Source: https://www.scribd.com/book/310678235/Representing-Parents-in-Child-Welfare-Cases-Advice-and-Guidance-for-Family-Defenders
Timestamp: 2019-05-25 03:46:35
Document Index: 89134470

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 671', '§ 672', '§ 671', '§ 671', '§ 671', '§ 671', '§ 671', '§ 671', '§ 675', '§ 1356', '§ 1356', '§ 1356', '§ 675', '§ 1356', '§ 1355', '§ 1901', '§ 1912', '§ 43', '§ 6302', '§ 161', '§ 15']

Representing Parents in Child Welfare Cases by Martin Guggenheim and Vivek Subramanian Sankaran - Read Online
by Martin Guggenheim and Vivek Subramanian Sankaran
500 pages12 hours
Representing Parents in Child Welfare Cases is a guide for attorneys representing parents accused of parental unfitness due to abuse or neglect. Leading experts provide insights into every step of the legal process, from the initial interview with the parent(s), through court hearings, to issues attendant to the Child Abuse and Neglect Registry System. Parents’ attorney’s must be prepared to navigate the obstacles created by the emotional nature of this work. Representing parents can be a lonely job, and natural biases against an accused parent can create additional obstacles from judicial officers, opposing counsel, social workers and service providers who are typically charged with assisting the reunification process. On the other side, competent legal representation often is the sole consistent support a parent has when he or she is pulled the child welfare system. This book offers practical, hands-on tips for attorneys at each stage of the process.
Publisher: American Bar AssociationReleased: Dec 19, 2015ISBN: 9781634252980Format: book
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Representing Parents in Child Welfare Cases - Martin Guggenheim
This book is written primarily for family defenders —lawyers and other advocates working with parents in court or administrative proceedings brought against them by the local child protection services agency. These proceedings are variously known as dependency, child neglect, child abuse, or child protection," depending on the locality. In some of these cases, the local agency may be seeking nothing more than a protective order of some kind, directing that a caregiver do or refrain from doing something. In other cases, the agency may be seeking a child’s removal from his or her family or the child’s continued placement in foster care. In still other proceedings, the agency may be seeking permanent termination of parental rights. In all these proceedings, the state, through the exercise of its parens patriae or police powers, charges parents or other caretakers with being inadequate in the rearing of children.
It would be difficult to find a more important type of legal proceeding implicating an individual’s rights. Many forms of state intervention potentially impact an individual’s basic rights, interfering with someone’s property or liberty. For many people, criminal proceedings are regarded as the form of state intervention that most threatens our most basic right: the right to remain free in society and avoid imprisonment. But child protection cases implicate rights that others would regard as even more fundamental. Many parents certainly agree with Justice Stevens’s observation more than thirty years ago that depriving a parent of rights to raise one’s child— a deprivation of both liberty and property —is often … the more grievous compared to sentencing someone to prison ( a pure deprivation of liberty ). Lassiter v. Department of Social Services, 452 U.S. 18, 59 (1981) (Stevens, J., dissenting).
All of this suggests that family defense —working on behalf of adults threatened by state intervention with the temporary and permanent loss of the custody and rights to their children—would be a well-known, highly prized legal field, at least comparable in status to criminal defense, and arguably, even more esteemed because of the importance of the threatened substantive rights. Sadly, this is anything but the case. Family defense is an outlier field, barely known to most lawyers and law school professors, let alone among Americans more broadly.
Why this is so is complicated. One reason has to do with its relative youth. Criminal prosecutions brought to punish law violators—well-known and feared by the Founding Fathers—are the focus of three specific Bill of Rights Amendments enacted when the country began. But the modern regime of state-initiated legal proceedings carrying the potential power to remove children from their families and to cut permanently children’s ties with families only began in 1974 when Congress enacted the Child Protection and Treatment Act, federalizing much of the child welfare field. By that time, the Supreme Court had already interpreted the Sixth Amendment to require a lawyer for criminal defendants. See Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963); see also Argersinger v. Hamlin, 407 U.S. 25 (1972). But in 1981, when it was first asked whether parents in family defense cases also have a right to counsel, the Supreme Court held that there is no such automatic right. See Lassiter v. Department of Social Services, 452 U.S. 18 (1981).
No less important a difference between criminal prosecutions and child protection cases is their relative impact on society as a whole. Though criminal proceedings are disproportionately brought against poor people, many prosecutions are brought against rich and powerful people each year. Most Americans know somebody who has been a defendant in a criminal case. Film and television regularly tell stories involving criminal prosecutions in which the defendants’ rights are commonly a prominent focus. Well ingrained in these stories is an understanding that even innocent people can become the target of prosecutions. Because of this, Americans have a widely shared understanding of the central importance of the right to a rigorous defense to prevent overreaching by state officials and to ensure the protection of individual rights.
Child protection cases are a very different matter. Rather than reaching into all parts of town, these cases tend to be prosecuted only against poor families. Although child protective services are very well known in poor communities (which often fear them), they are almost never seen in well-to-do communities. In New York City, for example, 96 percent of the foster care population is non-white. As a result, many fewer Americans know someone who has been accused of parental unfitness; even fewer know someone who has lost the custody of their children to the state.
Finally, even when Americans know about these cases, they are less likely to believe that family defense is as important as criminal defense. They have a greater confidence in child welfare officials to ferret out worthy cases from unworthy ones. Recognizing the good intentions of child welfare professionals, many believe that fewer roadblocks should be placed in their path because they would not prosecute cases unless they honestly believed it was appropriate to do so. In addition, many place a greater focus on the children, who stand to lose the most when cases are wrongfully dismissed. Many of the same people who believe in a vigorous criminal defense as the price of liberty, even when it results in the acquittal of a guilty person, are unable to feel the same way when wrongful dismissal of a case means exposing a child to risk of harm.
Law schools also have contributed to the outlier status of family defense in the United States. In sharp contrast with criminal defense, very few law schools even teach about child welfare. And when they do, they tend to stress the importance of child welfare as the means by which vulnerable children are protected from dangerous situations. In those few schools that offer clinical experience in child welfare matters for students, the vast majority place law students with local agencies prosecuting child welfare cases or with law offices that represent children in those proceedings. Rarest of all are law school programs training the next generation of family defenders.
Much could be said in response. For some, including Justice Brandeis, the intentions of state officials are hardly a reason to be less vigilant to prevent overreaching. Experience should teach us, he wrote in 1928, to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent…. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).
And history, even in the field of child welfare, buttresses his concerns. Two of the most famous child welfare efforts in American history, both carried out by people of goodwill intending only to further children’s well-being, have come to be seen in historical perspective as deeply flawed efforts. Charles Loring Brace’s work in the mid-1800s eventually led to as many as 250,000 orphans being sent to the Midwest from New York on orphan trains, even though many of the children were not orphans, none of them or their families were given the opportunity to seek official review of the decision to send them away, and many ended up working as indentured servants throughout their childhood. See DUNCAN LINDSEY, THE WELFARE OF CHILDREN 13–17 (1994). Those responsible for placing children on these trains were proud of their work. But the Catholic families whose children were taken from them had a very different grasp of the situation. See NINA BERNSTEIN, THE LOST CHILDREN OF WILDER: THE EPIC STRUGGLE TO CHANGE FOSTER CARE 197–98 (2001).
Another blight on American history is the extensive use of American Indian boarding schools established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the late nineteenth century. In the name of achieving assimilation, the United States government engaged in a planned effort to eradicate Indian culture. See ROBERT A. TRENNERT, JR., THE PHOENIX INDIAN SCHOOL: FORCED ASSIMILATION IN ARIZONA, 1891–1935 (1988). The plan was to extirpate Indian custom and culture from Indian children by denying them the opportunity to speak in their native languages and forcing them to dress in non-native clothing and to engage only in non-native habits. Nor was this merely a very old mistake. As recently as 1959, United States policy encouraged the removal of Indian children and placement in non-Indian families for the same purpose. H.R. Rep. 104-808, at 16 (1996). This practice was regarded by the families whose children were seized as the ultimate indignity to endure. DAVID FANSHEL, FAR FROM THE RESERVATION: THE TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION OF AMERICAN INDIAN CHILDREN (1972).
Perhaps least of all should the fear that insistence on fair procedures (of which a strong defender bar serves as the foundation) will endanger children be an obstacle to creating a highly competent defender system. For one thing, this fear entirely ignores the contrary danger: that children will be wrongly wrested from their families; forced to become temporary or long-term state wards; have their lives permanently negatively impacted; threatened with abuse and other dangers disproportionately associated with foster children; and suffer long-term costs of poorer grades in school, lower graduation rates, higher incarceration rates, and considerably lower income levels over the course of their lives.
For another, family defense is conceptually very different from criminal defense. In many cases, criminal defense is focused on advancing the rights of the accused to prevent a conviction for reasons apart from factual innocence. As a consequence, a widely understood characteristic of criminal defense is defenders striving to achieve a victory for technical reasons (such as the enforcement of constitutional norms, which require suppressing statements, eyewitness identifications, or items seized by the police) even when evidence points to the defendant’s guilt. But there are no such technical defenses available in family defense. When parents’ lawyers are able to secure dismissal, it is either because the agency itself was persuaded that dismissal was appropriate or because a court found that the agency lacked evidence of parental wrongdoing required to permit intervention in the first place.
This leaves only the question whether children’s rights (or society’s interests) are better served by a legal system designed to prevent state intervention unless independent judges are satisfied there is a legal basis for the intervention. Differently asked, the question is whether children’s rights are served by living in a society devoted to the rule of law. To ask the question is to answer it. Children have reciprocal rights to be raised by their families, qualified, of course, by the important principle that they also have the right to be protected from parental misconduct. But the rule of law fully satisfies such rights and their limitations. It seeks to protect and implement children’s rights by ensuring that children are allowed to remain with their families when the law requires that result and that children are protected from maltreatment when the law requires it. Family defense does not undermine the values of child protection; it advances them.
This is true in still another way that is misunderstood by many professionals involved in child welfare. Of all the differences between criminal prosecutions and child welfare cases, perhaps the greatest involves the purpose of the intervention and its corresponding impact on almost everything that follows. Criminal proceedings are brought to punish criminals. The state’s interests and those of the accused are at odds when the case is first brought and when it ends with a conviction and sentence. The parties are true antagonists.
Though this is sometimes true in child protection matters, in the great majority of cases, the state’s interests are entirely consistent with the parents’. This is because the state’s purpose in virtually all cases is to help families find ways to be able to raise their children safely. In every state, the primary purpose of child protection intervention is to develop a plan that will allow children to be kept safely with their families of origin or be returned to them promptly. Instead of being punitive, the purpose is rehabilitative. Rather than trying to prevent parents from getting a second chance to raise their children, child welfare professionals seek to assist families to overcome the obstacles to the safe return of their children and to do so quickly. Only when parents fail to change their ways or prove unable to raise their children safely for the foreseeable future do the state’s interests and that of parents’ truly diverge (with parents seeking to retain their parental rights and state officials seeking to terminate them).
But the time between the filing of a case until this fateful divergence is the critical time in all child protection cases when family defense can serve as a vital ally with child welfare personnel by focusing attention to the critical issues of what deficits exist in the family, what needs to be done to address them, and how it may be possible for children to remain safely at home or be safely returned there.
Many who have worked in the field, including the authors of this book, do not believe that the intentions of state officials are a sufficient protection against state overreaching. Nor do we believe that a vigorous defense system threatens anything worth preserving. A thriving family defense system is needed throughout the United States to protect vulnerable families from the loss of the most precious of American rights (for both children and their families)—the right of families to raise children and of children to be raised by their families except when the conditions at home are sufficiently harmful that children deserve to be removed. Nothing about family defense threatens those rights; only its absence does.
Despite all of this, family defense is still in its infancy in establishing itself as an important legal field. The publication of this book is the field’s coming out statement: we exist and we do important work. Those committed to civil rights should want to join the field because it advances the rights of poor families and children to be protected by the rule of law. And those many lawyers who represent children in child protection cases may come to appreciate the value to children’s interests served by ensuring that their parents have well-trained, highly skilled lawyers devoted to serving the parents’ interests. As adults think back on their lives, who would not have wanted their parents to be represented by the best lawyer in town when their right to remain in their family was at stake? This book is devoted to persuading the best lawyer in town to become a family defense lawyer and we hope the book will help lawyers become excellent in their practice.
The book is very different from those written about criminal or juvenile defense work because the things family defenders need to do to successfully negotiate the child protection system are very different from what is needed to defend criminal cases. Much follows from what is so different about the purpose of prosecuting child protection cases. Because the prosecution’s first goal is to strengthen families so that children can remain with or be safely returned to them, family defenders must pay a great deal of attention to this purpose. They must do considerably more than what is common to criminal defense work. Like criminal defense, family defense requires a careful investigation into the facts and circumstances of the events that led to the prosecution. But unlike in some criminal cases, in family defense, parents can achieve all of their objectives (gaining the return of their children) whether or not they were guilty of something in the past. When parents have not done something that justifies coercive intervention in their families, family defenders should ensure that their rights are upheld. But what matters most in most cases is whether parents are moving toward something the judge or caseworker is demanding. Parents who comply with their case plan are most likely to achieve their long-term objective of regaining their children’s custody.
For these reasons, family defense requires careful attention to the present and the future. Lawyers representing parents should be actively engaged in fashioning the case plan by participating in its creation. Many case plans are flawed from the beginning because they were created without an accurate understanding of the parents’ needs. Family defenders are able to advance the goals of child welfare intervention by helping to identify more accurately what is going on in the parent’s life that should be addressed. When case plans call for parents to engage in services that will not make them better parents, no one wins. If parents do not complete services—even when those services would not be of real help to them—parents will often pay the price by being found non-compliant by the court. Courts and agencies weigh compliance heavily as a litmus test for a parent’s concern and love for his or her child. For these reasons, eliminating from a case plan services that will not be of any real use to the parent serves everyone’s interest.
To be an effective family defender requires getting to know each client, finding out what she thinks will be of help to her and what she most wants from the court intervention. This attention to the present and the future—the period of time the case will take to resolve—is the critical difference between criminal and family defense. The book will describe what family defenders should do to increase the chances of families remaining together. It is written by an experienced community of parents’ lawyers and advocates who have joined together in a national effort headquartered at the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law to advocate for every locality to provide quality legal representation to parents at the earliest possible time when a child protection case is being considered against a parent. We believe that high-quality legal representation is a critical component of the child welfare field. This book is written to provide advice, guidance, and encouragement to lawyers and other advocates who wish to be a family defender.
General Overview of Child Protection Laws in the United States
1.01 The Statutory Framework
Every state has laws that protect children from harm. Criminal assault laws protect persons of any age against physical assaults. Child abuse and neglect laws are special in protecting only children. States give their juvenile courts jurisdiction over children who have been denied proper parental care. Particular statutes may be phrased in terms of neglect, abuse, abandonment, dependency, or something else, but all contain provisions vesting broad discretion in the court to find appropriate substitute care.
Although there is considerable similarity from state to state in the definitions of child maltreatment, very few statutes use identical language. Counsel representing parents in child protection proceedings must familiarize themselves with the statutory scheme in their particular state. The general overview of the law provided by this chapter is no substitute for study of the language of the governing statute of the jurisdiction in which any given case arises.
Neglect ordinarily refers to a temporary lapse of care on the part of the parent, often involving some degree of willfulness. Statutes may be quite detailed, enumerating specifics such as moral unfitness of a parent, mental or physical incapacity of a parent, and failure to send the child to school; or they may be couched entirely in broad phrases, such as lack of proper parental care, control, or guardianship. Even statutes that set out numerous specific grounds of neglect usually include a catch-all phrase to cover other situations.
Although most acts of child abuse would come within the standard neglect provisions, many states have separate child abuse statutes. The allegedly abusive parent may be charged with a criminal violation as well as with neglect or possibly subjected to proceedings for termination of parental rights.
In addition to child abuse, abandonment and dependency are two common categories of neglect that may be the subject of separate legislation. Abandonment is shown by parental absence, usually required to be willful and, when separated from neglect findings, is ordinarily included in adoption codes as a ground for permitting the child to be adopted by another concerned adult. Dependency denotes a failure to provide adequate care without fault on the part of the parent; in some states, a finding of dependency must be made as a precondition to the provision of social services to the family.
States also treat unwed fathers very differently. In some jurisdictions, unwed fathers may not even be counted as parents with rights unless they take particular steps to secure such rights. Counsel is well advised to study carefully the laws regulating how men get to become parents with substantive rights.
Finally, states vary widely on the time frame within which agencies are encouraged or required to file a petition to terminate parental rights once children have entered foster care. Counsel should know the law on terminating parental rights before beginning the representation of a parent because the mere passage of time—which may be as short as three to six months—may result in parents permanently losing their rights.
1.02 Common Problems in the Operation of Child Protection Laws
Whatever their precise terms, child protection laws are almost universally administered in a fashion that gives rise to a common constellation of problems. Counsel representing parents can expect to confront the following problems in child protection cases:
children are removed from the families’ custody and placed in foster care despite laws that should forbid such placements;
the families prosecuted in these proceedings are overwhelmingly poor and, in communities with high rates of minorities, very disproportionately of color;
these families are brought to court to address concerns regarding parental decisions involving children’s health or education that are not made the subject of court proceedings for middle and upper income parents;
courts do not rigorously oversee the decisions of agencies;
as a condition of regaining custody of their children, parents are required to secure services that are either unavailable to them or are not needed;
many localities do not have adequate interpreters available to communicate meaningfully with parents;
parents are often mislabeled in psychological evaluations as having conditions they do not have;
services that would eliminate the need for foster care placements are not used;
intervention exacerbates the challenges of parents with special needs;
parents and children in foster care are not allowed sufficient time each week for visiting and the few visits made available often take place in inappropriate sterile environments;
children remain in foster care long after they could be safely returned to their families;
agencies and courts focus more on a parent’s deficits than strengths in making placement decisions;
parents do not regard caseworkers as allies, devoted to helping them and concerned for their, and their children’s, well-being;
parents do not understand what happened in their case when they were in court;
parents do not get to speak with their lawyers between court appearances and do not regard them as fighting for their rights or interests;
cases are increasingly fast-tracked for termination of parental rights when children remain in foster care for one year;
thousands of family relationships each year are permanently extinguished despite the children wanting to remain part of their families and even when they gain nothing by becoming legal orphans; and
counsel for parents are not appointed before significant decisions have already been made and, when appointed, are required to handle unacceptably high caseloads.
1.03 The Impact of Congressional Legislation on Child Protection Laws
For most of American history, protecting and caring for children was considered a matter of state rather than federal concern. That changed beginning in 1980 when Congress enacted the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, Pub. L. No. 96-272, 94 Stat. 500. It was enacted in the face of widespread evidence in the late 1970s that children were being needlessly separated from their families by child-care agencies. After conducting extensive hearings on the subject, Congress concluded that there was a need for federal action to effect change in local practices. The 1980 law mandates that states receiving federal money comply with specifications designed to prevent unnecessary separation of children from their parents, to assure a careful monitoring of children who are separated, and to provide an infusion of services into the family to speed the ultimate return of children to their parents.
The Act gives parents’ lawyers an important weapon for attacking deficiencies in state processes. It constitutes a statement of national policy that they can invoke to curb some of the most oppressive features of state child protection proceedings. The Act was meant to ensure the following results:
(1) no child will be placed in foster care, except in emergency situations, either voluntarily or involuntarily, unless services aimed at preventing the need for placement have been provided or refused by the family;
(2) no child will be involuntarily removed from his or her home, except on a short-term basis in emergency situations, unless there has been a judicial determination that the child should be removed;
(3) no child will be placed in foster care by the voluntary action of his or her parents unless a voluntary placement agreement has been signed by parents and agency;
(4) a child who has been removed from his or her home will be placed in the least restrictive family-like setting in which any special needs may be met, within reasonable proximity to his or her family and with relatives where appropriate;
(5) reunification services are made available to the child and his or her parents after removal from the home; and
(6) there must be a written individualized case plan developed for each child placed in foster care, an administrative review of each case plan at least every six months, and a dispositional hearing by a court or court-appointed administrative body to be held regularly.
See H.R. REP. NO. 96-136, at 6 (1979).
The 1980 Act has been amended many times, most notably in 1997 by the enactment of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act. See Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, Pub. L. No. 105-89, 111 Stat. 2115, 2121, 2129. One cannot know child welfare in the United States without knowing these laws. This section will explain them and their significance to local practice throughout the country. The most important provisions are codified at 42 U.S.C. §§ 671, 672, and 675 (2014). Among them are strict conditions for the removal of children from their homes. In order to be eligible for federal money to subsidize foster care services, agencies are required in most cases to identify and employ services that would eliminate the need for placing children in foster care. Federal law requires that courts oversee and approve the foster care placement of all children. Such removals are ineligible for federal reimbursement unless courts have found two things: that reasonable efforts to prevent the need for the placement were made or there were proper grounds for not making them and that continuation in the home would be contrary to the welfare of the child. See 42 U.S.C. § 672(a); see also 42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(15). Federal law also requires, unless there are reasons to the contrary, that agencies continue to employ reasonable efforts to make it possible for the prompt, safe return of children to their families. See 42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(15)(B). Although federal law exempts from these reasonable efforts requirements cases in which parents have previously lost their parental rights or committed certain crimes or acts of abuse, in most cases the reasonable efforts requirement is ongoing throughout the life of the case. See 42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(15)(D).
Federal law also regulates where children should be placed in foster care and other important aspects of the foster care placement. It requires that whenever children are placed in foster care that agencies exercise due diligence to identify and contact all adult relatives to alert them of the placement and to offer them the opportunity to take temporary custody. See 42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(29). Federal law also requires that agencies make reasonable efforts to place siblings in the same foster home and to provide for frequent visitation during their placement. See 42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(31).
The Adoption and Safe Families Act has had a powerful impact on practice throughout the United States. Federal policy today encourages adoptions once children have been in foster care for a certain length of time, even in cases where there was no compelling need for foster care placement or where no efforts were undertaken to reunify children with their birth families. It is one thing for Congress to excuse states from exercising reasonable efforts toward reunification when parents have previously inflicted serious harm on their children or even, perhaps, when the state has previously terminated parental rights to a sibling. See 42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(15)(D). But current law substantially shortens the amount of time within which parents may regain custody of their children before the state is authorized to initiate proceedings to terminate parental rights in many unexceptional cases.
Under federal law, termination petitions ordinarily should be filed after a child has spent fifteen out of twenty-two consecutive months in foster care. In too many places, however, agencies and courts treat federal law as requiring that termination petitions be filed based solely on the amount of time children have been in foster care. This is a very serious misreading of federal law, and lawyers for parents should become familiar with the exceptions written into federal law that eliminate the requirement that a termination petition be filed.
Federal law does not require, or even recommend, that a termination of parental rights petition be filed when the child is in the care of a relative, 42 U.S.C. § 675(5)(E)(i), when there are no grounds for termination under state law, 45 C.F.R. § 1356.21(i) (2)(ii)(B) (2014), when adoption is not the appropriate permanency goal for the child, id. § 1356.21(i)(2)(ii)(A), and when the child is an unaccompanied refugee minor, id. § 1356.21(i)(2)(ii)(C), among a number of other situations, 42 U.S.C. § 675(5)(E)(i); 45 C.F.R. § 1356.21(i)(2)(ii)(D).
The penalty for a state’s failure to abide by federal law regulating foster care is a fiscal one. States that place or keep children in foster care in violation of federal law are ineligible for an increase in federal funds above the amount they received in 1979. Counsel should become familiar with these federal provisions and with the regulations the Department of Health and Human Services have promulgated. See 45 C.F.R. §§ 1355–57 (2014). Moreover, every state has codified significant parts of the federal law. Counsel should read the state statute thoroughly and its accompanying administrative regulations as well. They invariably contain numerous provisions that, if enforced vigorously, would make the initial separation of parent and child difficult to bring about and, if the child is removed, would require significant state efforts to reunite the family as quickly as feasible. State case law should also be reviewed to determine which features of the federal requirements are being judicially enforced, which have been held unenforceable, and which have not yet been litigated. For a discussion of the details of the federal legislation and strategies to assure its implementation, see Amelia S. Watson, A New Focus on Reasonable Efforts to Reunify, 9 CHILD L. PRAC. 113 (2012); see also Jeanne M. Kaiser, Finding a Reasonable Way to Enforce the Reasonable Efforts Requirement in Child Protection Cases, 7 RUTGERS J.L. & PUB. POL’Y 100 (2009).
Whenever Native American children are the subjects of child protection proceedings or proceedings for the termination of parental rights, the Indian Child Welfare Act, 25 U.S.C. § 1901 et seq. (2014), should be consulted. See Chapter 11 for more information. This law applies to any child who is either a member of an Indian tribe or the biological child of a member and eligible for membership in a tribe. When covered children are subject to jurisdiction in state juvenile courts, the Indian Child Welfare Act ordinarily requires that jurisdiction be transferred to the appropriate tribal court if the parent or the tribe so requests. And even when proceedings involving covered children remain in the state courts, the Act’s procedural rules are applicable, including federal standards of proof that supersede those ordinarily used in state courts to test the showing made of a need for foster care placement or termination of parental rights. See 25 U.S.C. § 1912(e)–(f); see also Megan Scanlon, From Theory to Practice: Incorporating the Active Efforts Requirement in Indian Child Welfare Act Proceedings, 43 ARIZ. ST. L.J. 629 (2011). Attorneys for parents should determine early in the case whether the Indian Child Welfare Act is applicable. If it is, counsel should study the Act, discuss with the client the rights and choices that the Act provides, and effectuate those that the client wants to pursue.
1.04 The Nature and Status of Parental Rights Under the Constitution
Although the Constitution does not expressly confer upon parents the right to rear their children without undue interference by the state, since the 1920s, the Supreme Court of the United States has consistently and vigorously protected parental rights through the application of constitutional principles. Indeed, it has characterized the rights to conceive and to raise one’s children as essential, Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 651 (1972) (quoting Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923)), basic civil rights of man, Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 65 (2000) (quoting Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 (1942)), and rights far more precious … than property rights, Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 232 (1972) (quoting May v. Anderson, 345 U.S. 528, 533 (1953)). In 2000, the Court characterized the interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children to be perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court. Troxel, 530 U.S. at 65. As the Court once summarized, a parent’s legal interest in his or her child is established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition. See Yoder, 406 U.S. at 232.
American constitutional law allocates to parents very broad authority to raise their children as they see fit and many Supreme Court cases have established the rights of parents to raise children as they choose. As the Court expressed, there is a private realm of family life which the state cannot enter. Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166 (1944). In the absence of a compelling state interest, raising children, and teaching them the values of their family, is something the state can neither supply nor hinder. See id.
In the first significant parents’ rights case, Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), the Court held that a statute forbidding the teaching of the German language impermissibly encroached on the liberty parents possess. The Court explained that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects this liberty, incorporating the right to marry, establish a home, and bring up children.
Relying on Meyer, the Court two years later struck down an Oregon statute requiring children to attend public schools. The Justices found that this statute unduly interfered with the right of parents to select private or parochial schools for their children and that it lacked a reasonable relation to any purpose within the competency of the state. See Pierce v. Soc’y of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925). The Court wrote:
The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children…. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations?
In several other well-known instances, the Court ruled that state officials exceeded their authority by interfering with parental child-rearing choices. These cases protected a parent’s right to make decisions about their children even when state officials disagreed with them. In 1972, the Court held that Wisconsin’s compulsory education law violated an Amish father’s rights to take his fifteen-year-old children out of school to complete their education in Amish ways at home. See Yoder, 406 U.S. 205.
In 2000, the Court declared unconstitutional a Washington statute that authorized judges to order parents to permit more visitation between children and their grandparents than the parents desired. See Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000). The Court held in Troxel that parents’ childrearing decisions are presumptively correct. As a result, it is not enough for judges to find that a different choice than the parents’ would further the child’s best interests. Explaining that it cannot now be doubted that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects the fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children, the Court ruled that judges lacked the power to overrule fit parents’ childrearing judgments. See id. at 66 (plurality opinion).
Troxel stands for the important principle that neither agencies nor courts may take positions regarding children because they regard them as furthering the child’s best interests. A best interests inquiry unavoidably grants the decision maker a degree of discretion to overrule parental childrearing choices that is incompatible with the protection of constitutional rights. In Troxel, for example, the trial judge’s decision to award the grandparents more visitation than the mother would have allowed, was based in part on the judge’s own experience as a child and his recollection of fond memories of time spent with his grandparents. Justice O’Connor’s plurality opinion condemned this exercise of judicial power as contravene[ing] the traditional presumption that a fit parent will act in the best interest of his or her child. See id. at 69. The trial judge, the Court held, failed to provide any protection for Granville’s fundamental constitutional right to make decisions concerning the rearing of her own daughters. See id. at 70. As the Supreme Court wrote in 1978, "We have little doubt that the Due Process Clause would be offended ‘[i]f a State were to attempt to force the breakup of a natural family, over the objections of the parents and their children, without some showing of unfitness and for the sole reason that to do so was thought to be in the children’s best interest.’ Smith v. Organization of Foster Families, 431 U.S. 816, 862–863 (1977) (Stewart, J., concurring in judgment)." Quilloin v. Walcott, 434 U.S. 246, 255 (1978).
The Court has done much more than jealously guard a parent’s right to make childrearing decisions. It has also protected the custodial rights of parents. Perhaps the most important case in this line was Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645 (1972). Stanley declared unconstitutional an Illinois dependency statute that deprived unmarried fathers of the care and custody of their children on the death of the mother without any showing of the father’s unfitness. The Court declared the law unconstitutional, holding that unless a parent is unfit, he has the constitutional right to the care and custody of his children. In reaching this conclusion, the Court observed that [t]he private interest here, that of a man in the children he has sired and raised, undeniably warrants deference and, absent a powerful countervailing interest, protection. Id. at 651. The Court characterized the state’s interest in caring for a fit parent’s children as "de minimis." Id. at 657.
The Court also held that the Constitution requires that a parent’s substantive custodial right must be protected by rigorous procedural protections that preclude presuming the father’s unfitness: All Illinois parents are constitutionally entitled to a hearing on their fitness before their children are removed from their custody. See id. at 658.
Stanley followed the 1944 Supreme Court decision in which the Court first explained that the state has a legitimate interest in ensuring that children are not harmed by their families. In Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944), the Court held that states may prosecute parents when they expose their children to serious hazards to their well-being. In sustaining the conviction of a minor’s guardian who, in the exercise of her religious freedom, violated a child labor law, the Court explained that [p]arents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free … to make martyrs of their children. See id. at 170.
Both Prince and Stanley are the foundational cases for applying constitutional protections in child welfare cases. Combined, they stand for three simple propositions. First, parents have constitutionally protected rights to the care and custody of their children. Second, those rights are limited and may be attenuated or lost when they fall below the minimum standard of care for childrearing. Third, when state officials believe children need protection from their families, they must charge parents with unfitness and prove their case in court.
Although the Supreme Court has never had occasion to comment on the subject, a number of federal courts have also added the important idea that the right to resist coercive state intervention in the family belongs to all of its members, including children. As the Second Circuit explained almost forty years ago, [T]he right of the family to remain together without the coercive interference of the awesome power of the state … encompasses the reciprocal rights of both parent and child. Duchesne v. Sugarman, 566 F.2d 817, 825 (2d Cir. 1977). The court explained that children have the constitutional right to avoid dislocat[ion] from the emotional attachments that derive from the intimacy of daily association with the parent. See id. (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Tenenbaum v. Williams, 193 F.3d 581, 599, 600 (2d Cir. 1999) (parents and children alike share the fundamental right to remain together without the coercive interference of the awesome power of the state ); Nicholson v. Williams, 203 F. Supp. 2d 153, 235 (E.D.N.Y. 2002) (liberty interest in not being forcibly separated by the state is shared by parents and children ). Other courts that have expressed similar sentiments include Suboh v. Dist. Attorney’s Office of Suffolk Dist., 298 F.3d 81, 91 (1st Cir. 2002); Brokaw v. Mercer Cnty., 235 F.3d 1000, 1018–19 (7th Cir. 2000); J.B. v. Washington Cnty., 127 F.3d 919, 927 (10th Cir. 1997); Franz v. United States, 707 F.2d 582, 594–95 (D.C. Cir. 1983).
The constitutional right to raise children is also the corollary of another set of fundamental constitutional rights of Americans: the right to procreate. In 1942, proclaiming that procreation is fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race and one of the basic civil rights of man, the Court held that an Oklahoma law that allowed the state to sterilize persons convicted two or more times for crimes amounting to felonies involving moral turpitude, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it infringed upon the fundamental right to have off-spring. See Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 536 (1942).
Ever since, the Court has advanced the reproductive rights of Americans. In a 1965 decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), the Court used the opportunity to declare unconstitutional a Connecticut law that, although still on the books, had not been enforced for many years. The law barred the use and distribution of contraceptives, even for married persons. The Court ruled that the Constitution protects various kinds of intimate privacy and that the marriage relationship fell well within a zone of privacy that protected couples from virtually all governmental regulation. In a concurring opinion, Justice Goldberg wrote:
The home derives its pre-eminence as the seat of family life. And the integrity of that life is something so fundamental that it has been found to draw to its protection the principles of more than one explicitly granted Constitutional right…. The entire fabric of the Constitution and the purposes that clearly underlie its specific guarantees demonstrate that the rights to marital privacy and to marry and raise a family are of similar order and magnitude as the fundamental rights specifically protected.
381 U.S. at 495 (quoting Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 551–52 (1961) (Harlan, J., dissenting)).
Griswold’s reasoning was broadly extended seven years later from a privacy right within a marriage to an individual’s privacy right. In 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972), the Court reasoned that because the marital privacy recognized in Griswold protects two independent and distinct individuals, this protection should apply equally to a single person. The Court announced that [i]f the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child. Id. at 453. Accordingly, the Court invalidated a Massachusetts statute that prohibited the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried persons.
Both Griswold and Eisenstadt were important foundational decisions for the Court’s next, and most controversial, foray into the field of procreative rights. In 1973, the Court decided Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), declaring for the first time that part of a woman’s constitutional right to privacy (including the fundamental right whether or not to beget a child) includes the choice to terminate an unwanted pregnancy (at least in the early stages of the pregnancy). In Roe, the Court restricted state power to forbid abortions, holding that a woman’s decision whether to bear a child is within the sphere of privacy founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty. See id. at 153. The Court noted that even though the word privacy cannot be found in the Constitution, a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy has been constitutionally recognized in connection with activities relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, and child rearing and education. See id. at 152. The next year, the Court invalidated a scheme of mandatory leaves for pregnant public school teachers because that scheme unnecessarily interfered with the decision to raise a family, declaring freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Cleveland Bd. of Educ. v. LaFleur, 414 U.S. 632, 639–40 (1974).
The Court has decided only a small number of cases that began as child welfare proceedings in state court. In 1981, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause does not require the appointment of counsel for indigent parents in every parental status termination proceeding. Rather, parents have a due process right to a fundamentally fair procedure that may, but not invariably, require the appointment of counsel. See Lassiter v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 452 U.S. 18 (1981). Even in reaching this holding, however, the Court stressed that a parent’s desire for and right to the companionship, care, custody and management of his or her children is an important interest that undeniably warrants deference and, absent a powerful countervailing interest, protection, id. at 27 (quoting Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 651 (1972)), and that a parent’s interest in the accuracy and justice of the decision to terminate his or her parental status is, therefore a commanding one, id.
The following year, the Court declared unconstitutional, a New York statute that authorized termination of parental rights based on a preponderance of the evidence. Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982). Santosky is the first Supreme Court case to hold that even after parents are found unfit in a contested court proceeding, they retain constitutionally protected parental rights. As the Court explained, [t]he fundamental liberty interest of natural parents in the care, custody, and management of their child does not evaporate simply because they have not been model parents or have lost temporary custody of their child to the state. Even when blood relationships are strained, parents retain a vital interest in preventing the irretrievable destruction of their family life. Id. at 753.
The upshot of this body of case law is that parents have a constitutional right to the care, custody, and control of their children. This right includes the right to be free from interference by the state in the rearing of children, so long as parents discharge certain obligations to provide for their health and safety and education. Because of the fundamental nature of these rights, state intrusion into the upbringing of children or the integrity of the familial relationship is permitted only if strict due process safeguards have been observed, see, e.g., Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982), and after a showing has been made that a weighty state interest justifies disturbance of the parent–child bond and cannot be achieved in a less disruptive manner, see, e.g., Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000).
The government gets to set the boundaries at the outer limits of what is acceptable parenting. Thus, laws protecting children from neglect and abuse are a proper exercise of the state’s police power (regulating the conduct of citizens that has the potential to harm others) or parens patriae power (protecting individuals incapable of protecting themselves). But, this means only that parents are obliged to exercise a minimum degree of care when raising their children. Unless parents fall below this standard and are found to be unfit in court proceedings charging them with abuse or neglect, parental childrearing decisions are virtually immune from state oversight.
This places considerable attention on the definition of unfitness under state law. To ensure against state officials using the power to protect children from harm through open-ended, value-laden judgments, state law must strictly define neglect (or its equivalent term). The draftsman’s goal in defining neglect is to proscribe parental conduct in which no one is permitted to engage without intruding into conduct that, however, unacceptable it may be to some, is above the level of impermissible. Only when no parent is permitted to do something are state officials authorized to prevent a particular parent from exercising his or her parental rights.
Many states, however, use phrases of great breadth and vagueness to define the circumstances warranting state intervention. For example, they commonly give juvenile court jurisdiction over children who are denied proper parental care, see, e.g., NEB. REV. STAT. § 43-247 (2014); 42 PA. CONS. STAT. § 6302 (2014), are found in conditions injurious to their physical or mental well-being or morals, see, e.g., TEXAS FAM. CODE ANN. § 161.001 (2014), or are deprived of other care or control necessary for a child’s physical, mental, or emotional health or morals, see, e.g., GA. CODE ANN., § 15-11-2(48) (2014).
In a variety of contexts, the Supreme Court of the United States has held that statutes authorizing the abridgment of fundamental liberties protected by the federal Constitution must set forth with specificity the conduct that will trigger the state’s action. See, e.g., Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972); Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, 382 U.S. 87 (1965); Herndon v. Lowry, 301 U.S. 242 (1937). The Court has emphasized three related but distinct dangers that make vague legislation intolerable in areas bordering on important constitutional rights. First, when state intervention is broadly authorized and inadequately channeled in these areas, there is a grave risk that the constitutional rights will frequently be invaded and that the invasions will be difficult to detect and remedy. Second, individuals are deprived of fair notice regarding the conduct that will subject them to state intervention. Third, vague authorizations of state intervention lend themselves to arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement. See, e.g., Smith v. Goguen, 415 U.S. 566, 572–76 (1974); Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U.S. 99 (1940).
In addition, because child protection proceedings infringe on fundamental constitutional rights, the Constitution requires that courts carefully limit the means used. Each aspect of intervention must be viewed through the lens of restricting constitutional freedoms only as much as necessary to achieve the specific compelling state interest. States must show both that (1) their actions further a compelling state interest and (2) they have chosen the least restrictive means to advance it or they are violating the Constitution. See City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 534 (1997) ( Requiring a State to demonstrate a compelling interest and show that it has adopted the least restrictive means of achieving that interest is the most demanding test known to constitutional law. ); see also Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330 (1972); Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U.S. 479 (1960).
A number of courts have applied the strict scrutiny required by these doctrines to child protection statutes and to statutes authorizing the termination of parental rights and have declared them unconstitutional. A federal district court in Iowa in 1975 declared an Iowa law unconstitutionally vague that authorized termination of parental rights for refus[al] … to give the child necessary parental care and protection or for parental conduct likely to be detrimental to the physical or mental health or morals of the child. See Alsager v. District Court, 406 F. Supp. 10, 14 (S.D. Iowa 1975), aff’d per curiam, 545 F.2d 1137 (8th Cir. 1976). The court found the statute suffered from three vices: the absence of fair warning, the impermissible delegation of discretion, and the undue inhibition of the legitimate exercise of a constitutional right. See id. at 18.
A year later, another federal court struck down an Alabama law, saying:
When is a home an unfit or improper place for a child? Obviously this is a question about which men and women of ordinary intelligence would greatly disagree…. Because these terms are too subjective to denote a sufficient warning to those individuals who might be affected by their proscription, the statute is unconstitutionally vague.
Roe v. Conn, 417 F. Supp. 769 (M.D. Ala. 1976) (three-judge court).
The Supreme Court of Arkansas applied a similar analysis to invalidate a law authorizing the termination of parental rights whenever parents were found not to provide their child with a proper home :
Using any of … [the possible] meanings does little to make the words a proper home clearly understandable, so that it doesn’t mean one thing to one judge, something else to another, and something yet different to still another. What is a proper home? A correct home? A suitable home? A fit home? An appropriate home? A home consistent with propriety? Is propriety to be determined ethically, socially, or economically? Or on the basis of morality? Or prosperity? Is the standard a maximum, a minimum, a mean or an average?
Davis v. Smith, 266 Ark. 112, 133, 583 S.W.2d 37, 43 (1979).
In the child protection field, the great danger of overly vague laws is that they permit implementers—caseworkers who may have minimal training—to invoke state power in circumstances under which no legislative body ever contemplated or approved state action. When the power is used to pass judgment on parents and when that judgment is made, as it usually is, about poor parents who frequently are members of minority groups, there is an inordinate danger that the judgment will be based on cultural biases and values of the professionals. This point was made by the Supreme Court when it pointed out that termination of parental rights proceedings are often vulnerable to judgments based on cultural or class bias. See Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745, 763 (1982). This is so, the Court explained, because the parents involved in these matters are often poor, uneducated, or members of minority groups, and the determinations [are] unusually open to the subjective values of the judge. See id. at 762–63; see also Smith v. Org. of Foster Families, 431 U.S. 816, 833–34 (1977).
Vague laws, in other words, allow arbitrary intrusions into the lives of families both by failing to limit beforehand the discretion of caseworkers to remove children from their families or to charge caregivers with neglect and by allowing judges thereafter to rule against parents in situations in which the legislature made no determination that state intervention is appropriate. As the Alsager court said, intervention in any given case may thus turn upon which state officials are involved in the case, rather than upon explicit standards reflecting legislative intent. This danger is especially grave in the highly subjective context of determining an approved mode of child-rearing. See 406 F. Supp. at 18–19.
These arguments, though persuasive in theory, will rarely result in a declaration of the unconstitutionality of a child protection law at the trial level. Most juvenile court judges are not used to being asked to rule that a statute is unconstitutional and are not apt to take seriously any kind of facial challenge to a law. In addition, a number of state appellate courts have upheld the constitutionality of dependency laws that were rather broadly worded. See, e.g., In re Cager, 251 Md. 473, 248 A.2d 384 (1968); In re William L., 477 Pa. 322, 383 A.2d 1228 (1978), cert. denied sub nom. Lehman v. Lycoming Cnty. Children’s Servs., 439 U.S. 880 (1978); Custody of R.R.B., 108 Wash. App. 602, 31 P.3d 1212 (2001).
1.05 The Limited Role of Federal Judicial Oversight in Child Welfare Matters
Even though the field is embedded in constitutional doctrine, it rarely feels that way in dependency court. Constitutional discourse is uncommon in these courts. Several factors inhibit the expansive development of federal constitutional rights of parents in child protection proceedings despite the strong doctrinal bases that exist for recognizing that these proceedings affect parental interests of importance under the Constitution. First, individual rights other than the parents’ are directly implicated in child protection cases. The proverbial principle that it is better to let ten guilty persons go free than to countenance one innocent person’s conviction does not express the balancing of interests generally believed to be appropriate in this area of the law. Indeed, some prefer, and some of the state statutory schemes appear structured to assure, overbroad intervention in order to assure that all children who need protection will get it.
In addition, federal courts, especially the lower federal courts, have not been significantly involved in the child protection area. There was a brief period in the 1970s when the lower federal courts decided several important cases in the area. See, e.g., Sims v. State Dep’t of Pub. Welfare, 438 F. Supp. 1179 (S.D. Tex. 1977) (three-judge court), rev’d on other grounds sub nom. Moore v. Sims, 442 U.S. 415 (1979); Roe v. Conn, 417 F. Supp. 769 (M.D. Ala. 1976) (three-judge court); Alsager v. District Court, 406 F. Supp. 10 (S.D. Iowa 1975). But the Supreme Court has since developed doctrines limiting the exercise of federal jurisdiction that make the lower federal courts practically unavailable as a forum for this kind of litigation.
By changing the doctrine involving standing and ripeness, see, e.g., City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95 (1983), challenges to state intervention can rarely be made the subject of a federal lawsuit before state judicial proceedings against the parent have been initiated. Once those proceedings have commenced, the abstention doctrine precludes a parent’s recourse to the federal courts throughout the pendency of the state proceeding. See Moore v. Sims, 442 U.S. 415 (1979). Finally, the habeas corpus jurisdiction of the federal courts ordinarily does not extend to reviewing the result of a state child protection proceeding after it is over. See Lehman v. Lycoming Cnty. Children’s Servs. Agency, 458 U.S. 502 (1982). The interplay of these rules has largely excluded the federal district and circuit courts from any direct involvement in child protection cases.
This has not entirely kept federal courts from overseeing state child protection practices. Some innovative litigators have succeeded in filing claims challenging the constitutionality of various state court or agency procedures. And they have sometimes achieved remarkable results. In the 1990s New York, for example, caseworkers were routinely charging mothers with neglect and removing children from their custody when the mothers—victims of domestic violence— allowed the children to witness the violence. Lawyers for these mothers filed a federal class action seeking an injunction preventing caseworkers from removing children from parents except upon a showing that the parents fell below the minimum standard of care when raising their children.