State tries to stop newspaper reporting on CPS

I have posted before how California law has been interpreted to shelter CPS (Child Protective Services) from public scrutiny. Sometimes they even try to restrict a parent from showing legal accusations to his own attorney.

UCLA law professor E. Volokh writes:

Avilucea also got, from the child’s mother, the child abuse complaint (filed by the New Jersey Division of Child Protection) that sought to remove the child from her custody. ...

The state therefore got a court order that barred the newspaper from publishing “any information obtained from the filed verified complaint,” as well as ordering the newspaper “to remove from any publication source any documents if already printed or distributed.” And there is also a related statute, which criminalizes “encourag[ing] the release of the contents” of such records and reports (and which might presumably apply to any request by the reporter that the mother let him copy the complaint).

I think this order violates the First Amendment. ...

But it’s not clear that the government may get a court order blocking publication even of an illegally solicited document — the prior restraint doctrine, which presumptively forbids injunctions against publication, is generally very strong.

And beyond that, I don’t think that the government can just flatly ban the targets of government action from going to the media with complaints about such government action. If the government wants to take away your liberty, your property or your children, and you think this action is unjust, you should have the right to blow the whistle, and appeal to those who are ultimately in charge of the government, and in whose name the government acts — your fellow citizens.

The legal briefs on the free speech issue are also sealed, and unavailable.

I think Volokh is correct that CPS confidentiality laws are contrary to established interpretation of the First Amendment and maybe some other amendments as well.

Update: A comment adds:

There is no reason to respect an unconstitutional court order or the court that issued it. I am a lawyer in NJ, and the Family Courts in NJ routinely trample First Amendment rights, often closing the entire courtroom in many case involving children, whether DYFS (whose name has changed) is involved or not. Even when DYFS is involved, I am not convinced the statute requiring all records to be sealed, initials to be used and the courthouse closed is constitutional. The general reason given is "best interests of the child," a general, non-descript catch-all phrase that is used to justify almost anything in Family Court.

Volokh removed links to the brief, even tho he says that the order sealing them is unconstitutional.

CPS gets too much money

Robert Franklin of the National Parents Organization does a lot of good work, but I cannot agree with this:

The latest scandal out of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services had barely been made public last week, when the top echelons of state government swung into action. ...

Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders ordered the Department of Family and Protective Services Wednesday to ramp up efforts to protect endangered foster children and curb the backlog of ones waiting for homes.

Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus released a joint letter to department Commissioner Hank Whitman directing him to immediately develop a plan to hire and train more special investigators to take up the backlog of at-risk kids who have not had a face-to-face interaction with Child Protective Services. ...

In short, Abbott, Patrick, et al are trying to look tough on the issue of child safety while doggedly refusing to do the one thing that’s unquestionably required to do a better job of protecting children at risk – pay caseworkers more.

No, paying caseworkers more will not help.

I don't know about Texas, but California CPS (child protective services) workers are extremely well paid. They have 6-figure salaries, and seem to have a lot of excess time on their hands. The more they make, the worse job they do.

No, a much better approach would be to keep cutting CPS funding until they focus only on what is necessary.

The evil of mandated reporting

Here is a CPS incident in the news:

She and her husband were suspected of child abuse. The daycare center had called CPS to report a bruise on the baby’s chest.

In a sane world, if a daycare attendant wondered about a mark on a child’s chest, she might pick up the phone and call the parent, but that’s not the world we live in. The person at the daycare center really had no option but to call CPS. After all, she didn’t want to lose her job. ...

“The sheriff told us that he thought the birthmark looked like a handprint.” ...

Meanwhile, Skenazy makes the obvious and responsible point that, the mere fact that we have mandatory reporting doesn’t mean the adults in charge of the situation must suspend their adult common sense or their ability to judge the reality of what’s been reported.

These stories illustrate the fact that we must kill off the notion that overreacting to nearly non-existent threats is prudent. Clearly, the daycare provider had been trained, just like the TSA, to treat anything the least bit suspicious as incredibly, overwhelmingly suspicious. Overkill is the government MO. It shouldn’t be. ...

“I would rather see 1 million reports that end up not being an issue than see even one go unreported and lead to serious injury or the death of a child.”

(I mixed up the quotes. Check the source to see who said what.)

The evil of mandatory reporting is understated here.

You may think that the day care worker should have just called the mom for an explanation of the birthmark, and then dropped the matter. Unfortunately, that is illegal.

I once heard of a physician who are was prosecuted for consulting an expert medical professor over whether a symptom was evidence of abuse.

The law requires child professionals to report all suspicions. If he was suspicious enuf to make a phone call, then reporting to CPS is required. The child care worker needs to look the other way and not have any suspicions, or keep calling CPS with accusations that are probably trivial or easily explained.

So these problems are not solved by ppl being reasonable. The only solution is to abolish mandatory reporting of suspicions.

No such fix is likely. The dopey women who work in this field say crazy things like a million false reports being better than some potential real problem going unreported. There is no reasoning with such ppl.

Your name was incorrectly submitted

I just got this letter:

In response to your request, the Santa Cruz County Human Services Department has completed a review of the investigation to determine whether the report made to the Department of Justice (DOJ) was made in accordance with the statutory requirements.

Section 11169 of the California Penal Code requires child protective agencies to forward to DOJ a written report on each case of known or suspected child abuse that the agency investigated and determined to be either substantiated or inconclusive, and not unfounded. The one exception is for cases of neglect coming within subdivision (b) of Section i1165.2.

I have reviewed the recommended decision, dated April 21, 2016. The recommended decision is attached and its findings incorporated by reference.

Based on my review of the recommended decision, I:

|X| Adopt the findings in the recommended decision. ...

Your name was incorrectly submitted to DOJ. We have notified DOJ and requested that your name be removed from the Child Abuse Central Index (CACI).

Cecilia Espinola, Director
Human Services Department

Cecilia Espinola was paid $276,029.04 in 2014.

She still gets the law wrong. The Penal Code says:

11169. (a) An agency specified in Section 11165.9 shall forward to the Department of Justice a report in writing of every case it investigates of known or suspected child abuse or severe neglect that is determined to be substantiated, other than cases coming within subdivision (b) of Section 11165.2. An agency shall not forward a report to the Department of Justice unless it has conducted an active investigation and determined that the report is substantiated, as defined in Section 11165.12. If a report has previously been filed which subsequently proves to be not substantiated, the Department of Justice shall be notified in writing of that fact and shall not retain the report.

The crucial point here is that Child Protective Services (CPS) investigates reports, and classifies them as substantiated, inconclusive, or unfounded. The California law clearly says that only substantiated reports are forwarded to the DoJ CACI, but she says that she forwards reports that are "either substantiated or inconclusive".

The exception is that cases of "general neglect" are not forwarded to the DoJ, whether substantiated or not. I think the idea is that if a parent fails to feed and clothe her own kids adequately, then CPS can take action on this as general neglect, but it is not forwarded to DoJ because such a parent would not be a threat to others. The purpose of the CACI is for use in background checks for teachers and others with kid responsibilities.

Someone who makes $276k per year to enforce these rules should understand that reports have to be substantiated to be forwarded to the DoJ. She persists in the error even after I prove her wrong in a legal hearing.

Representing CPS at the hearing was Santa Cruz County attorney Shannon M Sullivan, who made $190,012.53 in 2014.

My notice of the hearing said:

You may attend the face-to-face meeting alone or with an attorney or other representative. If you bring an attorney, you must notify the Department in writing at least 10 business days in advance so that County Counsel can also attend. If you do not bring an attorney, County Counsel will not be there.

I actually intended to bring a lawyer, and hired one for the purpose. But CPS said that if I did, then it would not hold the hearing until July.

So I dropped the lawyer, and went by myself. To my surprise, County Counsel Shannon Sullivan was there anyway, and refused to leave even when I objected and showed the document proving that her presence was against their own rules.

The acting judge was just a CPS consultant who was previously a CPS director in another county. He found that the report was not credible, and that it would not be reportable even if it were 100% true. At no time did any child suffer any harm or be in any danger.

Actually, I just have the consultant's conclusion, as CPS has so far refused to release the full report to me. Perhaps I will have to subpoena it, as CPS probably finds it embarrassing.

This is now the seventh time CPS has brought a legal action against me. Every single one of them was ultimately resolved by proving that the CPS accusations had no merit whatsoever. This is harassment. I think that the whole department should be shut down.

I have never met a more despicable class of human vermin than CPS social workers, managers, and lawyers. They lie, violate the law, and mistreat children. There is no merit to anything they say.

CPS cartoons

A reader sent these.

Newspaper criticizes CPS

Whenever I hear or read stories about Child Protective Services (CPS), they are always either about harassing good parents, or causing some kid to suffer or die.

Here is the latest. The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports:

Despite high-profile child abuse and neglect cases, including many in the Bay Area, authorities have been slow to make substantive changes to the often underfunded and under staffed agencies, experts said.

In the horrific case of Shaun, 6, Delylah, 3, and their 9-year-old half sister, 135 pages of Monterey CPS documents obtained by the Contra Costa Times, and the state’s highly critical review of the case, found that social workers called repeatedly to the home in 2015 violated five state regulations and ignored best practices intended to keep children safe.

But that branch of CPS is not alone. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that in about 12 percent of all 2014 child fatalities involving abuse and neglect, the families had prior contact with CPS. During that year, 3.2 million children were the subject of at least one CPS report and 1,546 kids died from maltreatment, 70 percent of those under the age of 3. Of those fatalities, 131 were in California. ...

The same year, Contra Costa health officials paid $300,000 to the biological parents of a girl who died in foster care. Deonna Green was nearly 3 years old, yet weighed only 19 pounds, when she died in 2006. She was being fed baking soda by her guardian. ...

But last month, a federal commission charged with developing a national strategy to eliminate child abuse released the results of a two-year probe that delved into case studies, examined what went wrong and what can be done to stop vulnerable children from falling through the cracks. The National Strategy to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities commission estimated that between four and eight children will die every day from abuse and neglect unless major reforms are made. The commission criticized the lack of communication among various agencies, and issued several recommendations for agencies and states to follow to save children’s lives, among them:

CPS will probably say that it could do a better job with more money. I don't believe it.

A CPS social worker told me that they routinely investigate parents over and over again, even if no problems are ever found. She said that it is not unusual to investigate a parent 10 times, without finding anything.

At the same time, they have kids in foster care dying of malnutrition, and no one bothers to check that a kid has a normal weight.

I don't know whether these CPS workers are incompetent or evil or what, but we would all be better off if the agency were shut down.

Silly reform for Arizona CPS

Robert Franklin is a good advocate for fathers and for shared parenting, but his article on Arizona CPS falls for the idea that the bureaucrats need more money. (I am used to the term CPS = Child Protective Services, but apparently Arizona has changed its name to DCS in order to expand its influence.) He cites:

The hotline receives about 125,000 calls a year and currently generates about 52,000 reports that all require investigation under state law.

So most of the calls are so bogus that no follow-up is needed at all?

CPS likes to justify their investigations by saying that they are required by law, but apparently it is allowed to disregard the majority of reports.

I do not doubt that most of the calls are transparently bogus and need no investigation, I just want to point out that CPS certainly does not investigate everything.

Franklin is concerned about a proposed Arizona law:

Here’s the operative language from HB 2522:

E. EXCEPT FOR CRIMINAL CONDUCT ALLEGATIONS, THE DEPARTMENT IS NOT REQUIRED TO PREPARE A DCS REPORT IF ALL OF THE FOLLOWING APPLY:

1. THE SUSPECTED CONDUCT OCCURRED MORE THAN THREE YEARS BEFORE THE COMMUNICATION TO THE HOTLINE.

2. THERE IS NO INFORMATION OR INDICATION THAT A CHILD IS CURRENTLY BEING ABUSED OR NEGLECTED.

Really? This is going to save money?

Yes, I think that it ought to be obvious that if a complaint is non-criminal, over 3 years old, and not affecting any child today, then it should be ignored.

I would think, altho I have never tried, that if I went to my local police station and said: "I have a complaint about someone who was bugging me 5 years ago. He did not do anything criminal, and he is not bugging me now, but could you please investigate?" Then I would expect the police to politely ask me to move on.

And yet CPS wastes time investigating crap like this?

Not only that, but Arizona CPS/DCS is lobbying for a change in the law so that it can save money by canceling all those investigations!

Franklin writes:

Arizona, like so many other states, tries to do child protection on the cheap. Year after year, it indulges in the happy fantasy that too few caseworkers can do too much and do it effectively. They can’t. Poorly paid employees who often are asked to handle twice the caseloads called for by industry standards tend to do a poor job of protecting children. ...

So HB 2522 looks like an effort to keep funding levels the same by simply restricting what DCS needs to investigate. Yes, the state receives too many unnecessary calls. But as sure as the sunrise, HB 2522 will, if it becomes law, result in greater risk to children who need the very protection DCS exists to provide.

This is crazy. I don't know about Arizona, but California CPS is extremely well-funded, and case workers earn about $100k a year. They have way too many caseworkers for the need.

More money will not help them do a better job. They have too much money, and they find destructive ways to spend it.

Franklin is not a fan of CPS:

I’ve said before that more money isn’t the final answer to what ails children’s welfare agencies. The final answer is a change to the way they carry out their legislative mandates. A greater emphasis on providing needed services to biological parents so they can care better for their children is the best way states can protect children. That includes a de-emphasis on foster care and a change in agency cultures that too often include taking too many children from too many parents.

I am glad that people like him are sticking up for parental rights, but I do not see any realistic hope for reforming CPS. It is foolish to think that CPS might get more money, hire better people, and do a better job.

CPS cannot be reformed. It is evil. The whole concept of govt bureaucrats taking anonymous non-criminal complaints and micro-managing parenting behavior is contrary to a free society.

Personal update

I have quit posting personal details of my life on this blog. Actually I never did personal details about me or anyone else, except for what had been involuntarily put into the public record by others.

That is, if someone was making public accusations against me in open court, then I would describe my defense against those charges. I did this to defend myself, to help others, and to expose systematic problems with the family courts.

While I was exercised my First Amendment rights, I wasn't just claiming free speech or free press rights. I was mainly using that last clause in the 1A, where I have a right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

A lesson I have learned is that our legal system heavily favors sole custody of a child. A parent has constitutional rights to his or her child if there is sole custody, and not otherwise.

My biggest complaint is not the actual child custody decisions. The last time I was in family court, the judge denied that they ever make final child custody decisions, just as they never make final child support decisions. Nothing is ever final, nothing is ever appealable, and all parents are subject to continuing micro-management by the court.

In my case, the courts repeatedly (and temporarily) zeroed out my parental rights at the discretion of the judge, and without having to prove that I was a substandard parent at all.

I eventually did get joint custody of my two daughters. They are now more grown-up than most adults, so they do what they want anyway.

I now also have two sons, and permanent sole custody of them. I am not fighting the system any more. I am doing what is strongly encouraged by California public policy.

Unfortunately, the local Child Protective Services (CPS) disapproves. They harass me a regular basis. They make announced and surprise visits to my home, both day and night. They ask me to bring the kids to their facility for inspection. They interrogate day care workers and inspect the kids there. They give vague gripes and threaten to put my kids in foster care.

If you want an example of a dopey CPS agent, see this previously posted one who argued that zero calorie sodas have empty calories. The ones who investigated me were just as bad, and said things just as dopey.

I do not want to post the details. The attacks have been ordered at the highest levels of CPS, and they have a lot of power. I do not know why they hate me so much, but I do not want to inflame them anymore. If you are living in a town run by gangsters, do you insult the crooks in charge?

According to one CPS agent, the attacks were ordered by Melissa Delgadillo. I never met her, and do not know what she would have against me. I asked him if she was doing it maliciously, and he just nodded. But she could have been ordered by higher authority, for all I know.

At one court hearing, the County lawyer went into a half-hour rant against me, and ended with:

Nietzsche said, "What doesn't kill us, makes us stronger."

I do not know what point she was trying to make. Maybe it was some sort of anti-German slur, as I have a German-sounding name. She did not make much sense.

So far the judges have dismissed all of their complaints as being completely without merit. One time, the judge lectured CPS and County Counsel for an hour about bringing a frivolous complaint over ordinary parenting choices. The complaints are too stupid to repeat here. If I summarized, you would think that I was joking, and if I quoted them, I might be accused of violating confidentiality. Most of what they say does not even make any sense. The court hearings are held in secret, and are not on the public record.

Since there are no complaints against me on the public record, I do not see much need to respond on the public record. There are no pending non-public complaints against me either.

CPS is run by bullies who are used to getting their way, but it has failed to get its way with me. I forced them to remove me from the state abuse database, and they lost their court actions against me. I could be the only one who has defeated them in both these ways.

If you want to read about unreasonable CPS harassment, then follow the story of Danielle Meitiv. I have posted about it before. My story is more outrageous than here, but she is eager to fight this issue:

But now Danielle is going a couple of steps further. First, she’s writing a book about her family’s experiences with CPS and the police. Second, she’s starting a non-profit organization to combat the encroachment of governmental authorities into family life in the name of protecting children.

My parenting has been scrutinized more than any other person, to my knowledge. There are 100s of pages of reports about me.

Of course some of these reports were written by gay psychologists and illiterate CPS agents, and they show no knowledge of child rearing. No criticism of me ever quotes any textbook, or research, or personal experience, or generally accepted principles.

If you want to know about the evils of CPS, there are plenty of other sources. For example, see the Legally Kidnapped blog. Or read earlier postings on this blog. I do not care to publicly document my private Hell anymore, as I really just wanted to document public actions. I am only posting this as a courtesy to my regular readers who have asked about my case.

Vermont CPS murders

I intended to quit posting this junk, but this story is too weird.

Vermont passed a law making it easier for CPS to take kids away from parents. Friday morning, Jody Herring lost custody of her kid to the foster care system. Friday evening, she shot and killed the CPS/DCF social worker Lara Sobel responsible. Herring was arrested. Saturday morning, three relatives of Herring were shot and killed.

Here are links to the stories. These folks are innocent until proven guilty, of course.

I posted a 2012 story where Georgia CPS seemed to be assassinating its enemies. I never got the full story.

These people sound like gangsters. Obviously killing Herring's relatives was revenge, but was it by CPS or by the relatives of Sobel, the social worker? I assume that they did not kill Herring because she was in police custody, and they could not get to her.

I know it sounds crazy and paranoid to think that a state child welfare agency would carry out revenge murders. But CPS attracts cruel sadistic bullies, just as police forces also attract such people. Somebody carried out these murders.

There is lots of publicity today about the one-year anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri. The riots were fueled by Obama administration arguments that a white racist cop shot a black man who held his hand up and said "don't shoot". Instead, all the evidence proved that the black man was trying to kill the white cop, and the cop had to shoot in self-defense.

Has there been much publicity about these Vermont crimes? They should be easy to solve. Just interrogate everyone with a motive. No one had time to plan a perfect crime. Impulsive killers always leave plenty of evidence.

The obvious lesson here: Do not screw with CPS, even if they are ruining your life. These are people who think nothing of collateral damage on the way to their intended targets.

Update: Herring has been charged in all the murders:

Premont also told police that Herring “would often make comments about how ‘people are going to pay. There’s going to be an Armageddon.’”

The affidavit also says Herring seemed to mention other victims the day she was arrested, before the three bodies were discovered in Berlin.

It says that as Barre police were escorting Herring back to a holding cell after interviewing her the day of Sobel’s murder, “she laughed and uttered ‘did you find the other three yet?’”

I guess the relatives were conspiring with CPS to take her 9yo kid away. She stole the gun, because she failed the background test to buy one. Meanwhile, the state has leaked reports that she was nuts:

Defense lawyer David Sleigh initially asked at Herring's arraignment Aug. 10 to block the release of DCF records.

After the prosecution responded, Sleigh filed a second request after learning that reporters obtained court records showing a doctor believed Herring was bipolar and had mental health issues. ...

The family court records were used by media outlets, including the Burlington Free Press and the website VtDigger. The records included a letter from a doctor that noted, "Jody's chief medical problem restricting her employability is an underlying bipolar disorder," family court records show.

Dr. Kevin D. Crowley of Green Mountain Family Practice wrote in November 2010 that, despite his not being a psychiatrist but based on Herring's "numerous office visits, it is unlikely she would be able to hold a job for any length of time because of her emotional state and her resultant inability to stay focused."

Crowley indicated he was offering his presumed medical diagnosis to John Wirth, a staff attorney for the Office of Child Support. The document was part of the public file in family court.

Psychiatric intervention that amounted to "polypharmacy of treatment has only normalized things a little," Crowley wrote.

"Ms. Herring is a bright intelligent woman and I believe with time she will settle into gainful employment," the doctor wrote. "It will be a long time however."

So she was too crazy to hold a job but she still somehow won sole child custody in the family court?!

A big surge in medical child abuse

I have posted about Justina Pelletier, a kid who was seized by Massachusetts after conflicting medical diagnoses. Now there are many other such cases:

The term “medical child abuse” dates from the mid-1990s, as a condition related to Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disturbance in which a parent induces illness in a child to get attention. It has caught on with doctors over the last decade. But what constitutes “unnecessary medical care” — the heart of the test for medical child abuse — is vague and subjective. After all, doctors often disagree with one another when it comes to the diagnosis and treatment of complicated conditions. ...

As I’ve researched medical child abuse over the past year, several advocacy and support groups for patients with rare diseases told me they had seen an alarming rise in medical child abuse charges: MitoAction (which supports patients with mito); the American Partnership for Eosinophilic Disorders (disorders relating to white blood cells); the Ehlers-Danlos National Foundation (a rare disorder of the connective tissues); and Dysautonomia International (autonomic nervous system disorders). Through these groups, I’ve surveyed 95 parents who have been accused, in 30 states.

Dr. Frances D. Kendall, the geneticist in Atlanta who diagnosed my daughter’s mitochondrial disease, told me that she has seen a rising number of cases in which the parents of children with mito had been wrongly charged. Dr. Mark S. Korson, the geneticist who treated Justina Pelletier at Tufts, also said that such charges have snowballed in recent years.

Most states lump “medical child abuse” into general child abuse or neglect statistics, and can’t break out separate numbers. Michigan is an exception. Its figures show that, on average, 51 charges of medical abuse have been made against caretakers each year between 2010 and 2013. Extrapolating this to the national population would mean more than 1,600 charges each year.

Child neglect used to mean not getting the basic necessities of food and clothing. Now it means CPS gets to second-guess expert medical opinion.

As I’ve researched medical child abuse over the past year, several advocacy and support groups for patients with rare diseases told me they had seen an alarming rise in medical child abuse charges: MitoAction (which supports patients with mito); the American Partnership for Eosinophilic Disorders (disorders relating to white blood cells); the Ehlers-Danlos National Foundation (a rare disorder of the connective tissues); and Dysautonomia International (autonomic nervous system disorders). Through these groups, I’ve surveyed 95 parents who have been accused, in 30 states.

Dr. Frances D. Kendall, the geneticist in Atlanta who diagnosed my daughter’s mitochondrial disease, told me that she has seen a rising number of cases in which the parents of children with mito had been wrongly charged. Dr. Mark S. Korson, the geneticist who treated Justina Pelletier at Tufts, also said that such charges have snowballed in recent years.

Most states lump “medical child abuse” into general child abuse or neglect statistics, and can’t break out separate numbers. Michigan is an exception. Its figures show that, on average, 51 charges of medical abuse have been made against caretakers each year between 2010 and 2013. Extrapolating this to the national population would mean more than 1,600 charges each year.

This is a big attack on parental rights. Parents should always have the right to get a second medical opinion, and to choose which medical advice to follow.

OUR legal system protects parents’ rights to make decisions for their kids, even if those decisions are sometimes less than ideal.

Courts have long dealt with cases of neglect, in which parents are charged with denying kids necessary care. In these cases, courts have allowed the state to require care only when doctors agree about the treatment, its medical benefits are clear, and its risks are small. This exception is narrow because courts recognize that parents are usually far better positioned — and motivated — than doctors or the state to know and do what is in their child’s best interests. These protections should apply to medical-abuse charges.

Government should not get involved when doctors disagree about a diagnosis or course of treatment, the doctors have full knowledge of the child’s medical record, and a parent chooses one doctor’s opinion over another’s. It should intervene only when there is evidence that a parent has intentionally provided significant misinformation to physicians, fabricated elements of the medical history or induced medical symptoms. Parents should always be allowed to seek second (and third) opinions.

We must protect children from the rare disturbed parent. But medical child abuse, as it has been understood, is far too big and blunt an instrument to accomplish this purpose. It has harmed too many genuinely sick kids, and made life hell for too many loving parents. It is time to end the medical abuse panic.

County mental health official arrested

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports:

A 56-year-old Santa Cruz County children’s mental health worker was charged with sexual assault of a child in Santa Cruz Superior Court on Tuesday.

Christopher Douglas McCauley, who has posted $100,000 bail, pleaded not guilty and was ordered back in court July 23, Judge John Salazar ruled. McCauley faces 15 years to life in prison if convicted, prosecutor Rafael Vazquez said outside court.

McCauley, of Live Oak, is accused of attacking a child 1995, authorities said. The alleged victim was not a mental health client, and the report recently was made to Child Protective Services, according to the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office.

McCauley has worked for County Mental Health for about 20 years.

He was earning $100k per year in salary and benefits.

I hesitate to post this, because a story like this can destroy a man's career, and the accusation might be completely false. He is innocent until proven guilty.

I do not even know what the article means when it says "accused of attacking a child 1995". If the accusation is about a 1995 attack, then it should be dismissed for all the reasons that we have a statute of limitations.

If a crime was really committed, then why didn't the victim or parent report it directly to police? I would not trust CPS if it were my child.

Sheriff’s deputies have said there might be other victims.

The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office asks anyone with information to call 831-471-1121.

Do they have the goods on this guy or not? Maybe they only suspect him, so they figured that they could arrest him and put out the call for more victims and evidence. If that is the case here, I would hate to think that I cooperated in an evil plot to ruin a man's reputation.

If he has really been molesting kids for 20 years, and using his position as a County children's mental health worker to recruit victims, then I hope that they throw the book at him, and fire his supervisors and enablers as well.

But I doubt it.

I am not sure which is worse. That the County would employ a child molester in a position like this, or that it would frame an innocent man. Based on what I know about CPS, both seem possible.

His lawyer or his friends are welcome to post here anything in his defense.

CPS backs down in Meitiv case

The Wash. Post reports:

Maryland officials have taken steps to clarify their views about children playing or walking alone outdoors in a new policy directive that says Child Protective Services should not be involved in such cases unless children have been harmed or face a substantial risk of harm.

The directive, part of a public statement to be issued Friday, follows a nationally debated case involving “free range” parents Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, who let their young children walk home alone from parks in Montgomery County.

Now the Meitivs have been cleared of all charges.

Of course they suffered a lot of headache and legal expense to keep the privilege of their kids walking to a playground. Glad to see CPS bullying was stopped.

California treats all accused parents as guilty

I just found http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/cab1417.pdf on the official California court site. It is obviously part of some informative booklet for kids who are subjected to being put in foster care.



Note the presumption that the parents are guilty. A juvenile dependency case is defined by the county CPS agency making an accusation of parental abuse or neglect, and it is up to the judge or the appeals court to accept or dismiss the accusation.

This shows that county agents will tell a kid that his parents are guilty of abuse when there is only an unproved accusation.

This is laughable:



No, this is like telling a criminal defendant that the police are there to keep you safe. Yes, we have police to make a safer society, but once you are charged with a crime, the police work for the prosecution, and their goal is to help put you in jail.

It is the judge’s job to listen to what everyone says in court. The judge knows what the law is and decides what needs to happen to keep kids safe. If the judge asks you a question, it is very important for you to tell the truth. The judge needs to know the truth to make the best decision for you.

This is pretty crazy advice. According to a recent federal case, juvenile dependency court judges in some areas spend less than 5 minutes per case, and often less than 60 seconds. No such judge will ever make the best decision for a child, and the child could be sentencing himself to a disastrous foster home by cooperating.

I could not find the rest of this booklet, or instructions on using it, but it illustrates the guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality of govt agents that I often complain about. Actually it is worse than that, because there is no mention of any possibility of being proven innocent. To CPS, an accusation is just the same as a guilty verdict.

I often mention people who are presumed guilty, and here is a list of egregious 2014 cases.

CPS takes kid without parental wrongdoing

This is a disturbing case:

The state can remove an out-of-control child from the custody of a parent even if the mother or father is not to blame for the child's behavior, a California appeals court said Thursday.

If children face substantial risk of harming themselves, it doesn't matter whether the parent did anything intentional to put them in that position, the 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled.

"When a child thereby faces a substantial risk of serious physical harm, a parent's inability to supervise or protect a child is enough by itself to invoke the juvenile court's dependency jurisdiction," the court said in its 3-0 ruling.

The court disagreed with another state appellate court that ruled in 2010 that a parent had to be shown to be culpable for a failure or inability to supervise or protect a child. Such conflicts between appeals courts are often resolved by the state Supreme Court.

Thursday's ruling goes against the commonly accepted understanding that a court has to find the parents did something wrong to remove the child, said Dan Mayfield, a San Jose attorney who specializes in juvenile law.

"It broadens the government's power," he said.

The ruling came in the case of a Los Angeles County mother whose teen daughter repeatedly ran away from home and had a child at the age of 15. The appellate court said the girl remained incorrigible despite her mother's best efforts, which included looking for her each time she left home, sending her to live with her grandparents and calling the police and Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services for help. The mother was identified in court documents only as "Lisa E." and her daughter as "R.T."

"(The) mother in this case was neither neglectful nor blameworthy in being unable to supervise or protect her daughter," the court said.

But state law is clear that children can still be taken if they have suffered or are at substantial risk of suffering serious harm that a parent is unable to stop, Associate Justice Brian Hoffstadt wrote.

Here is the court opinion (pdf). As long as there is an appellate conflict, this only applies in LA County.

I do not understand this case, because the parent put the kid with a relative, and this court ruling upheld the court putting the kid with the same relative. So I do not see how CPS can blame the parent for doing that.

Safe to leave kid in car

The NJ supreme court has agreed to hear a case where a mom was accused of doing something unsafe, but the court refused to look at safety evidence. The Free Range Mom reports:

A mom left her son in the car for what everyone agrees was under 10 minutes to run an errand. The toddler slept through the whole “ordeal,” but the mom was found guilty of neglect, even upon appeal, when the three appellate judges ruled that they didn’t have to list the “parade of horribles” that COULD have happened to the child.
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Which is, of course, fantasy as policy again: Just because the judges could imagine a kidnapping, or carjacking, or a big bad wolf, doesn’t mean that these are at all likely. They aren’t. As the Washington Post just wrote: There’s never been a safer time to be a kid in America. What’s more, my own book cites the stat that if for some reason you WANTED your kid to be abducted by a stranger, the amount of time you’d have to leave him outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen is 600,000 years.

A lawyer explains in a newspaper op-ed:

Child-safety orthodoxy ignores the fact that protecting your child from one risk almost always exposes him to another. Keeping children safely indoors promotes inactivity and obesity. Taking them with you to the store, instead of leaving them home alone, exposes them to accidents, the No. 1 cause of death of American children. “Free-range” parents argue that coddling and overprotecting children interferes with development and their ability to become responsible and self-sufficient.

Most disturbing about the New Jersey case, however, is that the court condemned the mother’s action without ever weighing the actual risk of genuine harm. The court ruled the mother wasn’t entitled to present evidence on either the likelihood or severity of harm to the child. The court said the imagined dangers spoke for themselves: “We need not describe at any length the parade of horribles that could have attended (this) neglect.”

Judges, social workers, and psychologists talk about safety a lot, but they almost never consider realistic data on what is safe or risky. Safety is just a buzzword for their superstitions and prejudices.

This NJ case is unusual because the appeals court considered behavior that was obviously safe, and claimed that it was unsafe with no evidence required. It was as stupid as saying, "you can tell the defendant is guilty by just looking at him."

I assume that the NJ supreme court will say that some evidence is required, unless the legislature has passed a law against the behavior.

Today has a Cracked article on 5 Things Your Parents Did (They'd Be Arrested For Today). Yes, leaving a kid in a car in one of them, along with letting your kid walk places alone, play outside, hear swearing, and go naked.

Anonymous accusations and deflategate

QA law professor writes in the Wash. Post:

The recent media obsession with “free range” parenting has illuminated a policy issue which rarely affects parents who debate free range parenting: the exploitation of child abuse reporting hotlines.

Each year, about 3.4 million calls are made to these state-run phone lines. Tragically, only a fraction of these calls are made by trained professionals reporting actual abuse or neglect. The others are made, often anonymously, by people who don’t know what constitutes abuse (or, more nefariously, by those who want to punish the parent). But because child protective service agencies are required to act, these calls can result in innocent parents losing their kids, tangling families in a complicated system.

The anonymous reporting was a terrible idea. Even worse, our society has become one to convict people on the flimsiest of evidence. Here is the latest example, from pro football:

The Deflategate report is out! And it’s not even 5 p.m. on the Friday before Memorial Day!

Read it here.

Anyway, the gist of the report is that the NFL’s investigation, spearheaded by attorney Ted Wells, found that “it is more probable than not” that two Patriots equipment managers — Jim McNally, the attendant for the officials’ locker room at Gillette Stadium, and John Jastremski, a team equipment assistant — “participated in a deliberate effort to release air from Patriots game balls after the balls were tested by the game officials” during the AFC championship game in January.

The report also found that Patriots quarterback Tom Brady “was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of McNally and Jastremski involving the release of air from Patriots game balls.”

The NFL’s findings hinge on incriminating text messages sent between McNally and Jastremski. And boy, are they incriminating. And hilarious. ...

What seems to be something of a smoking gun, when McNally calls himself “the deflator” and mentions taking the story to ESPN, came on May 9, 2014, before the start of the season.

Got that? They spent months investigating, and wrote a 243-page report, and all they can say is that there is a 51% a couple of low-level equipment managers did something improper? And maybe Brady had some awareness? And the smoking gun is the word "deflator" in a message a year ago?!

The balls are supposed to be between 12.5 and 13.5 psi. Brady prefers them closer to 12.5 while others prefer higher inflation.

I am surprised that the NFL wants to make an issue out of this, when (1) the air pressure had no effect on the game, (2) its own official screwed up by not testing the balls, (3) the game has been over for months, and (4) it only has a 51% case of wrongdoing by low-level employees.

There is no reason for anyone to care about this. I just point out how our twisted society wants to make these reckless accusations against people.

Another sports superstar who has been accused of being a cheater is Barry Bonds. But after 12 years of federal felony prosecutions, he now stands acquitted of all the charges. I think that the feds just did not like him breaking Babe Ruth's records.

Dopey fat CPS agent tortures a dad

Ever wonder what it is like for CPS to give some ordinary dad the third degree? Watch this video.

The CPS woman is fat, ugly, and stupid. She complains that he gave his kid a soda with caffeine. He explains that it was zero calories and no caffeine. She then argues that "zero calories" means that the soda had "empty calories". He tries to explain, but it is hopeless.

She also objects to him being concerned about the daughter's weight. The CPS agents insists that his concern should be that the kid become a happy adult, and only the pediatrician should have an opinion about her weight.

I would have said, "I watch her weight because I don't want her to become a fat slob like you."

The kid is on some psychiatric drug, and the dad wants to know what it is and what the effects are. The CPS agent says that he has no right to that info. She says that he just has 8 hours of visitation each Sunday, and he can call an ambulance if there is a medical emergency. Otherwise he should shut up and ignore the problem.

There is more to the guy's story here and here. I did not read it as I was mainly interested in the behavior of the CPS agent. She is a disgrace, but probably doing what she was trained to do.

Robert Franklin comments on the Meitiv case:

The lesson is that CPS can and will do what it likes regarding your children. Caseworkers and their supervisors don’t like parents who fail to kowtow to CPS power. The Meitivs are learning that the hard way and countless other parents are attending to their travail. They too will learn the lesson CPS seeks to teach – parents, regardless of how responsible and loving, go their own way at their own risk. Do you think you know best about how to raise your kids? Think again. CPS makes the rules and those who fail or refuse to abide by them do so at their peril and that of their children. It matters not that your children aren’t harmed or placed in danger.

One of those rules is that you can never believe the facts about children’s safety in this country and act accordingly. Those facts demonstrate that, on average, the risk of harm to children, particularly from strangers, is vanishingly small. In neighborhoods like the Meitivs’, it’s even smaller. So parents like them are perfectly safe in sending their kids off to the park to play, particularly given the children’s careful upbringing.

But to an astonishing degree, the issue is not about children’s safety; the issue is about CPS’s power. Parents must conform or pay the price because Big Sister knows best.

Yes, CPS is all about bullying people with its power.

Free Range Parenting is a Constitutional Right

I have followed the Maryland Meitiv kids, who keep getting arrested for being alone a few block from home.

Libertarian Russian-American law professor Ilya Somin writes:

The bottom line is that the CPS’ actions here seem to be the result of exactly the kind of “mere disagreement” with parental choices that the Supreme Court specifically barred as a basis for overriding parents’ constitutional right to direct their children’s upbringing. Economist Bryan Caplan, an expert on child safety data, sums it up well: “it’s crazy, people are being persecuted for doing things that are extremely statistically safe just because other people disagree.”

As Megan McArdle points out, today’s controversial “free-range” parenting largely consists of practices that were considered perfectly normal throughout most of American history. When I was growing up in the 1980s in a suburb similar to the one where this incident occurred, elementary school kids routinely walked all over the neighborhood by themselves. By the standards of today’s Montgomery County, I would have been detained by child welfare officials almost every day.

Sadly, incidents like this one now happen with some regularity, as “helicopter parents” and officious bureaucrats have promoted unrealistic parenting norms that have no real basis in legitimate safety considerations. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need constitutional litigation to put an end to such abuses. Simple common sense should suffice.

I am tempted to hope that this case gets litigated to the US Supreme Court, and it makes a broad declaration for parental rights just as it is about to mandate same-sex marriage.

But that would not work. The public has to be somehow convinced that routine parental decisions are not the business of CPS, unless there is some demonstrable serious harm.

CPS Has Outlived Its Usefulness

I looked for some objective evidence that CPS does some good, and I could not find any. This seems surprising, as these agencies spend billions of dollars and must have to justify their budgets somehow.

I did find this 2010 NY Times article:

Child Protective Services investigated more than three million cases of suspected child abuse in 2007, but a new study suggests that the investigations did little or nothing to improve the lives of those children. ...

In an editorial published with the study, starkly titled “Child Protective Services Has Outlived Its Usefulness,” Dr. Abraham B. Bergman suggests some essential changes: child abuse, because it is a crime, should be investigated by the police; public health nursing services should be the first to respond to concerns of child neglect; social workers should assess appropriate living situations and work with families to obtain services, and not be engaged in law enforcement. But Dr. Bergman, who is a pediatrician at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, expressed considerable skepticism that such changes would happen.

I agree that crimes should be investigated by police. We now have CPS, family courts, and colleges investigating and adjudicating criminal abuse of various sorts, and they are incompetent to do so. They do not respect the rights of the accused, or understand the unreliability of hearsay, or follow innocence until proven guilty.

When the state decides that something is a crime, then accusations belong in the criminal justice system. It is evil to punish people who have not even been charged.

I also agree that CPS is not going to change, no matter how many times it is proved that they are ineffective at helping kids.

Why men vanished from grade schools

You don't see many men working for elementary schools anymore. All men are suspected child abusers. The schools don't want to hire men, and the men don't like being suspects all the time.

Here is a case of an elementary school counselor and child behavioral specialist whose career was ruined by a false accusation. He tried to take precautions; he never had a child in his office with the door closed. He would only see a kid with the door open and everyone in plain view of a secretary and other passersby.

Nevertheless some 7yo kid accused him of repeated anal sodomy. Based on that, CPS made a finding of substantiated abuse. And the police arrested him after a 3-month investigation. This was despite the fact that the kid told inconsistent stories, the medical exam was negative, and there was no corroborating evidence of any kind. They believed the kid and were over-eager to prevent abuse.

Does anyone seriously think that this ever happens? If it did, the kid could walk out the door, scream, get a medial exam, and the man would spend the rest of his life in prison. At it would be a short life, because he would get killed in prison.

You might say, "Why would a kid ever invent a story like that if it were not true?" He did not, originally. He had a minor complaint about being touched with his clothes on. It was only after CPS interrogation and manipulation that the story escalated.

He somehow got it the case to a federal appeals court, where he finally found a judge with some common sense:

Indeed, it appears that no federal court of appeals has ever found probable cause based on a child’s allegations absent some other evidence to corroborate the child’s story…. Indeed, some cases have expressed heightened concerns about the reliability of child-witnesses’ allegations when, as here, there are other indicia of unreliability.
We are, of course, all too aware of the difficulties facing police investigations into child sexual abuse. We recognize that a child-victim’s testimony often plays an important role in prosecuting the perpetrators of this serious and disturbing crime. Nevertheless, we conclude that J.S.’s young age is a factor bearing on the reliability of his accusations and that Rigney (and the district court) should have given it appropriate weight.
Second, we note that the implausibility of a witness’s accusations is also germane to determining the existence of probable cause…. Without question, J.S.’s allegations against Wesley were facially implausible.

Indeed, it appears that no federal court of appeals has ever found probable cause based on a child’s allegations absent some other evidence to corroborate the child’s story…. Indeed, some cases have expressed heightened concerns about the reliability of child-witnesses’ allegations when, as here, there are other indicia of unreliability.
We are, of course, all too aware of the difficulties facing police investigations into child sexual abuse. We recognize that a child-victim’s testimony often plays an important role in prosecuting the perpetrators of this serious and disturbing crime. Nevertheless, we conclude that J.S.’s young age is a factor bearing on the reliability of his accusations and that Rigney (and the district court) should have given it appropriate weight.
Second, we note that the implausibility of a witness’s accusations is also germane to determining the existence of probable cause…. Without question, J.S.’s allegations against Wesley were facially implausible.

I conclude that there are horrible systemic problems with the authorities on child abuse. It has been well known for decades how easily kids can be manipulated into saying bogus things like this. I must have watched 5 TV documentaries on the subject. If CPS were at all fair or honest, they would have training programs in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

But I am afraid that is not the conclusion that most people will draw. This case will not even make the news. People will just assume that an isolated agent used bad judgment, or that more money needs to be spent on CPS and police, or that such agressive prosecution is necessary to root out the real abusers, or even that the man probably really was an abuser who just hasn't been caught in the act yet. They may even say that only the rights of the kids should be considered, or that there must be something wrong with a man who wants to work in an elementary school anyway.

I have posted many of these stories, and it is useless. If these don't convince you that the system is broken, and that there is a CPS war on the innocent, then nothing will.