Court Opinion

ID: 9619999
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 05:36:42.739127+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:48:37.626642
License: Public Domain

Josephine Linker Hart, Judge, dissenting. I agree with Judge Baker that this case should be reversed, but write separately to make two points. First, the basis for the trial court’s conclusion that custody could not be regained by Fields within a reasonable time was largely created by DHS’s inaction, as DHS knew about Fields’s whereabouts and his status as T.F.’s biological father and did nothing to make him a part of the case until it assumed that termination of his parental rights was a fait accompli. Fields was not even represented by counsel until December 5, 2007, not two weeks before the December 21, 2007, termination hearing. Of course, as Judge Baker so clearly states, no reunification services were offered. DHS did not even make the effort to ascertain Fields’s date of release from incarceration, which should have been a key element in their case. The majority has, however, overlooked this glaring failure by speculating, despite Fields’s testimony to the contrary, that the time for his release would be too far in the distant future to provide “permanency” for T.F. Furthermore, although the actual time remaining on Crawford’s sentence was not proved at the hearing to be “a substantial period of the juvenile’s life,” as specified by Arkansas Code Annotated section 9-27-341 (b)(3)(B)(viii) (Repl. 2008), the majority creates out of whole cloth a iegal theory to work around this failure of proof through a twisted interpretation of the holding in Crawford v. Arkansas Deparment of Human Services, 330 Ark. 152, 951 S.W.2d 310 (1997). In Crawford, the supreme court expressly states, consistent with two other cases, that imprisonment is “not conclusive on the termination issue.” 330 Ark. at 157, 951 S.W.2d at 313. While the supreme court affirmed the termination, it noted that the appellant not only faced an additional four years on his sentence, he was incarcerated for sexually abusing the half-sister of his two children. Obviously, the instant case is distinguishable. My second point is of broader nature. I think the State of Arkansas has made a fundamental error in how to approach these cases. The basic terminology involved proves this: we call these actions “termination of parental rights.” In effect, they are termination of parental responsibility. The goal of this state should not be to punish those whom we perceive to be bad parents, but to ensure that they carry out their basic responsibility to support and nurture the children that they bring into this world. I do not dispute that almost all the parents of the children in DHS custody are part of the problem. We as a society need to make them part of the solution, not absolve them of that responsibility and leave them unencumbered to produce more offspring. In this case, Fields, albeit belatedly, stepped forward to assume responsibility for the child he fathered. We should not penalize him for doing this — indeed, we should expect nothing less.