at a high-school drinking party for possession of narcotics paraphernalia. He was brought before Ciavarella, who initially ordered him locked up in a facility 20 minutes away from where he lived with his mother, who immediately sought to get him released.
“I had letters from the teachers, letters from the coaches saying that this was a good kid and that he learned his lesson,” she recalled. “He just wants to get back to school and to get back to his life. We just thought he was gonna be released home. And that’s when he wasn’t.”
She got a call from her son the next day saying that he had been driven through a rain storm to another facility four hours from home.
“He was scared to death,” she remembered. “When I flipped out and went to look into it, they told me I had no rights over him anymore. He was in their custody and I had no rights.”
Fonza had a lawyer with her when she returned to court, but Ciavarella would not let him speak.
“It didn’t matter anything anybody said,” she recalled. “They did what they wanted. And it didn’t matter who was there and what anybody said, they just kept these facilities full and that was it. That was the bottom line.”
Eight months later, Kenzakoski was released.
“He never talked about what happened in there,” Fonzo remembered. “He didn’t even want to look you in the eye. So God knows what happened to him.”
He had missed his entire entire senior year in high school
“Losing his chance at a scholarship, never getting to wrestle again,” Fonzo said. “It was just awful. And he was just angry and bitter. He was not the same person. He got into a fight.”
He was arrested, but the charges were dropped. Ciavarella nonetheless ruled him in violation of probation.
“And that’s when he went away for a year,” Fonza said. “He was never the same. And you know, you can’t take a kid who’s still learning and growing and making mistakes and trying to be a kid and rip them out of their home and all of their well-being and think that they’re just gonna bounce right back like nothing ever happened,”
Her son became depressed and withdrawn. He ceased talking to anybody.
On Memorial Day, 2010, he took his own life with a bullet. He was 23.
“He was my everything, my only child,” Fonza said. “His whole life got upended and ended.”
The judges who had enriched themselves at the expense of Kenzakoski and hundreds of others were indicted for racketeering and both were convicted in 2011. Ciavarella got a tougher sentence because he went to trial. Fonzo confronted him outside federal court in Scranton where he got 28 years.
“Do you remember me? Do you remember my son, an all-star wrestler?” she asked him. “He’s gone. He shot himself in the heart.”
Conahan arranged a lesser sentence of 17-and-a-half years by pleading guilty. Fonzo held him equally responsible as the senior judge in the scheme She consoled herself that at least both men had now themselves been locked up.
“At least in my heart, I felt they were paying for what they did to these kids, they did to these kids and ruining lives, my son’s life,” Fonzo said. “They were off the street, out of society.”
The real estate developer and the lawyer who participated in the scheme cooperated with the government and received token sentences. Fonzo received a modest sum from the developer, but did not take a penny for herself. She set up a foundation at her son’s former high school in his name that gave an annual award until the money ran out. .
“A wrestler scholarship,” she said.
She had a German shepherd named Justice, but felt less like she had received some measure of justice itself after the pandemic hit and Conahan was granted compassionate release to home detention because his age and health made him vulnerable to COVID-19. He was allowed to move into a luxury home in a gated community in Delray Beach, Florida which he had been able to acquire even though he was supposed to have been stripped of all his ill gotten gains and his salary as a judge had been under $75,000.
“It was a slap in the wrist when he was in house arrest in that paradise,” she said. “And where did that money come from?”
As the pandemic passed, Conahan was allowed to continue serving his sentence in the cushy quarters that he retained even after the courts awarded a $206 million judgment against him and Ciavarella on behalf of 300 victims, one of whom had been only 8 years old when he was locked up for their profit. Conahan nevertheless had the audacity to apply for his sentence to be reduced to nothing at all. The court was not having it.
“The intended weight of the Court’s 17.5-year sentence was frustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, when after serving half of the original sentence Conahan was released from prison to home confinement,” federal Judge Robert Marinari said in his ruling. “Now, he seeks further reduction.”
The judge added, “To reduce Defendant’s sentence—the sentence of a white-collar criminal who admittedly engaged in the extensive conduct charged after he had been entrusted with administering justice and overseeing the well-being of children in trouble—would undermine respect for the law and would not adequately deter such conduct, particularly when the [Bureau of Prisons] has afforded Defendant the benefit of serving half of his sentence on home confinement.”
Then came the word “DENIED,” which seemed to guarantee that Conahan would be serving out the rest of his already too lenient term. Fonzo had no reason to think otherwise as she set off on Thursday to make house calls as a physical therapist.
One of her patients was up in the mountains in an area without cellphone service, and it was not until she was descending to see her next patient that she realized something big must have happened.“I started getting so many hits on my phone, like texts coming in and calls and people messaging,” she recalled. “I was just getting bombarded.”
She learned that Biden had granted Conahan clemency.
“What happened here is like my son’s life didn’t matter,” she said. “If he cared anything about our kids and our lives, he never would have done this. I am deeply hurt.”
The clemency did not extend to Ciavarella, who is not due for release until 2034. But Conahan was free for the holidays. A mother still grieving after nearly 14 years noted, “Christmas is a hard enough time.”
To make it worse, she lives near Scranton, which Biden speaks of as his home town and touchstone.
“He came here, God knows how many times, talking about caring about everybody here and, this is family here, this is where he blah, blah, blah. And then he does this. I mean, this is just a slap in the face to everybody here. It’s just disgusting,” she said.
She added, “I voted for him. We have an expressway named after him.”
There is also a Biden Street in Scranton, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro happened to hold a press conference here on an unrelated matter on Friday when he was asked about the clemency granted Conahan.
“I do feel strongly that President Biden got it absolutely wrong and created a lot of pain here in northeastern Pennsylvania,” Shapiro responded. “Some children took their lives because of this. Families were torn apart.”
Shapiro continued, “There was all kinds of mental health issues and anguish that came as a result of these corrupt judges deciding they wanted to make a buck off a kid’s back. The fact that he’s been allowed out over the last years because of COVID, was on house arrest and now has been granted clemency, I think, is absolutely wrong.”
Shapiro concluded, “He should have been in prison for at least the 17 years that he was sentenced to by a jury of his peers. He deserves to be behind bars, not walking as a free man.”
Biden offered no specific reason for any individual clemency. CNN reported an unnamed administration official saying the White House had conferred blanket mercy on 1,499 non-violent offenders who met such general conditions as behaving well while on house arrest.
While Conahn walked free, Fonza set out into the trees around her home.
Her son loved the outdoors and after his death she sought solace walking in the woods with Justice. She came upon a number of heart shaped stones.
Justice has succumbed to age and illness, but Fonza now has a blue heeler named Ella Grace. She set off through the trees with Ella Grace after her last patient on Thursday. She came upon a piece of bark in a shape that still manages to be a comfort to a heartbroken mother whose son shot himself in the heart.
“There are hearts everywhere,” she said.
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