Court Opinion

ID: 9900327
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-11-18 22:11:03.718654+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:21:04.469418
License: Public Domain

722                   October 25, 2023                 No. 556

         IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF THE
                 STATE OF OREGON

              In the Matter of D. A. M.,
                aka B. B. M., a Child.
         DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES,
                Petitioner-Respondent,
                            v.
                        J. L. M.,
                       Appellant.
              Linn County Circuit Court
                21JU02550; A180845

   Heidi M. Sternhagen, Judge pro tempore.
   Argued and submitted September 7, 2023.
   Kyle Sessions, Deputy Public Defender, argued the
cause for appellant. Also on the briefs was Shannon Storey,
Chief Defender, Juvenile Appellate Section, Office of Public
Defense Services.
   Stacy M. Chaffin, Assistant Attorney General, argued the
cause for respondent. Also on the brief were Ellen F. Rosenblum,
Attorney General, and Benjamin Gutman, Solicitor General.
  Before Ortega, Presiding Judge, and Powers, Judge, and
Hellman, Judge.
   ORTEGA, P. J.
   Reversed and remanded.
Cite as 328 Or App 722 (2023)                                            723

          ORTEGA, P. J.
          In this juvenile dependency case, mother appeals
from a judgment changing the permanency plan for her
20-month-old son, D, from reunification to adoption. Mother,
who is incarcerated, challenges the juvenile court’s deter-
mination that the Department of Human Services (DHS)
made reasonable efforts toward reunification. We agree
with mother that the juvenile court erred and, accordingly,
reverse.1
                             FACTS
          In the absence of de novo review, which is neither
requested nor warranted in this case, we are bound by the
juvenile court’s factual findings as to what efforts DHS has
made, so long as there is any evidence in the record to sup-
port them. Dept. of Human Services v. C. H., 327 Or App 61,
63, 533 P3d 1112 (2023). We draw the relevant facts from
the juvenile court’s letter opinion and from the record.
          Mother gave birth to D in May 2021 at home, and
they were transported by ambulance to the hospital. At
the hospital, mother admitted that she had used heroin
earlier that day and had used heroin and methamphet-
amine throughout her pregnancy. Mother tested positive
for methamphetamine, amphetamine, and heroin, and D’s
meconium tested positive for those substances as well as for
codeine. Although D did not show signs of withdrawal upon
first arriving at the hospital, he later began having severe
withdrawal symptoms that required the use of morphine to
manage.
          DHS met with mother at the hospital and made an
initial in-home safety plan with her, which included offering
mother addiction recovery services. However, mother left D
at the hospital the next day, and hospital staff were unable
to contact her or make medical decisions on D’s behalf. DHS
took protective custody of D when he was four days old.
          Despite various and repeated attempts to locate
and contact mother, DHS was unable to do so until she was

     1
       Our conclusion that the juvenile court erred in determining that DHS
made reasonable efforts obviates the need to address mother’s other assignments
of error.
724                            Dept. of Human Services v. J. L. M.

arrested in mid-July 2021 on outstanding probation war-
rants.2 In the few weeks that mother was incarcerated at
Linn County jail awaiting sentencing on her open criminal
cases, DHS met with mother, arranged for visitation with D,
and twice discussed mother’s desire to engage in addiction
recovery services. In August 2021, mother was sentenced
to a term of imprisonment and transported to Coffee Creek
Correctional Facility to serve her sentence.
         In November 2021, the juvenile court took jurisdic-
tion over D on two bases: “mother’s substance abuse has led
to her incarceration, which places the child at risk of harm”
and “[m]other is incarcerated and unavailable to parent her
child.” The court ordered mother to engage in a safety plan
and a referral for substance abuse evaluation and recom-
mended treatment, and it ordered DHS to make those refer-
rals and offer those services reasonably necessary to permit
mother to achieve reunification.
        Throughout mother’s incarceration, DHS had facil-
itated weekly video visits and monthly in-person visits with
D, and DHS met with mother monthly on the phone or in
person to provide updates and pictures of D and to discuss
mother’s case and the status of services mother could engage
in while incarcerated.
          From August 2021 to September 2022, mother was
housed in medium security at Coffee Creek. During that
time, DHS twice provided mother with letters of expectation
to inform her of the services and supports DHS was offering.
The letters explained that mother needed to “participate
in drug and alcohol treatment at the level deemed appro-
priate in her completed assessment” and “follow all recom-
mendations from her treatment counselor and/or [ ]DHS”
in addition to “demonstrat[ing] sobriety and a long-term
commitment to living a drug free lifestyle.” DHS also twice
provided mother with action agreements that outlined “spe-
cific actions” mother should take to address identified safety
threats, including that mother “complete an [alcohol and

    2
      A year earlier, mother had entered an agreement with the state to defer
further proceedings in five open criminal cases involving various drug and prop-
erty crimes, pending her completion of the Linn County Drug Court Program.
Mother failed to engage in drug court.
Cite as 328 Or App 722 (2023)                                               725

drug] assessment through an approved provider,” “follow the
recommendations of the treatment provider,” and “maintain
a drug free lifestyle.” On multiple occasions, DHS spoke with
mother’s prison counselor to inquire about services available
to mother while in prison. Each time, the counselor said that,
due to the pandemic, the Department of Corrections (DOC)
was not offering alcohol and drug counseling to adults in
custody and would not allow DHS to bring in outside provid-
ers to offer drug and alcohol services to mother.
         In September 2022, mother was transferred to min-
imum security. After the move, DHS twice contacted moth-
er’s new prison counselor to discuss mother’s access to alter-
native incarceration programs, and the counselor said that,
due to her county detainers,3 mother was not eligible under
DOC policy to participate in DOC-provided drug treatment
programs until six months prior to her release in February
2024. DHS did not inquire about whether DOC would allow
DHS to bring in outside providers to offer drug and alcohol
services to mother in minimum security.
         In January 2023, the juvenile court held a perma-
nency hearing for D, who by that time had been in substi-
tute care for 20 months. Mother and the DHS caseworker
testified consistently with the facts described above. Mother
also called as a witness an attorney who was working pro
bono to lift her county detainers so that she would be eligi-
ble to participate in DOC programs.
        After the hearing, the court changed D’s perma-
nency plan from reunification to adoption and entered a
permanency judgment memorializing that ruling. The court
concluded that, “[u]nder the totality of the circumstances,
including the efforts prior [to] and after mother’s incarcer-
ation” and considering the length of mother’s incarceration,
“[ ]DHS has provided reasonable efforts for the duration of
this case.” As to substance abuse services, the court found
that DHS “has communicated with DOC about services
available to mother by DOC as well as sought to bring in
outside providers to offer drug and alcohol services/treat-
ment.” The court acknowledged that DHS “could have been
    3
      In two of the five open cases, mother was sentenced to 30-day jail sentences
to be served consecutively to her prison sentence.
726                      Dept. of Human Services v. J. L. M.

more active in communicating with [m]other’s prison coun-
selor between September 2022 and January 2023 regarding
services,” but that DHS “continue[d] to communicate with
mother and inquire about services that were available to her
once she was in minimum security.” As to the safety plan,
the court found that DHS originally had “tried to engage in
a home safety plan with mother,” but she “did not engage.”
                       DISCUSSION
         A foundational policy of Oregon’s juvenile depen-
dency system is “to offer appropriate reunification services
to parents” of children who have become wards of the court
to allow parents “the opportunity to adjust their circum-
stances, conduct or conditions to make it possible for the
child to safely return home within a reasonable time.” ORS
419B.090(5). Accordingly, when a child’s permanency plan
is reunification, the juvenile court must determine at each
permanency hearing “whether [DHS] has made reasonable
efforts * * * to make it possible for the ward to safely return
home and whether the parent has made sufficient progress
to make it possible for the ward to safely return home.” ORS
419B.476(2)(a). To change a child’s permanency plan away
from reunification, the juvenile court must first determine
that DHS has proved by a preponderance of the evidence
(1) that DHS has made “reasonable efforts” to reunify the
family, and (2) that, notwithstanding those efforts, the par-
ent has not made sufficient progress to permit reunification.
Dept. of Human Services v. K. G. T., 306 Or App 368, 374, 473
P3d 131 (2020).
         Whether DHS has made “reasonable efforts” is a
legal conclusion that we review for legal error. C. H., 327
Or App at 63. “Reasonable efforts to reunify a child with
[their] parent focus on ameliorating the adjudicated bases
for jurisdiction and give parents a reasonable opportunity to
demonstrate their ability to adjust their conduct and become
minimally adequate parents.” Dept. of Human Services v.
D. M. R., 301 Or App 436, 444, 455 P3d 599 (2019) (internal
quotation marks omitted). “DHS’s efforts are evaluated over
the entire duration of the case, with an emphasis on a period
before the hearing sufficient in length to afford a good oppor-
tunity to assess parental progress.” Dept. of Human Services
Cite as 328 Or App 722 (2023)                             727

v. S. M. H., 283 Or App 295, 306, 388 P3d 1204 (2017) (inter-
nal quotation marks omitted).
          “It is well established that DHS is not excused
from making reasonable efforts toward reunification simply
because a parent is incarcerated.” Dept. of Human Services
v. L. L. S., 290 Or App 132, 139, 413 P3d 1005 (2018). The
length and circumstances of incarceration may be properly
considered as part of the totality of the circumstances in
assessing the reasonableness of DHS’s efforts toward reuni-
fication. Dept. of Human Services v. C. L. H., 283 Or App
313, 329, 388 P3d 1214 (2017). However, although the “cir-
cumstances and duration of a parent’s incarceration may
well bear significantly on whether a parent is able to make
‘sufficient progress’ as required by ORS 419B.476(2)(a),” a
parent’s incarceration does “not absolve DHS of its sepa-
rate obligation, over the life of the case, to make reasonable
efforts to give the parent the opportunity to ameliorate the
bases for jurisdiction.” Id. at 330.
         Here, it is undisputed that DHS has never provided
mother with the two court-ordered services aimed to amelio-
rate the jurisdictional bases: a substance abuse evaluation
and a safety plan. The parties disagree about whether DHS’s
reunification efforts were nonetheless reasonable, and that
disagreement largely turns on their different readings of our
recent decision in K. G. T. We therefore turn to that case.
          In K. G. T., the father, who had been incarcerated
for a year before the permanency hearing and would not be
released for at least another seven months after it, needed
substance abuse treatment, parent training, and mental
health services to address the jurisdictional bases. 306
Or App at 371-73. DHS determined that DOC did not have
any of those services available to the father, but never con-
sidered trying to arrange services itself, instead taking the
view that it could provide those services to the father once
he was released from prison. Id. at 382. We concluded that
DHS did not provide sufficient evidence to meet its burden
to show that it made reasonable efforts toward reunifica-
tion. Id. at 384-85.
       In reaching that conclusion, we reaffirmed that,
“when a parent contends that DHS’s efforts have not been
728                        Dept. of Human Services v. J. L. M.

reasonable because the agency has declined to provide a
particular service, the court’s ‘reasonable efforts’ determi-
nation should include something resembling a cost-benefit
analysis, at least when * * * the agency itself has deemed
that service to be ‘key’ to the reunification plan.” Id. at 377
(internal quotation marks omitted). We also considered
“some of our existing precedent involving incarcerated par-
ents” and discerned from that precedent
   “that DHS is not required to do the impossible. That is, if it
   is truly not possible to provide a particular service to a par-
   ticular parent, the ‘cost’ necessarily outweighs the benefit,
   no matter how great the benefit might be. But DHS must
   show that it is truly not possible. Otherwise, if providing
   a needed service is possible—albeit perhaps expensive or
   inconvenient—the court must engage in a cost-benefit-like
   analysis that is fundamentally tied to the goal of provid-
   ing the parent, over the life of the case, with a reasonable
   opportunity to demonstrate improvement, if not ameliorate
   the jurisdictional bases. It is for DHS to establish the cost.”
Id. at 378, 381 (footnote and internal citation omitted).
         Applying that standard, we explained that DHS had
failed to provide any evidence to the juvenile court regard-
ing the cost of providing the father with DHS-approved ser-
vices, “in person or otherwise,” while he was incarcerated,
and that both DHS and the juvenile court gave “little, if any,
consideration to the benefit of the services that were not pro-
vided” to the father. Id. at 381-82. Further, because it was
undisputed that the services that were not provided were
“needed,” were “critical to the case plan,” and went “directly
to ameliorating the jurisdictional bases,” we concluded that
DHS did not meet its burden to prove that it had given the
father a reasonable opportunity to demonstrate his ability
to adjust his conduct and become a minimally adequate par-
ent. Id. at 382-85.
         With that understanding of the applicable legal
standard in mind, we return to the parties’ arguments here.
As to the substance abuse evaluation, mother argues that
DHS’s efforts were not reasonable because, even though she
failed to engage in the treatment DHS offered to her in the
several weeks she was in Linn County jail, DHS failed to
Cite as 328 Or App 722 (2023)                              729

provide her a substance abuse evaluation or treatment in
the nearly 17 months that she was in prison. Mother argues
that DHS cannot rely on institutional barriers to excuse
that failure and that, in any event, DHS did not inquire into
the possibility of bringing in an outside evaluator in the five
months leading up to the dependency hearing, after mother
was moved to minimum security.
          DHS responds that its reunification efforts were rea-
sonable. As to the substance abuse evaluation, DHS points
out that it made multiple attempts to provide mother with
drug and alcohol services, before and after she was incarcer-
ated. In DHS’s view, K. G. T. stands for the proposition that,
“[w]here institutional barriers exist to providing services,
DHS must at a minimum explore options beyond whatever
happened to be available through DOC,” and, here, “DHS
did just that.” DHS suggests that it met its burden to estab-
lish that providing mother with a substance abuse evalua-
tion and treatment was impossible, because mother’s prison
counselor repeatedly advised DHS that it was not permitted
to send providers into the prison, and DHS continued to fol-
low up with mother and her counselor to determine what
services could be provided to her. DHS does not dispute that
it did not inquire whether DOC would allow DHS to bring in
an outside provider after mother moved to minimum secu-
rity. But DHS argues that that failure does not render all of
its efforts for the entirety of the case unreasonable, given its
ongoing coordination with mother and her new prison coun-
selor about the services that were available to her through
DOC and given that, in DHS’s view, a substance abuse eval-
uation “would provide relatively little benefit to ameliorat-
ing the bases for jurisdiction” because mother is “a long-time
drug user” who has “three other children that she has not
parented for approximately four years due to her drug use,”
and “[t]he services needed to support her sobriety while
incarcerated may be different than what is needed to sup-
port her sobriety in the community.” Finally, as to the safety
plan, DHS argues that it created an initial in-home safety
plan that could not be implemented because mother aban-
doned D at the hospital and that it “maintained an ongoing
safety plan” with mother. DHS acknowledges that it did not
provide mother with a copy of the ongoing safety plan, but
730                              Dept. of Human Services v. J. L. M.

argues that mother’s caseworker discussed the safety plan
with her and provided mother with action agreements and
letters of expectation “that contained the [same] categories
of information included in a safety plan.”
         As an initial matter, we conclude that DHS has not
established that providing mother with a substance abuse
evaluation and treatment while she was incarcerated was
“truly not possible,” and DHS therefore was required to
establish that the cost of providing that service outweighed
the potential benefits. K. G. T., 306 Or App at 381. To be
sure, in K. G. T., DHS failed to even consider providing ser-
vices to the father during his incarceration when the neces-
sary services were not available through DOC. Id. at 382.
Here, by contrast, DHS apparently considered one alterna-
tive to DOC-provided services—sending an outside provider
into the prison to conduct an evaluation—and repeatedly
sought DOC’s permission to pursue that alternative. But
the record here does not establish that sending an outside
provider into the prison was the only or necessary means
to provide mother with a substance abuse evaluation while
incarcerated. It is reasonable to infer from this record that
other options may have been possible, such as an evalua-
tion conducted over the telephone, via mail or email corre-
spondence, or by means of a remote video meeting.4 Indeed,
mother’s caseworker regularly met with mother over the
telephone, and DHS facilitated weekly video visits with
D. Further, although we acknowledge that there may be a
qualitative difference between an in-person evaluation and
one conducted by other than in-person means, DHS did not
develop a record on that point or present evidence that an
in-person substance abuse evaluation was necessary for
mother to receive the type of treatment required to become
     4
       At oral argument, counsel for DHS suggested that mother did not argue
to the juvenile court that other alternative means to provide her with an assess-
ment may have been available, and that mother had raised that argument for the
first time in her reply brief on appeal. That argument is not well taken. First,
it misallocates the burden of proof. See Dept. of Human Services v. M. C. C., 303
Or App 372, 383, 463 P3d 592 (2020) (An “incarcerated parent is not charged with
the burden of finding solutions to institutional barriers”). Second, mother in fact
argued to the juvenile court that “there were no additional efforts made to figure
out if treatment could be provided to her in some other way aside from asking if
they could bring in someone to do the assessment” and that the pandemic has
demonstrated that “a lot of things can be done remotely,” including treatment.
Cite as 328 Or App 722 (2023)                            731

a minimally adequate parent or to demonstrate progress in
ameliorating the jurisdictional bases. Cf. Dept. of Human
Services v. W. M., 310 Or App 594, 599, 485 P3d 316 (2021)
(DHS failed to provide parents with a reasonable opportu-
nity to address the jurisdictional bases where there was evi-
dence that the parents needed “in-person, hands-on work”
with a professional and the child to learn the skills to man-
age the child’s serious and complicated feeding disorder and
such services were unavailable due to the pandemic).
         In K. G. T., DHS’s “fail[ure] to explore any options
beyond whatever happened to be available through DOC”
made it “impossible to know what other options might exist
or what they would cost” and therefore “impossible to know
whether DHS’s efforts were reasonable or not” under the
applicable cost-benefit analysis. 306 Or App at 384. The
same is true here. DHS’s failure to explore any options aside
from the one that it was repeatedly told was not actually an
option has made it impossible to know what other options
might exist or what they would cost. Without such a record,
it is impossible to know whether DHS’s efforts were reason-
able or not.
         We also reject DHS’s argument that providing
mother with a substance abuse evaluation would have lit-
tle benefit in light of mother’s past drug use, her length of
incarceration, and the obstacles she may likely face upon
release from prison. We have explained that “an assessment
of the ‘benefit’ of a particular service does not turn upon
whether that service will ultimately make reunification
possible.” C. L. H., 283 Or App at 329. Rather, “the juve-
nile court must consider the importance of the service that
was not provided to the case plan and the extent to which
that service was capable of ameliorating the jurisdictional
bases.” Id. at 328. Although both of the jurisdictional bases
here arise from mother’s incarceration, it is undisputed that
mother’s substance abuse is the primary reason that mother
is incarcerated. Accordingly, substance abuse treatment is
critical to the case plan and goes directly to ameliorating
the jurisdictional bases. Providing mother with a substance
abuse evaluation and treatment services would give her an
opportunity to make progress on the central issue in this
732                            Dept. of Human Services v. J. L. M.

case, and it would put the juvenile court in the position to
evaluate mother’s progress toward the reunification goals in
light of her other circumstances.5
           Reversed and remanded.

     5
       Because we conclude that DHS did not meet its burden to establish that
its efforts were reasonable given its failure to provide mother with a substance
abuse evaluation and treatment, we need not address the safety plan.