Michael Conahan
American convicted felon and former judge
Michael Thomas Conahan is a disgraced American former judge. He received a J.D. degree from Temple University and went on to serve from 1994 to 2007 as judge on the Court of Common Pleas for Luzerne County. During the last four years of his tenure, he was the president judge of the county.
He was serving a 17.5 year sentence for his part in the "kids for cash" scandal of giving harsh sentences to juvenile offenders, often accused of minor crimes, sending them to for-profit facilities in exchange for kickback payments. Due to coronavirus concerns, Conahan was released on furlough on June 19, 2020, to home confinement. On December 12, 2024, the remainder of his sentence was commuted by President Joe Biden.
"Kids for cash"
Along with his fellow Luzerne County judge Mark Ciavarella, Conahan was found to be involved in the Pennsylvania "kids for cash" scandal in 2008.
Ronald Belletiere from Florida was sentenced in the 1990s to 4½ years in federal prison in connection with a Hazleton cocaine-trafficking ring. A witness in that case testified that in 1986, then-Magisterial District Judge Conahan called to tip him off that his drug connection was being investigated. Conahan allegedly referred the man to Belletiere as a safer source to obtain drugs.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6829405. VIAF identifies the subject as 316745400. The Library of Congress control number is no2015080980. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 2007, 2020 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Conahan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.