How rushed justice and judges fail our kids
It's a typical morning in the court system designed to protect Wisconsin’s children from abuse and neglect: Justice is being strangled by the clock.
In this Hayward courtroom, attorneys spend two minutes on the case of a 3-year-old sent to the children's shelter after being found in a filthy home. The case of a teenager anxious to reconnect with lost siblings gets three minutes, yet his desperation cannot be felt; he's absent from his own hearing. Should a mother's right to her child be terminated? The court date opens and closes in 60 seconds. Parent and child are legally severed for life.
By 11:30 a.m., 14 cases into a 21-case morning, Circuit Court Referee Norman Yackel is anxious. "C'mon folks, we can do this! Let's go, let's go, let's go!" he shouts. "OK, counsel, we can do this, let's go, let's get it done. It's like driving a car. Sit down and buckle up."
Scenes like this repeat daily in the state's courts, a little-known arm of the justice system deciding the fate of families whose children have been removed by social workers.
The stakes are high.
The courts choose who deserves another chance to parent, and who does not. They decide whether children will grow up in their homes, be placed with relatives or raised in institutions. But despite the magnitude of the civil proceedings, courts from Sawyer County to Kenosha County seldom have the luxury of careful decision-making for the thousands of children and their parents now in the system. With too little time to weigh the facts and consider best options, there's an ongoing risk that children will be wrongfully removed from their parents, or sent home into harm's way.
Any examination would find widespread evidence of a system riddled with problems that open the door to poor judgment:
• High caseloads mean judges regularly rule without time to probe basic information. Throughout the proceedings, even at critical stages such as when children are first brought into foster care by social workers, hearings are often superficial. Although national guidelines call for hour long initial hearings, throughout the state they commonly last five or fewer minutes.
• The field of law is a legal outpost often dreaded by judges and undervalued by court authorities. Throughout the state, only one-third of the full-time judicial officers hearing cases are judges; most often, commissioners or referees preside over the hearings. Sometimes, they do so on a part-time basis, while also being assigned to other, non-prestigious work.
• Substandard representation is commonplace for many parents in dependency court whose income makes them eligible for court-appointed lawyers. In some counties, including Sawyer County, the judge has provide financial savings to the county, in many cases by hiring inexperienced attorneys and cutting costs for investigators and experts.
• Children whose interests are supposed to determine case outcomes are regularly excluded from the court process. Judicial officers issue life-altering rulings without ever seeing the children whose futures are being decided. Lawyers fail to bring even teenage clients to court or interview them regularly.
The dysfunction permeating the courts is unknown to most people. Cloaked in confidentiality designed to protect children's privacy, the system allows few outsiders in, holding hearings so secretive that the law provides for criminal charges if clients or lawyers discuss them.
Yet system insiders, as well as numerous outside legal experts, openly describe the overloaded courts as a threat to the fundamental legal rights of parents and children.
The rapid-fire consideration of cases is all the more alarming because parents and children spend little to no time with their lawyers in advance of hearings. Social workers investigate the cases and file a report in court. All too often, advocates for children and parents accept or reject the findings, adding little to the courtroom discussion, and simply move on to the next case.
When you calculate it out, it's two minutes per case - enough time for everyone to say submit or object, but not much more,
If you were there as a child or parent, wouldn't you want the time to say something, and not have the judge thinking, 'I hope they don't want to say anything because I've got 20 more cases to get through?' How do you make a good decision without hearing from people?"
You’re in, you're out, they don't even talk to you, . A typical discussion with court-appointed attorneys lasted mere minutes. "They always said, 'submit, submit, submit,' just go with what the court says."
Judge gets incomplete story, leading to a tragic result court judges must promptly make the most critical of decisions. Err one way, and a child may be sent home to a dangerous situation. Err the other way, and children are separated from their families for a life just as chaotic and fearsome. Growing evidence shows disruption can be worse for many children than remaining in their homes with the appropriate support services.
Worse, sometimes judges do not get the information they need.
Too many lawyers fail to meet personally with their clients; rather, they simply "submit" to the findings of the social workers in court, without adding information or correcting the record.
Most dependency cases do not involve physical or sexual abuse. Eighty percent of cases seek to protect the children from neglect, according to state child welfare data. Parents leave children home alone, or with inappropriate caregivers. Bingeing on drugs or just plain impoverished, they fail to stock the refrigerator. Others lose their kids when police are called to break up violent domestic disputes.
Occasionally, cases land in court that have no business there - an injured child turns out to have suffered because of "brittle bone disease," not an abusive parent; a sexual molestation allegation is planted by a vindictive spouse. The system is expected to weed out such cases, and for those able to afford private lawyers, it often does. But that may not also be true for the poor.
High caseloads for court-appointed attorneys mean "justice can't be done for cases that deserve it, The system as practiced is not designed to protect parents' and children's rights.
Typical lawyer's caseload called 'humanly impossible' The signs of excessive caseloads are widespread. Court-appointed attorneys have little time to prepare their cases or even meet with their clients. Lawyers must meet clients to interview them and understand their needs at initial hearings, and then encourages them to return to court so she can see them again in the brief intervals between her other appearances. This is malpractice of the law, and it's a shame that we allow it here."
These characterization is not an exaggeration in courts in Wisconsin.
Too often, the system serves the children as poorly as their parents.
Often this haste causes hearings to become impersonal.
Judges run the risk of getting burned out and begin just processing them instead of carefully thinking," . Yet on rare days when the workload is light, .
Overcrowding and Laziness affects cases from the time judges first review the decision to remove the child from home. It is a critical juncture, : The hearings were perfunctory, except in those rare cases when private lawyers, rather than court-appointed lawyers, represented the parents.
Rushed Judgment is also a Factor in Prison Reform.
This is why we need accountability to End This Injustice,
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