Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Update, sort of, on FACDL lawsuit
The FACDL quo warranto action is now docketed on the website for the Leon County Clerk of Court, but there is very little information. No hearings or other actions are currently docketed. The case is assigned to the Honorable P. Kevin Davey.
37 2007 CA 002898 FLORIDA ASSOCIATION OF CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYERS, I vs CHARLIE CRIST AS GOVERNOR
| Plaintiffs | Defendants |
| FLORIDA ASSOCIATION OF CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYERS, I | CHARLIE CRIST AS GOVERNOR KEN PRUITT PRESIDENT OF THE FLORIDA SENATE KURT BROWNING SECRETARY OF STATE OF FLORIDA LEWIS, JEFFREY FLYTE, JACKSON GEORGE, JOSEPH MASSA, PHILIP DEAN, JEFFREY |
| Plaintiff Attorney(s) | Defendant Attorney(s) |
| DOSS, D TODD RUDENSTINE, SONYA | |
| Case Comments | Case Attributes |
| WRIT QUO WARRANTO TRANSFER FROM SUPREME COURT SC07-1744 | Number: 37 2007 CA 002898 Action: OTHER Status: OPEN Filed : 10/19/2007 Citation: |
Monday, October 29, 2007
Conversation with Bill Grant
In reference to my post below regarding the firm to take conflict/dependency cases in Citrus, Sumter and Hernando Counties, I just had a very good conversation with attorney Bill Grant.
I'm glad we got to talk. Communication is a good thing.
In some respects I'm reassured about their ability to provide good representation to parents. To the extent that I still have questions, they are questions of quantity and quality.
I'll flesh this post out when I have time later.
I'm glad we got to talk. Communication is a good thing.
In some respects I'm reassured about their ability to provide good representation to parents. To the extent that I still have questions, they are questions of quantity and quality.
I'll flesh this post out when I have time later.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Buying and selling children
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?
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?
Thursday, October 25, 2007
A profile of the new defenders
In the post below, I linked to the article that confirmed that Grant & Samargya, LLC will take over all criminal conflict and all dependency cases in the counties of Citrus, Sumter, and Hernando starting November 1, 2007 (one week away from the time of this posting).
Congratulations to the firm for getting the contract, and I wish them well.
Here is their website. It is not very informative (in case you didn't click on the link, it simply says "coming soon"), so out of curiosity I did a whois search and found that the domain name was registered November 13, 2004. I urge these gentlemen to update their site as soon as possible, as a combined population of 373,320 people will be looking to them for answers about how the indigent will receive legal services.
Mr. Grant became a member of the Florida Bar in 2002. He was mentioned on an Orlando radio host's blog at this link (you have to scroll down a bit). Also at this blog post.
Milan Samargya became a member of the Florida Bar in 1994. Previously an Orlando attorney, it seems from simple google searches, and mentioned in this article. (Why this Florida story is in the Pocono Press, I can't imagine).
James Dozier (the lawyer to be hired by the firm to help with the conflict and dependency cases) became a member of the Florida Bar 17 months ago. I'm not sure what this search might mean.
I've sent email to Mr. Grant. If any of these three lawyers get in touch with me, I'll reproduce here anything they want me to. They've got a big task ahead.
Congratulations to the firm for getting the contract, and I wish them well.
Here is their website. It is not very informative (in case you didn't click on the link, it simply says "coming soon"), so out of curiosity I did a whois search and found that the domain name was registered November 13, 2004. I urge these gentlemen to update their site as soon as possible, as a combined population of 373,320 people will be looking to them for answers about how the indigent will receive legal services.
Mr. Grant became a member of the Florida Bar in 2002. He was mentioned on an Orlando radio host's blog at this link (you have to scroll down a bit). Also at this blog post.
Milan Samargya became a member of the Florida Bar in 1994. Previously an Orlando attorney, it seems from simple google searches, and mentioned in this article. (Why this Florida story is in the Pocono Press, I can't imagine).
James Dozier (the lawyer to be hired by the firm to help with the conflict and dependency cases) became a member of the Florida Bar 17 months ago. I'm not sure what this search might mean.
I've sent email to Mr. Grant. If any of these three lawyers get in touch with me, I'll reproduce here anything they want me to. They've got a big task ahead.
So the rumor was true
I'd heard around the courthouse that an Inverness firm consisting of a total of three attorneys had been given the responsibility to cover ALL of the criminal conflict cases and dependency cases in three (count 'em) counties.
The article excerpted below seems to confirm that.
What the article does not mention is the amount of money that the firm will get for this enormous multi-county burden. Since everything else I'd heard is confirmed by this article, I'm more comfortable repeating the scuttlebutt (if it is wrong and Mr. Deen wishes to correct this blog in that respect, I'm still happy to hear from him): sources say that the amount of the contract is a total of $75,000, which might help to explain this line from the article:
Here's that excerpt I promised, then some more comments:
I am not sure what Mr. Grant meant by streamlining due process. In fact I am sure that I have no idea at all what that means. I'll email him and ask. Perhaps he was misquoted.
The article excerpted below seems to confirm that.
What the article does not mention is the amount of money that the firm will get for this enormous multi-county burden. Since everything else I'd heard is confirmed by this article, I'm more comfortable repeating the scuttlebutt (if it is wrong and Mr. Deen wishes to correct this blog in that respect, I'm still happy to hear from him): sources say that the amount of the contract is a total of $75,000, which might help to explain this line from the article:
The two lawyers will continue their current private practice, representing criminal and civil clients.This continues the trend noted in an earlier post in which at least one of the Regional Counsels seems to be building his organization around private attorneys who accept these duties as being a part-time commitment. In fairness, the legislation that established the Regional/Conflict Counsel offices require that such attorneys give "first priority" to criminal conflict and dependency cases, but those are just words when compared to the reality that these jobs cannot possibly be part-time in any sense, and that the compensation is unlikely to keep any lawyers or firms doing it for very long.
Here's that excerpt I promised, then some more comments:
An Inverness law firm has been selected to represent indigent criminal defendants in cases where the public defender has a conflict of interest and indigent parents in dependency proceedings.
The firm of Grant & Samargya LLC is part of a regional criminal conflict and civil counsel office that will represent eligible clients in Citrus, Sumter and Hernando counties beginning Nov. 1....
Grant and Samargya have hired a third attorney, James R. Dozier, to assist them with the increasing caseload that will likely result from their new responsibilities...Grant said he doubts the new agency will save on costs, but he believes it will provide central supervision for the conflict process by assigning lawyers from state run offices to handle the cases.
"I don't think it's going to save them money as much as it will streamline due process and make it subject to a central boss," he said...
Samargya said the law firm also will be busy with cases involving indigent parents in dependency and loss of parental rights cases. The firm will handle all dependency cases involving indigent parents. Those cases were formerly assigned to private attorneys.
I am not sure what Mr. Grant meant by streamlining due process. In fact I am sure that I have no idea at all what that means. I'll email him and ask. Perhaps he was misquoted.
Falsifying public records wasn't a crime before?
Read the whole thing at this link.
New law targets false reporting of child welfare workers
DAYTONA BEACH -- An adult investigator for the state Department of Children & Families details in a report that he talked to two suspected victims of abuse.
The only problem is the victims said they never spoke to him.
In another local case, a state investigator writes in a report that he spoke to a Port Orange police officer about a child being abused.
But, turns out, the officer said he was never contacted and wasn't even on duty at the time the DCF investigator said the conversation took place.
Those are two of several cases in recent years where state officials found child welfare workers falsified records.
But rarely in such cases locally or statewide do workers face prosecution, according to a recent report by the DCF Inspector General's Office.
State officials hope that will change after legislators earlier this year made it a felony not only when a worker alters an existing document, but creates a false one -- which the old law didn't address.
Ed: I can tell you that I've had more cases than you would believe me about where absolutely completely made up stuff becomes the heart of the case, because it is very difficult to take revolving case managers off the official narrative that is in their inherited notes. In some cases I've been able to turn the light bulb on above the judge's head and achieve an understanding that the foundation of a case has been a sham, on other cases I've not been able to. I know this article, and this law, seems to focus on false reports of child visits that never happened, but that is not the only, and certainly not the most damaging, category of false reporting.
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