They should wear red capes

FOR YEARS, Marsha Levick was alarmed by the number of kids sent into juvenile detention for low-level crimes that never should land a child in jail.

But it wasn't until two Luzerne County juvenile-court judges were convicted of taking $2.6 million from the builder of a juvenile detention center - a scandal dubbed Kids for Cash - that the abuse of children's legal rights began receiving the attention it should've been getting all along.

That's disheartening to Levick. But if that's what it took to lift the issue above the radar, so be it.

"For most people, the money part of the scandal is the most shocking," says Levick, lead counsel of the Juvenile Law Center, which she co-founded in 1975 with attorney Robert Schwartz. Their investigation of legal horrors by Luzerne County judges Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella fortified an FBI investigation of the men. Ultimately, Conahan pleaded guilty to racketeering and Ciavarella was convicted of racketeering and fraud charges.

Levick and Schwartz - dogged and brilliant child advocates who ought to wear red capes to work - are prominently featured in a new documentary about the scandal, also named "Kids for Cash," opening today.

"The Luzerne case was the greatest judicial courtroom scandal in the nation," says Levick. "That's what got everyone's attention. But once people get beyond that, they see the bigger issue."

Which was the chilling, systematic denial of legal representation for kids unlucky enough to be brought before the Luzerne judges on charges as petty as mocking a school principal on a phony Myspace page. In some cases, the children were sentenced to years of detention - which never would've happened had they had legal representation, as required by a 1967 landmark order by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The fate of the Luzerne children turned when a victim's mother sought help from Levick and Schwartz, whose years as kids' legal advocates meant that they were aware of a prior complaint, years before, about Ciavarella's overzealous "zero-tolerance" sentencing methods of juveniles. They researched his record and found countless cases of kids sentenced without counsel.

Because of their willingness to pull the thread on a scandal bigger than anyone in the Luzerne judicial system was willing to acknowledge, wrongly jailed kids were freed from detention and their records - more than 2,500 of them - were expunged.

"There was a conspiracy of silence, a willing blindness," in Luzerne, says Levick. "People knew these kids had no lawyers but saw it as business as usual. As outsiders, we were able to peer in and say, 'There is something very wrong here.' "

What would these kids and families have done without advocates as experienced, yet unjaded, as Levick, Schwartz and their staff?

Levick worries about them still. Now adults, many had been incarcerated for years by the time the scandal came to light.

"A lot of them continue to suffer the consequences of what happened to them, " says Levick. "They may no longer have records, but they suffered really severe and serious disruptions in their educational lives, in their engagement with their communities and with their families. It has been very difficult to regain what they lost and to undo the trauma of those years. That's the painful part of this scandal that persists."

Since their release, important changes have come about in the Keystone State.

A child's right to counsel has been reiterated and strengthened.

Kids can no longer be shackled in the courtroom.

And judges can no longer send a juvenile offender into placement without a stated reason for removing him or her from home. In the past, if a defense lawyer wanted to challenge a placement, there was nothing on the record they could challenge.

"You would assume reasons would be given, but they were not required," says Levick.

Despite the successes, says Levick, much remains to be done - chiefly, the rolling back of an insane zero-tolerance policy for juvenile behaviors as innocent as a kindergartner bringing a plastic knife to school.

And whether the "perfect storm" of gaps that caused Kids for Cash have been fixed remains an open question.

"We'll see, when the next problem comes along, " says Levick, "how well the judicial system polices itself."