Court Opinion

ID: 9566900
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 19:44:35.003354+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:40:45.939607
License: Public Domain

ROSSMAN, J.,
dissenting.
The petition paints a bright and clear picture that the welfare of both children is endangered because of mother’s use of drugs and because one of the girls was born with drugs in her system. If that does not state a case for juvenile court involvement, I am greatly concerned for those children in this state who may be in need of protective services. Accordingly, I dissent.
We have, on numerous occasions, found state intervention to be appropriate if it is reasonable to predict that harm will come to the child. State ex rel Juv. Dept. v. Rhoades, 73 Or App 192, 698 P2d 66, rev den 299 Or 443 (1985); State ex rel Juv. Dept. v. Grannis, 67 Or App 565, 680 P2d 660 (1984); State ex rel Juv. Dept. v. East, 38 Or App 59, 589 P2d 744, rev den 286 Or 1 (1979). The state may intervene to protect a child from risk, even in the absence of actual damage to the child. State ex rel Juv. Dept. v. Rhoades, supra, 73 Or App at 196; see also State v. Damofle, 89 Or App 620, 628, 750 P2d 518, rev den 305 Or 671 (1988) (Warren, J., dissenting).1 Therefore, a petition to establish jurisdiction over the older daughter is sufficient if it alleges facts showing that the circumstances surrounding that child create a risk of harm to her welfare.
The majority insists that the state must not only allege facts showing that the circumstances surrounding the child create a risk of harm to her welfare, but that it must specifically allege how the child is harmed by those circumstances. In its hypertechnical approach, the majority requires too much of a petition. The petition asserts that mother uses controlled substances and, shortly before the petition was *678filed, had given birth to a baby with controlled substances in her system. Mother admitted at the preliminary hearing on the petition that the newborn had heroin in its system. Although there was no allegation that the older child was actually harmed, as was her infant sibling, it is a reasonable inference that the mother’s drug abuse poses a danger to the older child’s welfare as well. On the facts proved — together with mother’s admission — it was proper for the trial judge to conclude that “if a mother’s willing to use heroin during her pregnancy and allow her unborn baby to become addicted to heroin, the older child is in danger also.”
Mother herself understands the trial judge’s logic. She states in her brief that “one might reason that if the infant had drugs in her system, and if the mother used controlled substances, then that must affect the ability of the mother to provide sufficient care to the older child.” Nevertheless, she argues that, because such an inference was not specifically pled in the petition, it was not subject to the test of proof and, consequently, the petition failed to allege sufficient facts to give the court jurisdiction. That argument is without merit. A petition must allege sufficient facts that the state is prepared to prove and upon which the court can rely to find jurisdiction. It need not supply the deductive reasoning from which a court can conclude that the facts are sufficient to find that a child is within its jurisdiction.
Although the majority may very well be correct that the acts of sexually or physically abusing a child may be qualitatively different from a parent’s self-abuse with controlled substances, that does not mean, however, that the latter may never pose a reasonably predictable harm to the children in that parent’s custody. The potential danger to a child’s welfare posed by a mother who obviously used a controlled substance while pregnant with another child and who continued to use controlled substances thereafter is no less predictable than that posed by a parent who has sexually or physically abused her other children. In any event, the risk of harm here seems to me to be at least as apparent as that created by the unsanitary and dangerous conditions surrounding the children in State v. Damofle, supra.
In summary, the petition asserts circumstances indicating that the older child is at risk because of mother’s sub*679stance abuse. That is all that is required to bring the child within the protective jurisdiction of the juvenile court. The trial court correctly decided that — if the facts were as alleged — the older child would be entitled to receive protection without first having to suffer a predictable harm. We should affirm.

 In Damofle, we affirmed the defendants’ convictions for criminal mistreatment in the second degree. ORS 163.200(1). We held that the statute was not unconstitutionally vague and that defendants could be held liable for failure to provide adequate “physical care” for their three small children, even in the absence of actual physical harm to them. The dissent argued that the legislature did not intend to impose liability for mistreatment in the absence of an injurious result. Although the dissent said that the evidence of unsanitary or dangerous living conditions was insufficient in itself to convict defendants of criminal mistreatment under ORS 163.200(1), it noted, citing Rhoades, that the same evidence could suffice under the statutes authorizing juvenile court jurisdiction because, under those, as opposed to criminal statutes, the state would be permitted to intervene to protect a child from an apparent risk without actual injury to the child.