Word: legality
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...biggest scandal in American legal history, many are calling it at least the darkest day for the country's troubled juvenile-justice system. For more than four years earlier this decade, two senior county juvenile-court judges in northeastern Pennsylvania took kickbacks of $2.6 million in exchange for packing thousands of kids off to privately owned detention centers. Many of the kids had committed minor offenses and didn't have the benefit of a lawyer. A 14-year-old from Wilkes-Barre, for instance, spent a year in a Glen Mills detention facility for the offense of stealing loose change...
...former chief of the same court. Or maybe it was what State Chief Justice Ron Castile told a local columnist, in a sad commentary on the entire system: the judges found the state's figures on the unusually high rates of kids being sentenced to detention and getting no legal representation simply too hard to believe...
...Pennsylvania scandal showed, keeping kids out of institutions requires at the very least zealous legal representation. The Supreme Court extended the right to legal counsel to juveniles in 1967. But in practice the requirement still goes largely unfulfilled, in part because in some jurisdictions, it does not apply to the initial detention hearings at which judges decide whether the minor can stay at home or must be held by authorities. In addition, the confidentiality measures in place to protect the identities of minors can sometimes prevent much needed transparency...
...position where they should have known of the problem but chose not to speak out. Instead, it took the work of the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center to uncover the abuses. After discovering that more than 50% of kids in Luzerne County Juvenile Court had been without legal counsel, the organization in April 2008 petitioned the Pennsylvania supreme court to step in. (See the top 10 crime stories...
...altogether, in all kinds of climatic conditions, with no incident. "I wouldn't do this in Afghanistan," he concedes, but he insists on his right to walk naked on the trails of his own country, where public nudity - as long as it is not lewd - is perfectly legal. (See pictures of treasure-hunting in Afghanistan...