UPDATED: New York’s structure for screening child abuse reports guarantees one thing: mutually-assured buck-passing. The Legislature should change that.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2018

The State Assembly holds a hearing Oct. 9 that could be a first step in the right direction

Last March, the New York City Family Policy Project, an essential resource, and not just for New Yorkers, published a comprehensive report on the harm done by the state’s child abuse hotline, which is run by the state Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS).  The report found that New York screens out false reports at a far lower rate than most states. That causes havoc for families wrongly investigated, and deluges workers with so many false reports they have less time to find the few children in real danger. 

Responding to the Family Policy Project report, the State Assembly Committee on Children and Families announced it will hold a hearing on the issue on Oct. 9.  

I hope they will zero-in on one nearly unique element in the New York system that makes it particularly destructive: a built-in incentive for what should be called mutually-assured buck-passing. Only one other state has the structural problem New York has built into its process.  I also hope the legislature will take a look at some relevant history, both recent and ancient. 

The structural problem 

In most states, the family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) is a state agency.  That state agency runs the hotline and that state agency does the investigations and takes away the children.  In 10 states,* the investigating and family-separating is a local government function.  But in five of those states, including California and Minnesota, the localities typically run the hotline as well, while in three more, localities can screen most or all reports sent from the state hotline. 

Only one other state, North Dakota, does it in the awful way New York does it: 

In New York, all calls alleging child abuse and neglect go to the statewide hotline run by OCFS.  They then send the reports they screen-in to localities to investigate.  The localities have no choice – if the state hotline sends it, the locality must investigate it. 

And it sure seems like, at least in New York City, they want to keep it that way.  The reason for that has to do with safety – no, no, not safety for the children, safety for the city family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). 

Over and over again, when ACS needlessly investigates and traumatizes an innocent family, the
agency’s commissioner, Jess Dannhauser, says something like: We didn’t want to wreak havoc on this family; the state made us do it!  

The state, for its part, has an incentive to send huge numbers of reports to the localities.  After all, if the hotline wrongly screens out a report and later there’s a tragedy, the state agency gets the blame.  This may well be a key reason the New York hotline wrongly screens in so many cases. 

Meanwhile, ACS speaks often of the need for better training so mandatory reporters don’t phone in false reports, (but since they’re mandatory reporters, they still may be afraid not to report) and ACS is piloting some supports in schools to encourage those reporters to seek alternatives to calling the hotline.  But Commissioner Dannhauser has never publicly called for the Legislature to simply give ACS the power to screen out false reports sent to his agency by the OCFS hotline. 

And no wonder: If ACS were to get that power, screen out a report, and then there’s a tragedy  – well, you know. 

Hence, mutually-assured buck-passing. 

I figure Dannhouser is likely to testify at the Oct. 9 hearing.  I hope one of the lawmakers asks him this question: You keep blaming the state hotline for forcing you to investigate reports you know are b.s.  Why have you never asked us for a law allowing you to screen out those reports yourself?  (And if the legislators don’t, I hope a reporter covering the hearing will.) 

UPDATE, OCT 10. WHAT HAPPENED AT THE HEARING:

On the one hand, for the first time I know of, Dannhauser made some noises about wanting some power to screen calls after they are received from the hotline. 

 However, Dannhauser is a master of calculated ambiguity.

 All he really said in his prepared testimony is that the state should consider creating a system in which localities would submit a plan that OCFS would then have to approve which would allow ACS to "conduct an expedited and less intrusive review of the allegations." He seemed to go a little further in answer to questions – or did he?  But this is certain: At no time did he call for simply giving his own agency the power to screen out reports it deems to be false.  It doesn’t sound like he wants to give up the power ACS truly covets: the power to pass the buck.

As I said, only North Dakota does it the way New York does it.  There also are two hybrid states.  In Colorado, there’s a state hotline and local hotlines.  Most calls go directly to the local hotlines which, of course, can screen reports. Pennsylvania has a state hotline that passes on calls to local family police agencies.  But, unlike New York, those local agencies have discretion to screen out almost all reports alleging “neglect” – which are, of course, the overwhelming majority of reports. Pennsylvania localities are not allowed to screen out reports alleging abuse or “severe neglect” – but this still is an improvement over New York’s approach. 

Pennsylvania also teaches something else: Giving localities the authority to screen won’t work miracles. Both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh take away proportionately far more children than New York City – and Pittsburgh decided to screen in the worst possible way – using “predictive analytics.” 

So why make the change? For starters, just taking away ACS’ excuse and making localities accountable for launching needless, harrowing investigations of families would be worth it. 

But also: right now, New York localities have to investigate 100% of the reports sent to them by the hotline.  If they get the authority to screen and wind up investigating 90% of the reports instead of 100% that’s still an improvement. And there’s nothing to stop OCFS from using predictive analytics at the state level should it so choose. 

Even without a law, it is possible to change regulations to allow for a kind of “circuit breaker” in which localities would have the authority to stop an investigation at a very early stage if the report never should have been sent to them in the first place. 

Also, there’s a more encouraging lesson from a county in Upstate New York. 

The relatively recent history 

At one time, two Upstate counties, Monroe (metropolitan Rochester) and Onondaga (metropolitan Syracuse) ran their own hotlines.  In Monroe County that was true until 2015 when, in the wake of a child abuse death, the state took that authority away.  Showing notably more courage than their New York City counterparts, Monroe County officials actually asked for that authority back. But, in a remarkably nasty response, the state OFCS said no – because, they said, when Monroe had its own hotline they screened out too many calls.  

Well, OCFS sure “fixed” that problem! Once the state took over, the number of screened-in calls skyrocketed. 

The ancient history 

All the way back in 1987, the (long-since defunct) New York State Legislative Commission on Expenditure Review gave hypotheticals to 23 hotline operators, 12 at the state hotline in Albany, eight in Onondaga County and three in Monroe County.  In each case, they asked: Screen-in or screen-out?  

The results: Big differences between Monroe County, Onondaga County and state hotline screeners (at that time the Monroe County operators were far more likely to screen-in reports) and no consistency among the state hotline operators. 

In one case, for example, all the Monroe County operators said screen it in, almost all the Onondaga County operators said screen it out, and the 12 operators at the state hotline split: 8 yes, 4 no. 

There is no reason to think the hotline is any less arbitrary, less capricious or less cruel today. 

Improving that will require a better screening tool and yes, operators will have to be trained in how to use it, and others will have to be trained to be sure they are using it correctly.  But beware of the use of “training” as a copout. Because in addition to being invoked when it’s needed, it’s also invoked – endlessly – as a way to avoid real change.  Training is no substitute for due process. 

So if you’re in Albany on Oct. 9, please be extra careful on the roads.  Because if anyone suggests a drinking game based on how often some family police official at the hearing uses the word “training,” you can expect a lot of drunk driving. 

*-Nine states are fully local. I also count Wisconsin, since the state runs child welfare in only one county, albeit the largest, Milwaukee.  I do not count Nevada, where the state runs the system everywhere except the largest county Clark County (metropolitan Las Vegas)

A New York bill would ease the trauma for children whose parents’ rights have been terminated.

Unfortunately, some foster and adoptive parents say preserving their exalted status is more important.   

New York State Assemblywoman Latoya Joyner sponsored
this excellent legislation in part because of her own experience
as a foster child.

Imagine for a moment that, in those millions of cases in which parents divorce, we had a very different set of laws than exists today.

Suppose the laws worked like this: If the parents could work out their own custody and visitation arrangements, fine. But if they couldn’t, then courts would be required, automatically and in every case, to deem one of the parents “unfit.”  The children would be denied all contact with the “unfit” parent.  No visits. No phone calls. No video chats. Not even a birthday card.

There are, in fact, circumstances where a no-contact order is entirely appropriate after a divorce.  But a law that required this result in every situation where parents couldn’t agree obviously would do enormous harm to countless children.

Yet there is one situation in which this draconian cutting-off of contact between child and parent is the norm: Termination of parental rights.

No contact for legal orphans

In almost every state, when the state itself decides that a parent is unfit and terminates that parent's rights, all contact between child and parent is cut off.  The cutoff is immediate.  Even if the child is languishing in a foster home or a group home – with no adoption in sight – the parents become legally dead to that child.  That’s why, when such children never find a permanent home, they are known as legal orphans.

A handful of states do it differently.  No, they don’t require contact after termination of parental rights.  But they allow a judge to order such contact if the judge is persuaded that this would be in the best interests of the child.  The laws apply both in cases where children are legal orphans and cases where they have been adopted.

A bill now on the desk of Gov. Andrew Cuomo would add New York to these states. 

The bill has the strong support of groups that defend families in New York courts – and they are family defenders not, as one news account claimed, “parents’ rights activists.” It also has the strong support of legal aid groups that represent children in child welfare cases – precisely because they recognize that such contact sometimes is in the best interests of children.

Indeed, the prime sponsor of the bill in the New York State Assembly, Assemblywoman Latoya Joyner, D-Bronx, was moved to sponsor the bill in part because of her own experience as a foster child. The prime sponsor in the State Senate, State Sen. Diane Savino, D-Staten Island, is a former caseworker.

Who opposes the bill? The usual suspects

So who is against the bill? Among others, of course, the trade association for New York’s private foster care agencies – for decades one of the nation’s more regressive forces in child welfare. (I still treasure a letter of complaint that group sent me when I was a journalist – in 1976.)

But also, the Upstate-based Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York.  Once a relatively progressive force, they now are taking a position that puts the desires of foster and adoptive parents ahead of the needs of children.

I would like to think they don’t speak for most such parents, because their memo opposing the bill reveals some ugly truths about its authors. It is drenched in smears and stereotypes about overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite birth parents, and it wrongly implies that the bill somehow would make contact between children and their birth parents mandatory.

They write:

[I]nstead of being governed by the best interest of the child, instead of allowing the adults involved to work in partnership to best support the child they love, decisions would be driven by the wishes of the biological parent, who has shown through their choices and continued actions that they were unable prioritize [sic] or meet their child’s basic needs.

Elsewhere the memo declares that termination only happens to “biological parents” – itself a pejorative term -- who

…despite being provided extensive support, services and legal representation, were unable to adequately stabilize their lives in order to provide a minimum sufficient level of ongoing care to their children.

This is false on every count. 

For starters, the bill explicitly states that judges should only allow contact if it’s in the best interests of the child – exactly the criterion the foster and adoptive parents claim to support. 

Second, the law would not ban voluntary arrangements between adoptive and birth parents – they are permitted under existing law.  But the bill might serve as an incentive to make adoptive parents more reasonable about reaching such agreements.  Right now, contrary to what is suggested in the memo, these agreements are not true “partnerships” because the adoptive parents have vastly more power.

Even worse is the stereotyping of all parents who lose parental rights.  Some are indeed unfit, and even contact with their children would be harmful to those children.  Others might be, as the memo says, unable to “meet their child’s basic needs” – but why is that grounds to terminate parental rights at all, let alone cut off all contact?  

Even when parents are truly unfit to have custody of their children, it still may well benefit those children to maintain contact.  And everyone in child welfare knows that the line about “extensive support, services and legal representation” is the Disney version. In many cases, the termination was unjustified, the result of a stacked-deck system in which parents often get no help and no effective legal representation.

 150 percent of other parents’ rights is a bit excessive

But the worst part of the memo is the part where the authors pervert an argument that advocates such as myself often have made in other contexts. They write:

This legislation contradicts the legal construct that adoptive parents are the legal parents under the law, imbued with 100% of the rights afforded to all parents, natural or adopted.

No, it doesn’t.

Adoptive parents should indeed have 100 percent of the rights afforded all parents. That’s why they should not be subject to any coercive intervention by child protective services agencies just because of their adoptive status – things like requiring them to present their children to mandated child abuse reporters, or special accounting requirements for adoption subsidies.

But they are not entitled to 150 percent of the rights of other parents.  And that, in effect, is what they have now in this most important area of all. 

The adoptive and foster parents group also claims that if the bill becomes law it will discourage some people from becoming foster or adoptive parents.  But anyone who won’t become a foster or adoptive parent because a new law won’t allow their privileges to be treated as more important than the needs of children really shouldn’t be a foster or adoptive parent.

If this bill is signed into law it would give adoptive parents equal standing with divorced parents – no more, no less.

Because that’s what’s best for the children.

INDEFENSIBLE: Here’s the real message from a child welfare system in Upstate New York: 1. We’re supremely arrogant. 2. We hate accountability. 3. We want to stay that way.

Given a chance to replicate a model family defense program with a proven track record for reducing needless foster care, improving child safety and saving taxpayers money – at no cost to the county – metropolitan Rochester said no.

UPDATE, NOVEMBER 2023: Metropolitan Rochester now has a better class of politician.  They've accepted the grant and the program is up and running!

UPDATE, JANUARY 29, 2018:

There is much more news and commentary on this issue:

The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle has an excellent story and an excellent editorial. 

The Daily Record, which first broke the story, has a follow-up.

The Daily Record also has an excellent op-ed column from Michele Cortese, executive director of the Center for Family Representation.

WXXI Public Radio also has a very good story.

UPDATE: FEBRUARY 7, 2018:

And one more excellent story, from Rochester City Newspaper

In the 1980s, when I was a reporter in Rochester, N.Y.,
 the Chamber of Commerce used this slogan.
I've updated it slightly to reflect current reality.

KEY POINTS

● More than a decade ago, New York City pioneered a model of family defense in child welfare cases. Impoverished families got a defense team including a social worker and a parent advocate as well as an attorney with a reasonable caseload. 

● In the years since, foster care was curtailed, so children were spared enormous needless trauma from wrongful removal and from being moved from foster home to foster home. They also were spared from the high risk of abuse in foster care itself.  At the same time, child safety improved. The model was so successful that the city child protective services agency supported it, and the city repeatedly expanded it. 

● A similar program in Washington State has earned similar support from “all sides” and achieved similar results.

● So when New York State offered grants to Upstate counties interested in replicating the New York City model, the Monroe County (metropolitan Rochester) Office of Public Defender applied.  All of the county’s family court judges supported the application.

● The county won the grant. But then, county officials stepped in and refused to accept the money. In other words, they turned down a chance to help the county’s children with a proven approach – at no cost to the county.

● As one family court judge pointed out, the plan would have done no more than give poor people the same access to justice that the rest of us already have in these cases. But for the Monroe County child protective services agency, that was too much to bear.

In most of the country, when children are torn from impoverished families, those families are almost literally defense-less.

In some states, there is no right to a public defender at all.  And in most states, family defense consists of a grossly overworked public defender or private attorney on a shoestring contract who just met his client outside the courtroom five minutes before the first court hearing – a hearing that often takes place after the child already is in foster care.  (That’s because, contrary to what they so often claim, child protective services agencies and/or law enforcement can take away children on their own authority – and they often do.)

Naturally, most child protective services agencies like it that way. The judge is reduced to wielding a rubber-stamp instead of a gavel; the agency itself becomes the real judge, jury and family executioner.  The agency can make little case or no case, offer no real help to families, and stumble and bumble along as it pleases.

But, as with so many times these agencies take a swing at so-called “bad parents” – the blow lands on the children.

The lack of meaningful defense is one of the main reasons so many children are taken needlessly from everyone they know and love, often when family poverty is confused with “neglect,” and consigned to the chaos of foster care.  That helps explain why two massive studies found that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.  Other studies document the high rate of abuse in foster care itself.

So consider the paradox: Child protective services agencies routinely claim – again, falsely -- that “we don’t take away children – a judge has to approve everything we do.”  But those same agencies are terrified of anything that would actually let those judges hear all sides of the story and make a fully-informed decision.

Indeed, the extent to which a child protective services agency objects to letting judges actually hear all sides of the story – that is, the extent to which it fights meaningful family defense – is a good measure of just how arrogant that agency is and how much it wants to avoid accountability. And that brings us to the child protective services agency in Rochester, New York and surrounding Monroe County.

As it happens, Rochester is where I did some of my first stories about the overreach of child protective services and the harm that does to children when I was a reporter for WXXI-TV, the public television station, and City Newspaper, the alternative weekly.  That was about 30 years ago.

A story last week in a regional newspaper for the legal community, The Daily Record, suggests things have not changed much.

The Record reports that, when offered a chance to replicate a proven model for high-quality family defense – a model shown to improve outcomes for children and save money, a model already in use for well over a decade elsewhere -- with the tab picked up by New York State – the county turned it down.

A little later, I’ll get to the excuses the county offered up for turning down this help (of which my favorite is the claim, which I must admit is true, that attorneys for parents would, in fact, represent parents).  But cutting through the b.s., what the county really is saying is this:

If poor people ever got the same quality of defense the middle class can buy for itself and if those poor people were able to challenge our lousy decisions, poor casework and meaningless cookie-cutter service plans we’d have to up our game. We’d have to stop taking away so many children needlessly, and provide real help to families.

The New York City experiment

This story really begins in New York City in 2000.  An advisory panel formed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement sat in on Family Court hearings.  As they documented in a scathing report, they were appalled. They saw families railroaded, needless placements and judges so terrified of the city’s tabloid press that they admitted, out loud and on the record, that they rubber-stamped removals even when they felt the child protective services agency, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), hadn’t made a good enough case.

A member of that panel, John Mattingly, got the Casey Foundation to fund an experimental program in which the newly-formed Center for Family Representation (CFR) would provide high- quality defense counsel for a small number of families.

In addition to a lawyer with a reasonable caseload, each family would be assigned a social worker who could work with the family and craft alternatives to those cookie-cutter “service plans” churned out by ACS.  Often there would be a third member of the team, a parent advocate, someone who had been through the system herself or himself, and could guide and encourage the parents.

At first there was only CFR handling a limited number of cases in Manhattan. But after CFR proved itself and Mattingly became commissioner of ACS,* the city itself began funding parental defense.  Today, CFR and three other providers, the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services and Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem provide this kind of defense counsel to about 90 percent of the impoverished families dealing with ACS in four of the city’s five boroughs.

Those who cling to stereotypes about everyone who loses a child to the system, believing them all to be sadistic brutes who torture children would, of course, find this upsetting. Those who know who really is in the system understand why this approach is so good for children.

In 2011, Brooklyn Defender Services produced this video about their work:

Brooklyn Defender Services also represented some of the families profiled in the landmark New York Times story about foster care as the new Jane Crow.

The Bronx Defenders was the subject of this story in The Nation

This model of family defense won an award from the New York State Bar Association, and it’s been recognized as a national model by the federal Administration for Children, Youth and Families.

Among the most important reasons for this success: Often these teams can get in early, instead of after the child already is in foster care, and much damage has been done.

As should be clear by now, this is not a matter of “getting bad parents off.”  The early intervention allows the defense team to prove families innocent when they have, in fact, done nothing wrong.  (Yes, I said prove families innocent. In the real world of child welfare, the burden of proof is reversed.)  The team can craft safe alternatives when there is a problem but foster care isn’t necessary, and come up with better ways to safety reunify families when it is.

It’s needed because, as the New York State Office of Indigent Legal Services put it:

Unfortunately, experience has shown that agencies too often wield their emergency removal power in situations where such drastic state action is unnecessary, and without first attempting to address the issues that brought the family to the agency’s attention.

High-quality family defense is one of the reasons that, even with setbacks over the past year, New York City has a relatively low rate of child removal – and, during the years since this model expanded citywide and entries into foster care declined, key measures of child safety improved.

And one thing more. Foster care is more expensive than safe, proven alternatives. CFR alone estimates it’s saved taxpayers $37 million in reduced foster-care costs since 2007.

Washington State also says yes

New York City is not alone.

Washington State started a program of high quality family defense in 2000.

.

Between 2000 and 2003, of 144 cases in the program in which families were reunified, not one was brought back to court.

“These children aren’t coming back,” said then-Washington State Supreme Court Justice Bobbie Bridge, a supporter of the program, “and we do get them back when we make bad reunification decisions.”

Even the state Attorney General at the time, who had to face the better-prepared lawyers, supported the project and wanted it expanded.

A 2011 evaluation found that in counties that have this kind of representation children are reunified more quickly. And when reunification really isn’t possible, guardianship and adoption occur more quickly as well.

But Monroe County says no

So when New York State’s Office of Indigent Legal Services offered a competitive grant to Upstate counties to test the model, Monroe County’s Office of Public Defender, which has a long and distinguished history in the field of family defense, applied.

Monroe County certainly needs it. Though the county has made real progress in reducing needless foster care, in 2016, the last year for which comparative data are available, Monroe County still took away children at a rate more than 20 percent higher than New York City, when entries into care are compared to the number of impoverished children in both places. For reasons discussed below, the Monroe County record probably was worse in 2017. And, as the Times story documented so well, there remains plenty of needless removal in New York City.

Monroe County won the grant.  Everything was all set to go.

Until county officials stepped in and turned down the money.  It’s not clear exactly who made the decision, but it appears to have been the County Executive, Cheryl Dinolfo. Presumably she was acting on advice from the county child protective services agency.

But she was acting against the advice of all of the county’s family court judges.  Judge Joan Kohout called the initiative “a great idea” adding: “I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t accept this grant, frankly.”

But I can.  One possibility: There was a high-profile death of a child “known to the system” last year, and the child protective services agency has been under intense pressure as a result. Dinolfo may be afraid of doing anything that political opponents could portray as “soft on child abusers.” (In fact, such deaths typically set-off foster-care panics, sharp sudden spikes in needless removal of children. So improved family defense actually is needed more now than at any time in recent years.)

An aversion to accountability

But I think the reasons go deeper – to the typical child welfare agency aversion to any kind of accountability.

What we do know is that the official reasons offered up by the county are pathetic excuses, an attempt to conjure up false images of vicious technicality-wielding lawyers scaring innocent children and hiding the crimes of child abusers.

The Daily Record  quotes a statement from county spokesman Jesse Sleezer, in which he claims that the program

would have injected lawyers into cases of abuse and neglect much earlier, potentially intimidating child victims and limiting access by CPS workers who would otherwise assess and monitor the child’s safety.

Well, for starters, as noted above, they’ve been doing this in New York City since 2002, that hasn’t happened, and the city child welfare agency is so comfortable with the program that it keeps expanding it.

Monroe County Executive
Cheryl Dinolfo

And throughout the modern history of child welfare, from the notorious McMartin Preschool case and others like it, all the way to the last major case to make it to the U.S. Supreme Court (in which my organization’s volunteer vice president served as pro bono counsel for the family) those most prone to intimidate children have been caseworkers, law enforcement and “therapists” – when the children didn’t give the answers they wanted to hear.

But even were this the first program of its kind, and even had been no track record of success elsewhere, Sleezer’s claim would be false on its face.

As Judge Kohout points out, these lawyers would have no magical powers.  It would just put the poor on something closer to an equal footing with people of more means.  Said Judge Kohout: “This program would provide the same right and the same access to legal advice to poor parents.”

And that raises a more fundamental issue: If the child protective services agency is “gaining access” in ways that would be stopped by a lawyer for a middle-class family, then chances are what the agency is doing to poor families is, at a minimum unethical and possibly illegal.  So does Monroe County Child Protective Services want to stop poor people from having higher-quality family defense so it can break the law?

Judge Kohout also understands the real reason why it’s a good idea to use this model early in a case: “There would be great benefit in avoiding dragging people into court and stigmatizing them by giving them that help up front.”

Mr. Sleezer’s other objection

Sleezer offered up one other objection:

The attorneys involved in this pilot program would serve only one client — the parent accused of abuse — and would not have any professional responsibility to serve the best interests of the abused child.

Aside from the fact that the overwhelming majority of parents are not accused of abuse – the charge is neglect – Sleezer is, in one sense, right.  Attorneys appointed to represent parents do, in fact, represent parents. You know; sort of like the way, in criminal cases, defense attorneys don’t also work for the prosecution and prosecutors don’t also represent the accused.

Indeed, by Sleezer’s logic, child protective services agencies shouldn’t be represented in court either, since those attorneys represent the agency’s interests. 

And it is arrogant in the extreme to assume that the interests of parents and children are at odds from the get-go. In fact, that’s part of what judges are there to determine.  What parents’ lawyers really are doing is defending families. In the process, they defend children from all the harm of needless foster care.

Determining whether the course of action recommended by those family defenders, or that recommended by lawyers  representing any other party, should be followed is what we have judges for.

The only a chance a judge really has to sort through competing claims and figure out what’s really best is if all sides get a chance to make the best possible case for their position.  Perhaps that’s why, as noted above, all of Monroe County’s family court judges supported the grant application. 

I believe the technical term for this approach, in which all sides make their best case and a judge issues a ruling, is “justice.”

Apparently, that’s exactly what Mr. Sleezer and his bosses are afraid of.

*Yes, that is the same John Mattingly I often criticized on this blog when he ran ACS. But whatever his failings, he deserves enormous credit for helping to create and expand high-quality family defense.