On February 18, 2011, Mark Ciavarella — a Luzerne County juvenile court judge in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who had presided over the county's juvenile bench since 1996 — was convicted of 12 federal counts including racketeering, honest-services fraud, money laundering conspiracy, and tax offenses after a federal investigation revealed he and President Judge Michael Conahan had accepted approximately $2.6 million in payments from private detention facility developer Robert Mericle and co-owner Robert Powell in exchange for steering a steady flow of juveniles into their for-profit lockups. The scheme operated from 2003 through 2008, during which time Ciavarella adjudicated an estimated 4,000 children — some as young as eight — many of whom appeared without counsel, were never advised of their right to an attorney, and were shackled and removed from the courtroom on the spot for offenses as minor as petty theft, truancy, and jaywalking. On August 11, 2011, Judge Edwin Kosik sentenced Ciavarella to 28 years in federal prison; a federal court later ordered both judges to pay roughly $206 million in damages to nearly 300 victims. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated approximately 4,000 juvenile adjudications. Among those children was a fourteen-year-old girl sent to detention for eleven months over a one-way-street violation, a sentence whose length, witnesses noted, appeared to match the number of buttons on her shirt.