In December, when President Joe Biden commuted the sentence of former Luzerne County judge Michael Conahan — one of two elected officials implicated in the infamous Kids for Cash scandal — anger bubbled up across Pennsylvania.
There was outrage in local op-ed pages. Family members of the more than 2,300 victims spoke out. Governor Josh Shapiro, in a rare dig at a fellow Democrat, called the clemency of Conahan “absolutely wrong” while insisting he “deserves to be behind bars.”
Kids for Cash remains one of the worst examples of judicial corruption in the history of the country. Conahan and fellow judge Mark Ciavarella received millions of dollars in kickbacks from a private detention facility in exchange for issuing draconian sentencing and imprisonment for minor offenses by teenagers and kids as young as eight years old.
But there was one person to hear the news who wasn’t among the aggrieved: The lawyer chiefly responsible for uncovering the scandal and prosecuting the judges in the first place.
“My best friends are upset about it, and this is what I say to each of them,” says Marsha Levick, co-founder of the Juvenile Law Center. “Do you believe in compassion and mercy?”
Levick answers her own question with a resounding yes. Compassion has underlied her storied career. More than most, Levick understands the non-rehabilitative effects of the justice system, its overcrowding, and the psychic toll of incarceration on many individuals. For all those reasons, and more, Levick has been focused on litigation and policy advocacy that works to lessen the amount of people, especially kids, behind bars.
It’s a mission that Levick has remained steadfastly committed to, even when it comes to one of PA’s most notorious villains in recent memory, Conahan. “I think it’s very hard to declare that you hold a particular set of values, and then start dividing them up,” says Levick. “Either you believe them or you don’t.”
“How does one carry on the fight? That’s the challenge for me. And, you know, I have some ideas.” — Marsha Levick, Juvenile Law Center
Since unearthing the Kids for Cash scandal — which resulted in more than 4,000 juvenile convictions in PA being thrown out — Levick has shaped national policy in numerous ways. Levick’s work as co-counsel in Montgomery v. Louisiana led to the Supreme Court retroactively applying its decision in a previous case (one that Levick also contributed to, with an amicus brief) which declared as unconstitutional life-without-parole sentences for juveniles. Montgomery resulted in thousands of people, including more than 500 in PA, who were convicted as kids receiving a chance at parole (no longer resigned to dying behind bars).
For her selfless pursuit of civil rights for youth and helping to enrich the public-interest legal community of Philadelphia, Levick is this year’s A. Leon Higginbotham Social Justice Champion of the Year. She will be honored alongside her fellow Citizens of the Year at a dinner celebration on February 25 at The Fitler Club Ballroom. (You can read about all of this year’s winners here, and find out about tickets and sponsorships for the star-studded event here.)
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Blazing a new path
According to Levick, you can’t tell the origin story of Juvenile Law Center without the context of the 1960s, when Levick was a student at Friends Select High School and then at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Time and place matters,” she says. “All of that social activism — and let’s be clear, also sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll — that was our world and what we experienced coming out of our teenage years, into law school.”
The daughter of an oncologist and a pscyhologist, Levick was a keen observer of the era’s tumult and idealism, from the Civil Rights movement to political assassinations to the Vietnam War. After graduating from Penn, she wished to contribute to a better world. “In the early 70s, women were flooding into law schools [for the first time],” Levick says. At Temple Law School, she was inspired by a constitutional law course to become a civil rights lawyer. And just a few years before, in a 1967 case known as Gault, the Supreme Court established the right to counsel for people under the age of 18.
For the first time, juveniles had a constitutional right to legal representation. Once again, Levick took inspiration from the epoch. “That’s what we seized on,” says Levick. “This whole idea of a universe of children’s lawyers was incredibly novel, and we saw a space that nobody was occupying. In a way, it was entrepreneurial and opportunistic.”
Believing they could positively shape a nascent area of the law, Levick and a few classmates hatched the idea of launching their own public-interest firm focused on representing juveniles. Even for seasoned lawyers, the idea required a leap of faith. Doing so right out of school was preposterous, many lawyers advised them. One of those people was Bob Reinstein, the constitutional law professor at Temple who’d first inspired them.
“I remember they came to me and they told me about these plans to create, upon graduation, a public interest law firm,” says Reinstein. “My reaction was pretty negative. I asked them, do you have any clients? No. Do you have any money? No. Do you know the percentages of law firms that fail? Yes. And I said, well, perhaps you should get some public interest experience for a few years and then come back and form the firm.”
“Marsha is largely responsible for redefining our understanding of how and why adolescents must be treated differently by our legal system.” — Deborah Gordon Klehr, Education Law Center.
Despite his best efforts, Reinstein was unsuccessful in dissuading them. “Fortunately, they didn’t listen to me,” he says with a smile that is audible through the phone. (Reinstein, who went on to be a longtime dean of Temple Law, served on JLC’s board for more than a decade.)
And so in 1975, Levick founded JLC along with a trio of soon-to-be-esteemed Philly lawyers: Bob Schwartz, Judy Chomsky, and Phil Margolis. At first, they operated out of a small space inside a physician’s office that belonged to Chomsky’s husband. “We literally had an examination table where we worked,” says Levick, who also recalls the perils of operating on a shoestring budget for years. “There was a period of time when the four of us, all four founders, laid ourselves off — so that we could pay the people who we had hired. But it didn’t matter. We weren’t interested in money.”
Over the past half-century, JLC expanded into a formidable organization with three dozen employees and a multimillion dollar budget. It’s become a beacon for public interest lawyers (practitioners dedicated to representing marginalized groups and promoting social change) and a testament to the power of their work.
“Juvenile Law Center was at the top of the list of where students wanted to work,” says Reinstein, referring to his time as dean of Temple Law from 1989 until 2008. “It was very hard to get a job there because there was such a demand.”
Along with organizations like Community Legal Service and the Education Law Center, JLC has helped to establish a new cut of “Philadelphia lawyer” — one that’s no less adept at legal nuances, but who is intent on making a lasting impact on the world. And Levick embodies that mission as much as anyone. She’s become a revered figure in the public-interest legal community, having mentored dozens of lawyers who have started their own firms or contributed to local civil rights litigation, including the founders of the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project.
While overseeing JLC’s litigation and appellate work, Levick worked on countless high-profile cases. She wrote the leading amicus brief in Roper v. Simmons, a U.S. Supreme Court case that ended the juvenile death penalty, one of several influential briefs that she’s submitted as part of winning SCOTUS cases. In 2016, the advocacy of Levick and her colleagues contributed to President Barack Obama’s decision to ban solitary confinement for juveniles in federal detention. And, while providing direct counsel on cases, Levick has remained a watchdog for children — such as a 2019 lawsuit that JLC brought (in conjunction with the Education Law Center) against Glen Mills Schools, winning a $3 million settlement for kids were denied educational programming during their detainment.
Invariably, JLC’s casework has touched on other hot-button issues of the day, including recent work around book bans, transgender rights, reproductive rights, the rights of children whose parents are incarcerated and youth in the foster system. “Pick an issue, and there’s likely going to be some children’s rights issue that is prominent or embedded or lurking there,” says Levick, who says she’s proud of the fact that JLC has remained true to its founding, situating its legal work within the broader struggle for civil rights. “We understand where the tentacles of our work go. We’ve always been about helping to create a society in which children can thrive.”
JLC has helped to establish a new cut of “Philadelphia lawyer” — one that’s no less adept at legal nuances, but who is intent on making a lasting impact on the world.
Much of JLC’s success has been in getting the courts to recognize a growing body of scientific research about the adolescent brain’s unique capacity for change — and the natural tendency for most children to grow out of criminal behavior. Though our brains are still developing well into our 20s, the law has historically ignored that fact. In that way, Levick has been on the front lines not only of legal battles, but also a central part of a movement to rid the country of unfounded stereotypes and myths about “superpredators” and the like, which fly in the face of science, law and public safety.
“Marsha is largely responsible for redefining our understanding of how and why adolescents must be treated differently by our legal system,” says Deborah Gordon Klehr, the executive director of the Education Law Center.
At times, the work has been risky, like going after two sitting judges. If not for Levick’s rare determination, the Kids for Cash scandal may have never been uncovered, especially given the notorious lack of transparency in juvenile court. All that Levick knew at the start of her investigation was a few anecdotal complaints from parents, suggesting egregious sentences for things like a harmless prank. From there, Levick built out statistical analyses of the judges’ impropriety and ultimately proving that criminality had occurred on the bench.
“It’s one of the best, if not the best, piece of lawyering that I’ve ever seen,” says Reinstein.
Levick continued to fight for the victims, obtaining settlements for the youth and their families of $24 million dollars and advocating for key legislative reforms in the PA General Assembly. In 2022, a civil court awarded the victims more than $200 million in damages, in part based on critical rulings obtained by Levick from the PA Supreme Court. (Though, due to a lack of seizable assets belonging to the judges, the money did not ultimately get paid out.)
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Looking ahead
Over the course of JLC’s existence, Levick has become one of the foremost experts on juvenile law in the country, and even around the world. She recently returned from Salzburg, Austria, where she’d been named a fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar, a prestigious international convening.
Through it all, she’s remained rooted in her native Philly. And although Levick is stepping down as chief legal officer of the Juvenile Law Center, which she co-founded in 1975 as the country’s first public-interest organization dedicated to children, she’s very clear that she’s far from retiring.
“I’m still very passionate about all these issues and I still feel like I have something to contribute,” says Levick.
From the beginning of JLC, Levick has brought systemic injustices into the light of day, worked to eliminate them indefinitely, and fought for victims’ retribution. And with a new administration in the White House, Levick believes that civil rights lawyers will have to double down on the work or risk having their legacies undone.
“It’s not the fight that we thought we were waging in 1975; it’s actually a harder fight because things are going backwards,” says Levick. “Trying to do this in an environment where truth doesn’t [seem to] matter is also really challenging. Entering the work 50 years ago, we had a set of beliefs. We thought people had the ability to discern the good from the bad, right from wrong. And now, the lines are much blurrier — not because we’ve made them so, but the world has become a very blurry space.”
In this environment, Levick says, the tactics for public-interest lawyers might need to change. But their spirit and mission should not. “How does one carry on the fight?” Levick asks. “That’s the challenge for me. And, you know, I have some ideas.”
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