Mom and Dad arrive at the Star Chamber for their 1:30 P.M. hearing about something. They join the tide of humanity waiting in the hall for cases to be called. A sign posted on the door tells them to stay out until they are called. As the hours creep by, a dull stupor sets in. Occasionally they sit up alert when they catch glimpses of their lawyers popping their heads out the courtroom door. Still no sign of recognition from them. Mom and Dad sink back into semi-consciousness.
Eventually, their attorneys come out to talk to them. We have good news, they say. They tell Mom and Dad that the county is willing to amend the petition to say that Amber has made allegations of molestation against her father, that this has caused her severe emotional distress and the family needs therapy to deal with it. The attorneys propose that the parents "submit on the petition" rather than go to trial. It’s the best thing to do, say the lawyers, because the amended petition does not say that Dad actually molested Amber.
The attorneys warn that the Department almost always wins these cases and that the social worker will be unhappy if they go to trial because she will think they are persisting in denial and failing to cooperate. Besides, say the lawyers, we can get more quickly down to the business of reunifying with the children. "What about the boys?," Mom asks. They will stay where they are or go to Grandma’s house say the lawyers. The judge isn’t likely to return them befor a psych evaluation is completed.
The Honorable George Gruff will hear Mom and Dad’s case. Presiding in Department 44, he hears only juvenile dependency cases. Judge Gruff didn’t pick this assignment. He’s the new judge. As the one with least seniority he ended up here because none of the other 65 judges on the county superior court wanted the job.
Judge Gruff’s background as a deputy district attorney and then a defense attorney representing asbestos manufacturers does nothing to prepare him for handling Mom and Dad’s case. He has no experience dealing with the problems of the poor.
The people who come into his court are indeed unfortunate but this fact does not weigh in their favor because Judge Gruff has an unshakable belief that people shape their own fortunes. This belief comes cheap. Born into a legal aristocracy where men in his family have become judges since the gold rush, a judgeship was as natural a destiny for Judge Gruff as having his baby teeth fall out. He cruises into court from his home perched high in the hills to weigh the fates of people who might as well have come from Venus or Mars.
Judge Gruff’s ignorance forces him to depend on the guidance of Mom and Dad’s adversary, the county attorney who Judge Gruff sees five days a week. His honor respects social workers since they’re about protecting children and would have no motive to mislead him. He knows nothing about Title 4-E funding or social workers attracted to the job because they are control freaks with the need to project their own issues on to hapless parents. About the time Judge Gruff becomes seasoned in the job, he will leave Department 44 never to look back.
The attorneys tell Mom and Dad that Judge Gruff is tough. They are well-advised to accept the social worker’s case plan. Mom will get an evaluation and follow the recommended course of treatment. Both parents will take parenting classes. Dad will go into therapy and attend a school for sexual batterers. Amber will get individual counseling. After a while, if everything progresses well, Amber and both parents will participate in joint family counseling.
The Department will select the evaluators and therapists from a list of approved providers who depend on the Department’s continuing largesse to pay their bills. The social worker will furnish her reports to the assigned professionals for their use as background. These reports will tell them what result the Department would like to see. The parents don’t get their own independent evaluators or therapists because they have no money to buy them like the Department does.
Once inside, Judge Gruff calls the case. The attorneys who have never interviewed their clients tell the court the parents are willing to submit on the amended petition. The court asks Mom and Dad if that’s what they want to do. They respond, "yes." "Very well," says Judge Gruff who then takes waivers of the right to a trial from the parents and explains that the court will decide the case on the social worker’s report.
The court then finds the allegations of the amended petition to be true. Mother is ordered to have an evaluation. The social worker is granted discretion to place the children with grandma. The case is continued for 30 days for the results of Mom’s evaluation.
Note about players in the Star Chamber
County counsel represents the social worker and the Department. A different lawyer represents the children. This attorney almost always supports whatever the Department wants to do even if it’s not what their clients want. This disregard for the children's views is permitted in California under Welfare & Institutions Code section 317 which states that the duty of minor’s counsel is to advocate for the minor’s best interests and not for what the minor wants. Section 317 is at odds with ABA standards for minor’s counsel, adopted in most states, which require counsel to advocate for what the children want just as an attorney for an adult would be required to do.
Parents’ counsel are appointed by the court and paid by the county. Usually a small group of attorneys handle the bulk of the cases. They appear regularly in the Star Chamber. They form a collegial bond with the other players. They understand that we’re all in this together to get things done in a demanding, high volume court.
The losers in the Star Chamber are the parents and children whose rights are traded in to maintain the spirit of cooperation and efficiency.
The truth finding process is nullified. The parents and children never get heard. The social worker’s unrebutted warped narrative becomes the foundation for the court’s findings. It’s nearly impossible to undo these findings once they are made. They will continue to haunt the parents for months, even years.
My apologies to conscientious truth telling social workers and parents’ counsel who work hard for their clients and may even meet with them in their offices before trial and talk to them on the phone. Kudos for not succumbing to the excesses of the Star Chamber. There are far too few of you.
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I read "Star Chamber in America - Part 3" and found it very plausible according to my experiences. It would be an old story to Junior M.who has written on similar topics and spent lots of time educatingparents about how the system really works. I am thankful that David is writing this post and hope he writes many more like it.
ReplyDeleteJunior went to prison twice and is getting out about now. I wrote (elsewhere) about my experiences trying to follow his pre-trial
hearings in which I was unable to witness a single argument, not even any argument nor any explanation in the case proper nor in how they
were setting it up, because the court kept moving, postponing, and pre-poning the hearings until nobody was left to witness them. We will never know whether the real reason he has been in prison was that
he exposed corruptions -- that he exposed the way the system is. We will never know because we, the common people, do not have access to
real courts, to find out the truth in a balanced setting.
He was convicted but that was because he and his attorney were not allowed to present relevant evidence. That's what the pre-trial
hearings or pseudo-hearings were about -- whether certain evidence would be allowed in court, and whether Junior would be allowed to
represent himself or instead would be represented by a weak court-appointed attorney. I know a little from what Junior told me, but I was unable to see for myself because the pre-trial hearings were
so hidden.
The setting is commonly called "court" but it is not what I mean when I say "real court".
This particular post of David's, the only one I've read, does not say anything about court transcripts, which are also a topic of interest.
As I understand the problems with title 4-E funding, if you take a child from their home, for out of home "care", then there is matching funding to the state from the federal, BUT
ReplyDeletethere is no such funding for in home services the family may need.
This means there is NO motivation for social workers to leave a child with the parents, even when that would be in the best interests of the child, and to provide the family with any services that might be needed to keep a family together, while providing them with possibly needed assistance.
Therefore, the first duty of a social worker in any given situation is to take the children into custody, recommend and justify (in spite of the facts in many cases) out of home placement for as long as possible, and bring money into the state coffers. Oh how the money rolls in, rolls in, oh how the money rolls in.
If the children are given services in home, staying with their family where a child belongs unless there is some EXTREME circumstance, there is no monetary incentive for social services to keep a family together. To the contrary!
In cases such as, for example, children who are said to be socially isolated due to homeschooling (a common myth), this does not have to be proven by the social worker. There is no immediate harm to the children. The situation could be easily remedied without removing the children, if it were in fact the situation.
In my experience with this kind of case, the children are taken, the parents are found guilty of neglect and abuse by the social worker, - without every talking to parents, the children, local school authorities, or anyone, (just a random phone call against the parents can trigger this) and the parents then must spend huge amounts of money and time trying to prove (against all odds the way the system is set up) that they are indeed good parents. And even if a parent gets the witness statements, and other proof of their innocence of wrong doing, and of their fitness as parents, they may not be allowed to enter the evidence in the case, or be allowed witness testimony. Juvenile dependency is not like a regular adult trial system. The kangaroo rules in dependency courts.
I personally have been in court and watched while Judge Brenda Harbin-Forte, as a dependency court judge, refused to allow into evidence and solid proof that goes against what the social worker has claimed in her narrative, and then made rulings based on the social workers false and limited information. We, the taxpayers, just don't hear about what happens in these closed door proceedings that destroy young lives!
The parents are gag ordered, and can go to jail if they tell the truth about what has been done to destroy their family, and their telling the world the harm being done their children would be used as proof they don't care about their children's privacy rights and well being, and further held as proof parents should have all of their parental rights permanently severed, never to see their children again until after they turn 18 years of age.
This system of taking the children on the whim of a social worker, without a warrant, without investigation or PROOF, then getting the funding rolling into the state coffers while parents, (proven guilty only by the words of social worker before the children are taken), scramble to retrieve their legally kidnapped children, is destroying young lives and devastating families all over the USA.
The parents are given, by the social worker, a list of 'approved providers' to go to for proving their mental fitness to parent.
These providers make a living by pleasing social workers with their reports, so they can stay on the county money approved provider list. Psychologist getting good amounts of money to write about both parents and children only that which supports the social worker's narrative provided before they see the client, the social worker has sent them in the case, are the normal way we do business in dependency cases.
If a provider were to tell the truth that there is NO problem with parents or children , and show how the social workers are not doing their job correctly, they would soon lose the county as a lucrative provider, and all of that income would go out the window. This is a lose-0lose situation for the families, (and for taxpayers).
Distraught parents are written up in social workers' narratives as emotionally unstable, angry, crying, lashing out at all social workers and anyone involved with legally kidnapping their children.
Who wouldn't be emotionally disturbed to have your children taken and not be allowed to see them, or know if or where they are being 'cared' for. Children in foster care are abused, not given medical and dental care, not allowed to go to school.
If you remain calm, don't act upset, and talk in quiet normal voice, show no anger and do not portray yourself as distraught over the loss of your children, then the social worker's narrative will explain your lack of concern for your children's well being, your inability to feel any emotion at the loss of your children, your obvious lack of concern for the best interests of your children.
Damned if ya do. Damned if ya don't.
That is the way everything you do will be written about when you go to court.
Social workers are trained to make your every act, every word, into a negative that will support your children having been legally kidnapped.
You will be vilified, because they need to justify taking your child, and keeping the child as long as possible.
Unless they take children, social workers do not have job security. The more money that rolls into the state from taking children, justified or not, the better it is for their job security. Taking children, right or wrong,
and keeping them for as long as is possible, is a big money business. Think of the people employed by wrongly taking one hundred children: social workers, foster parents, court stenographers, pyschologists, psychotherapists, file clerks, drivers who shuttle the children from place to place, guards, on and on goes the list of people who make a living off of the wrongful destruction of families in the dependency court system.
Where is the incentive to make this all change
to protect children and their families from the legal kidnapping of children?
In foster placements, it is a fact that chilfen have been put in religious classes six days a week (this actually has happened) where they were told if they do not accept a different religion they will burn in Hell forever.
I have had children show me drawings they made, in these religious classes during foster care in Richmond, California, of the child having drawn a picture of themselves actually burning in the flames of hell for refusing to accept a different religious belief than they practiced in thier own home. This is from my own experience and first hand observation with the dependency system. I have seen these things and worse things happen to children who have been legally kidnapped by social services - and where later the Ninth District Federal Court later ruled that the minors were illegally taken under the Constitution.
Try to imagine your children dragged away crying and screaming, as police assisting the social worker hold, and sometimes hurt you in the process. Imagine years of hell, your children tortured, neglected and abused in many different foster placements, none of the placements of their own ethnicity or religion, or dietary standards, not allowed medical and dental care, prevented from going to school, and having to repeat a school grade because of that, being forced to eat foods that they consider taboo, being physically hit, living in an environment where several people chain smoke tobacco, being dropped at a themr park in the morning, and left unsupervised there all day so the foster placement person does not have to deal with the child. I have had children children under age ten in foster placement tell me they were left at Waterworld unsupervised, and felt they were being stalked by a sexual predator, so would attach themselves to a family of strangers with children, pretending they were with them, to feel they were protected.
I could go on and on about the terrible abuses in foster care.
But the bottom line to me, and I say it again and again, as long as this dependency court system is protected by the VEIL OF SECRECY hiding the harm done our children, in the name of "protecting the privacy rights of minors', the terrible things that are happening to destroy children and thier families will continue.
We must hold the dependency system to the same standards as any other court in America. There needs to be a public attendance at all dependency trials, regardless of the age of the minor. There needs to be the option of a trial by jury, because biased judges are finding innocent parents guilty of child abuse and this goes on their record forever. Thre has to be investigation into what has happened, and innocent parents wrongly found to be unfit, have their children returned to them.
Imagine the government taking your children illegally, and making it look as if they had a reason, and you are guilty of crimes that deprive your children and you of ever being together again. Many don't habe to imagine it, it is their reality. Sometimes the children are so young, that the damage is not able to be repaired, ever.
I have been told by children under age ten that their social worker, Katherine Moore of Alameda County California, told them unless they made a video tape recording saying their mother abused them, they would never get to go home again.
These children had been taught by a good mother never to lie, and in one instance Katherine Moore did not succeed in causing this terrible harm. She found other ways to justify her illegal taking of the children. This was a case in which the Ninth District Federal Court said the children were taken illegally, in violation of their constitutional rights under IV and XIV.
This comes down to the funding. As long as the state is compensated by the federal government for out of home care, instead of in home services, the state will motivate social workers to take children, and prove the reason for having done so later, as if very often the case.
Children who have retainedc their own private counsel outside of the dependency system have been refused contact with their private attorney. The dependency court does not allow it, and the children are forced to be represented by the appointed counsel who "plays the game" and is part of the good ol' boy system that represents the interests of the careers of the dependency court employees, disregarding the best interests of the child.
No one will ever know. They know that if anyone did find out they are immune from prosecution anyhow. Katherine Moore cannot even be prosecuted for trying to force children to lie and say they were abused!
There are so many things wrong with our dependencey system that I could spend years writing about what little bit of it I have experienced.
How do we wake up the public? Thank you for this blog David. You need to get it out to millions of parents, so they understand how at risk they and thier chilren are.
And by the way, for those who know nothing about title 4-E:
Title IV-E Adoption Assistance and Foster Care Programs
Additional Funding Available
The Department of Health and Human Services announced the release of $187 million authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to support adoption assistance and foster care programs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Nearly $98 million will support adoption assistance programs, while nearly $89 million will go to foster care programs.
Find information about funding for your state.
See funding for all states.
Program Description
The Foster Care Program helps States to provide safe and stable out-of-home care for children until the children are safely returned home, placed permanently with adoptive families or placed in other planned arrangements for permanency.
The Adoption Assistance Program provides funds to States to facilitate the timely placement of children, whose special needs or circumstances would otherwise make it difficult to place, with adoptive families.
The Foster Care and Adoption programs are authorized under title IV-E of the Social Security Act, as amended, help states, including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Beginning in federal fiscal year 2010, tribes will also be eligible for these funds. Children in foster care numbered 496,000 in FY 2007. The average monthly number of children receiving IV-E Adoption Assistance in FY 2008 was approximately 381,000.
Title IV-E Funding Methodology
* A federal match equal to the Medicaid match rate for medical assistance payments (FMAP) is provided for state maintenance payments for foster care, adoption assistance, and guardianship assistance care for eligible children. The match ranges between 50 and 83 percent depending on the state’s per capita income.
* Funding is contingent upon an approved state plan to administer or supervise the administration of the program.
* There is no cap on federal funding; the amount spent reflects the number of children eligible for assistance.
* Funds are also available for administrative costs to manage the program, to train staff and foster parents, to recruit foster parents, and other related expenses. These expenditures, however, use match rates other than the FMAP to determine federal funding.
* In Fiscal Year 2008, federal funding for these programs was over $6.5 billion.
Effects of Recovery Act Funding
* The ARRA temporarily increases the FMAP rate for Title IV-E by approximately 6.2 percentage points.
* This matching rate increase is effective October 1, 2008 through December 31, 2010.
* ACF will issue initial grants to increase the first and second quarter awards to eligible States for FY 2009 and then will apply the new FMAP rates to subsequent quarterly awards through the first quarter of FY 2011 as required by the statute if all Medicaid eligibility requirements in ARRA are met.
* It is estimated that states will receive $187 million in additional funding through the second quarter of FY 2009 for the foster care and adoption assistance programs.
I read the entire comment left by Taxpaying Voter, dated April 5, 2009 9:55 AM. WOW!!! I knew, or had heard, most of what he describes, but he says it very well.
ReplyDeleteMy mind went numb during the final description of Title 4E at the end.
Junior M. (the person mentioned in an earlier comment which was posted by me) has expertise describing this same situation (where funding depends on taking children FROM their parents).
Another person who would understand a great lot of what you wrote, from his first-hand personal experience, is Joe C., but he's dead, after suffering 14 years of a terrible case regarding the custody of his children.
As you have emphasized, and I agree:
[quote]But the bottom line to me, and I say it again and again, as long as this dependency court system is protected by the VEIL OF SECRECY hiding the harm done our children, in the name of "protecting the privacy rights of minors', the terrible things that are happening to destroy children and thier families will continue.[unquote]
Therefore, there needs to be a discussion to understand the balance between, on the one hand, a need for "privacy", and on the other hand, a need for "openness" in government.
The "privacy" reason in these cases is somewhat odd. Let me think of a hypothetical example to illustrate: suppose a social worker, or CIA agent, or anyone, were to break in to a couple's bedroom one night while they were sleeping, and later claim the whole thing had to be kept secret to "protect" the couple's privacy (after all, they were in an intimate setting). I can see that this is an abuse of the "privacy excuse"; but even so, I have difficulty expressing precisely why this is so, and where to draw the line between a need for "privacy" and a need for openness in government.
The couple could waive their right of privacy; but in the situation you described, the children might be too young to waive anything, and even were they old enough to waive their right to privacy, the judge and the court's appointees stop them from being heard anyway, just as they typically stop any discussion and any revelations of truth that they have not themselves foreseen and planned for. So the situation as happens in court or in the court appointees' offices is mostly (if not totally) prejudice, and disallowing anything that doesn't match the prejudice.
-- John L.
War on drugs, war on families, common theme there. Good points. True facts. But the line seems confusingly blurred between savage satire (drugs)and savage reality (families).
ReplyDeleteAmnesty anyone?
Another comment, once you turn government into a business -- here by rewarding state government with bonuses and incentive programs for taking kids away and destroying families on an incentive system -- the perverse incentives and evils are mindblowing.
ReplyDeleteWalter Mondale, the author of the 1974 Adoption and Safe Families Act, was famously reported as having serious second doubts about the possibility of government turning this into a business. His fears have long ago come to pass.
This same thing happened with they passed forfeiture provisions for cops in drug laws.
It never ceases to amaze me what some people will do for money. As long as there is an incentive, the courts and local agencies will do anything and say anything and come up with a semi-plausible pretext for doing it that nobody really believes but keeps saying just because it's a reason, some reason.
The only way to stop the drowning is to drain the swamp, take away the perverse incentives -- money.
This is mind-blowing, it looks like a breakdown of legal system. Government can walk into your home and take your children away, I have hard time believing what I read.
ReplyDeleteI want to post one question, what is likely outcome when parents opt for trial. Is the trial held in the real court with jury? Are there any time limits on setting trial and keeping kids away?