The last time Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. sat in a courtroom witness chair was July 2009.

He wore a tan sport coat, blue dress shirt and tie. He chose his words carefully. And, though he had entered a conditional plea agreement with federal prosecutors on honest services fraud charges, you could not tell from his initial testimony if he was anything but a former by-the-books judge in Luzerne County’s Common Pleas Court.