With up to about 1,200 possibly still in custody.  

They have to go through five and one-half years' worth of records:

Today's ruling, which authorizes Grim [the special master] to overturn the cases, affects as many as 1,200 juveniles, he said. Their cases will be reviewed individually to determine if they meet the court's conditions.

Ciavarella and another former Luzerne County judge, Michael T. Conahan, have pleaded guilty earlier this year to taking $2.6 million in secret payments from the former owner of two juvenile detention centers.

The judges admitted that they helped the centers secure a county contract worth millions of dollars. Ciavarella routinely sentenced children to them.

Both men have agreed to spend 87 months in prison. They are free on bond while a federal judge considers the plea deal.

"We are very pleased that the court has issued this order expunging hundreds of cases of juveniles who suffered at the hands of Ciavarella," said Marsha Levick, legal director for the Philadelphia based Juvenile Law Center, which filed the case.

"We think this is just the beginning," said Levick, who added that Grim has 120 days to make all his recommendations on how to handle the remaining cases.

The ruling is the first good news for juvenile defendants in a sweeping investigation into corruption at the Luzerne County Courthouse that has already netted 4 guilty pleas and prompted the County court clerk to cooperate with federal authorities.

A County probation official, Sandra Brulo, 56, pleaded guilty today to altering a court document in a juvenile case. She's also agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors.

The court's ruling also comes more than a month after the high court asked Berks County Judge Arthur E. Grim to review the cases of an estimated 2,500 juveniles Ciavarella sentenced in the county between 2003 and 2008.

Grim moved quickly to select the most pressing cases, including those involving juveniles who were still in detention. Grim made his recommendation to the court on March 13.

I get the feeling that the part about the probation clerk pleading guilty and the court official cooperating with the feds (who may be the same person - the paper does not make it clear) that the judges being recipients of kickbacks for populating the private jail was not the whole extent of this.  I suspect that they had to have drawn in people like court clerks, bailiffs, court reporters, prosecutors and cops (and maybe defense attorneys) because there is no way an adjudication could be made to send kids to jail without those people playing their parts in the judicial charade.  They would have to have falsified the parts of the paperwork which indicated that, for example, the judge had read the kid his/her rights, that the kid was represented, and so on.  And the only way the judges would have been able to pull that off would have been to pass some of the payoffs along to those courthouse personnel.