Kindly read this post to the end, so I can wrap it up with a conclusion.
Since this blog's first post on June 9th, 2007, some four and half months ago, I've purposefully refrained from including anecdotal accounts from my own cases and others of which I know. The fact is, however, that there are things the public would truly have a difficult time wrapping its collective mind around if it knew about them, and dependency defense lawyers know some things that you (in true "you can't handle the truth" fashion) probably don't want to know about.
I've refrained from editorial-style posts for the most part and have endeavored to be a one-stop source of news about what will happen to dependency defense in Florida under the Regional Counsel system. In light of where it seems dependency defense in Florida is going, however, I'm going to indulge myself here and give you some uncomfortable facts and opinions.
To get to the point, money is the deciding factor in whether or not parents' rights to their children are terminated far too often. To be intentionally provocative, I can tell you that children in "the system" are sometimes simply taken from a poor and unsophisticated parent and given to someone friendly to a case manager for (and I have personally witnessed each of the following) 1) reasons of personal friendship between someone at DCF and someone who covets a certain child(ren); 2) because there is no legal reason to terminate parental rights, but the supposedly voluntary and altruistic custodians stand to get more public money if parental rights are terminated; 3) because a supervising attorney for DCF herself just so happens to want a particular baby and instructs her subordinate attorneys to come up with a theory under which she could not only shelter the child, but gain custody of the baby for herself, or 4) because a mountain of lies becomes too enormous for even good caseworkers to dig out from under.
Yes, those are all vague descriptions of cases I've handled myself. Let's get more specific:
In case number 1, four children who were only sheltered in the first place because of an unrelated report about the day care they were in, went to new parents who should not have been eligible for adoption in the first place, as there was a suitable placement with a grandmother. The problem was that grandfather had some problems in his background. The grandmother, a Hispanic Roman Catholic, made the heartbreaking decision to divorce her husband of decades in order to keep her grandchildren, but that was not good enough. After all, the people who wanted to adopt, despite their own history of domestic violence and their history of trying to hide that domestic violence, that should have disqualified them, were friendly with a high-ranking official at DCF,
who herself may have been linked to a later tragic event. The preferred couple friendly to DCF employees adopted the kids, and later one of their biological children sexually molested the adopted children and the couple decided to return the damaged goods to DCF.
I am ethically forbidden to tell the details of that story and to inform those four children of their right to sue. It is unlikely that anyone else will connect the dots and uphold their rights.
In case number 2, which I am still involved with, an Hispanic woman who is deaf and neither writes English nor signs standard American sign language is accused of neglecting a child who needs dental work. At nearly half of the hearings, a sign language interpreter has not been available and she has absolutely no idea what is going on and cannot receive meaningful counsel from her attorney. The child's needs are legitimate, so we consent to a finding of dependency and cooperate with a case plan, except that DCF doesn't ever lift a finger to help the mother, poor, deaf, and possibly with mental health issues, from getting evaluations done with the help of an interpreter and with an appropriate psychologist that might actually yield useful information for both the mother and the court. After several meetings in which an interpreter -- who is not supposed to do this as they are only charged with interpreting inside the courtroom -- helped me to talk with my client (imagine if you will not only being deaf but also not signing in ASL, or English if you will, and not writing in the English language, and having to deal with attorneys and caseworkers and judges who only deal in spoken English), I finally arrived at the conclusion that the mother would not object to the case closing to a permanent guardianship, as she believes her children might benefit from that, so long as she can still visit them and be their mother. She is rock solid that she does not want to give up her parental rights, however.
But no. It turns out that the custodian became a foster parent, which means that she gets money for having the kids. As a non-relative, if the case closed out to permanent guardianship, she would no longer get taxpayer money. If they terminated parental rights, however, she could get an adoptions subsidy, so DCF tells me they are filing to terminate parental rights. So that the custodian can get paid, and for no other reason. This case is still pending, and I'll go to the wall on it.
Yes, they buy and sell children.
In case number three, an injustice of horrifying proportions was barely averted. The supervising attorney for DCF in Volusia County heard that a member of her church had a baby, and that some of the members of her church thought that the mother couldn't properly take care of the baby. It just so happened that Ms. DCF Supervising Attorney, who was in the leadership of that church, wanted the baby for herself, so she tasked her subordinate attorneys to come up with a legal theory to shelter the baby and place the child in the care of Ms. DCF Supervising Attorney. They did so. Someone wiser than usual noted that this was a problem and had the case moved to a neighboring county. My county. I was appointed as the mother's attorney, and although I applauded DCF's decision to move the case, was appalled at how DCF's lawyer robotically repeated key allegations that had already been disproven, again and again. I have the transcripts, the chron notes, and the audio. I had to become my own social worker, and drive three hours round trip to create my own homestudy, after DCF dragged its feet on doing one.
The result was good. I got the baby reunified with her mother and the case closed. In the first time in my career, I urged the parents to sue. They declined, too shell-shocked to want anything to do with a court or DCF ever again.
In case number 4, a poor teenage Black mother goes to the police because she is afraid that she can't take care of her infant son. The police officer who responded, noting in her police report the sympathetic aspects of the mother's love for her child, takes her to a place that is supposed to help. A volunteer at that place, an adoptee herself, decides she wants the child for her own, and tricks the teenage mother into signing documents. A DCF caseworker is assigned and is later charged with and convicted of falsifying records in this case and actually serves jail time. Meanwhile, the "volunteer" who wanted the child has provided false history to a half-dozen doctors, and has the child diagnosed with pretty much everything that a child could possibly be suffering from. Suddenly the child is given a new name. Suddenly a therapist who is friendly to the foster mother and will only appear by phone before a now disgraced judge declares that the foster mother is the only person on Planet Earth who can safely be in the presence of the child, and the now disgraced judge buys it, as he seems to think therapists to be magic beings.
My client, the poor teenage black mother, still has her problems, but is denied any possibility of any contact at all with her child. She is denied the ability to call her child by name, as the foster mother has renamed him. She is denied the ability to give her child Christmas and birthday presents. She is denied any visitation of any kind under any circumstances, because a present judge defers to the ruling of a former -- disgraced -- judge.
But the foster mother has friends in the system. And DCF is institutionally incapable of admitting past mistakes (though in fairness I've had some back-channel sympathy and encouragement from some in the system over this still pending case) or of correcting a flawed record once it is made.
So there are my four true life examples. They are all personal to my own practice. Do you think this doesn't matter? Do you think that part-time attorneys stretched over several counties can handle this for very, very little money?What if you are falsely accused and happen to be poor? I can't put this any more bluntly than this: people in the government sometimes trade children to their friends. They have the power to do so. What stands between you and that horror?
