Say it aint so

I shot the breeze with a CWLS (those are DCF's dependency lawyers) attorney today who had been in a meeting with one of the five regional counsels. I'll leave both unnamed, and let you take it for what it's worth.

The attorney said that the particular Regional Counsel had remarked that he intended to approach dependency cases as follows: take one of the parents, conflict the rest out, and consent at arraignment.

I imagine that anyone bothering to read this will know what consent means, but in case you do not, it means having a parent decline an opportunity to contest the allegations against him or her and agree to perform whatever case plan tasks DCF requires of him or her before being reunified with the child or children involved.

Not having been in on the conversation, I'll allow for the possibility that the Regional Counsel meant they'd consent in the cases where such a plea is, in fact, proper and does not harm the client's position. That would be efficient in such cases.

Still, it implies that perhaps not a lot of effort and resources would be put into conducting an independent investigation of the alleged facts of the case. The ability to put investigators on cases is one potential advantage that the regional counsel offices might have over sole practitioner private defense attorneys. The ability to use staff resources to conduct sufficient depositions and other discovery is also a potential advantage of a well-functioning, staffed, and resourced regional counsel office over a sole practitioner private defense attorney.

Will all that really get done by arraignment, which occurs twenty-one days or less from the time of the shelter hearing? Surely those who defend parents who have had their families taken apart by state action don't intend to decide on the outcome of the case without interviewing not only the client, but the potential witnesses, etc. Let's hope not.

It's just an offhand remark I repeated and won't source, so I don't intend to rile anyone up too much over it. It simply doesn't make me feel better about the new system.