Star Chamber in America - Part 6

Mom and Dad scraped the money together to hire a lawyer who managed to get the boys reunited with them at the six month review hearing. Mom and Dad are working with the boys to overcome the trauma stemming from the long separation. The boys blame Mom and Dad for failing to protect them from the state. They fear every knock at the door. They are even afraid to leave the house. They avoid encounters with the police. They have nightmares.

Amber continues to make progress in therapy with Mom and Dad. Likely she will be returned home within a few months.

Proposals for Reform

1. Federal funding should be changed to encourage local agencies to provide services in the home of the family whenever possible. Currently only 11% of the funding goes to family preservation. A social worker once told me she would love to send children in one of my cases home under court supervision but there was no money for that.

2. Jury trials should be afforded in juvenile dependency cases. I think one of the problems with court trials is that unless all parties agree, judges chronically fear returning children where the evidence warrants it. The judge does not want to bear the responsibility for making a bad choice so he makes the safe choice. This violates the law which requires return to the home unless there is clear and convincing evidence that the children would be at risk if returned.

3. The dependency courts need to be open to the public. The rationale for closed proceedings is to protect the privacy of children. While this is a legitimate concern, often these children will end up testifying in a public trial where the parents are accused of crimes arising from the same acts which led to the juvenile case. The privacy rationale fails at least with respect to child witnesses in parallel juvenile and criminal prosecutions.

Even when the identity of a child is known to the media in a high profile case, the child's name usually is not disclosed.

The case for public access is that transparency will help to curb the excesses described in this series. In particular, media has a role to play in keeping the system honest. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

4. Exclusive reliance by the courts on the opinions of expert witnesses and the input of services providers on the payroll of the social services agency corrupts the judicial process. One alternative is to take the function of hiring them away from the agency and place it somewhere else so that they will not skew their reports to favor the agency. Another alternative is to provide funding for the parents to hire their own experts to rebut the experts chosen by the agency.

5. Rules of evidence which permit cases to be decided on reports rather than live testimony should be repealed. Social services agencies should be required to prove their cases in the same manner as any other litigant.