http://www.golocalprov.com/news/child-protection-cases/
Various people within the system suggest that delays are caused by insufficient funds and judicial vacancies. Don't believe them.
About fifteen years ago, I sat
in a nearly vacant courtroom at Garrahy Family Court, Providence, and
listened to a lawyer behind me explaining the strategy of delays to his client
in a custody case.
"After a year or two, she'll get
exhausted," the lawyer was saying. "She'll run out of money. She won't
be able to afford a lawyer or anything else. Then you'll get the kid, and you
can demand child support from your ex-wife." Neither one talked about
the emotional turmoil this would cause his child.
One of the most common ways that
lawyers delay cases is by seeking continuances to bring in "experts" who
will advocate for their clients. For more than two decades, I have
researched domestic abuse custody cases in Rhode Island Family Court, trying to
understand how this publicly financed process devastates so many children and
families. (Below I am naming only those lawyers, including Kevin
Aucoin at DCYF, and physicians who are specifically responsible to protect
children.)
First Case: At Hasbro Hospital’s Child Protection Program (CPP), Providence,
Rhode Island, in 1997, a 6–year-old girl sat rigid, a blanket over her head.
Children often try to disappear when life gets intolerable.
The girl’s father had a documented
history of aggression against his first two wives and their children. This
child, the youngest and only girl, showed symptoms of sexual abuse by the
father. CPP Director Dr. Carole Jenny reported: “There is no doubt in my mind
that some event happened because of the child’s clear and consistent
disclosure.”
The father harassed those who tried to
help his families: a security guard, social workers, therapists, teachers. He
took aim at Kevin Aucoin, chief legal counsel at the Department of Children,
Youth and Families (DCYF), for not responding quickly enough after the father
appealed DCYF’s findings against him. When he threatened to sue both DCYF and
Aucoin, the state agency needed Dr. Jenny to revise her assessment.
She listed warning signs in the father’s
behavior, then minimized them in a summary of court documents. Her new
"forensic review" freed the father to demand possession of his
children. He held them for thirty months, until the eleventh Family Court judge
to hear the case denounced his behavior in 2003 and sent the children home to
their mother without child support and still subject to their father's emotional
harassment. The children grew up in poverty. Their father, a realtor, gave his
house to an adult child from his prior marriage and convinced the court he was
poor, while their mother worked day and night stringing together minimum salary
jobs.
Second Case: In March 2006, attorney Lise Iwon began writing letters to the CPP
about a case in which she purported to be a neutral guardian ad litem. She
secured a report from Dr. Nancy S. Harper at CPP that lacked medical
information and merely summarized court documents Iwon had provided, repeating
the conjecture, hearsay, and biased rhetoric in the father’s defense strategy.
Harper’s supervisor, Dr. Jenny, never saw
or signed off on her CPP report before Iwon took it to the judge who ordered
DCYF to remove two young girls that day from their mother for a “psychiatric
evaluation.” Police arrived with a social worker to take them from their
schools into “temporary” custody. The children remained in foster homes and a
shelter at taxpayer expense for more than sixteen months before the state
awarded the younger girl to the father she had accused of sexually assaulting
her; the older girl went to yet another foster home.
Scores of neighbors, teachers, and others
wrote letters attesting to the mother’s superb parenting, but Iwon, who is a
close friend of the father's defense attorney, never interviewed these people. She began an aggressive search for mental health professionals who would testify against the mother. Dr. Jenny told me the mother’s behavior sounded “bizarre” but candidly admitted
she herself might seem bizarre if she believed her children were in danger. Eventually the father won sole custody
of the girls and denied them contact with their mother.
Third Case: A German father, head of a vast multinational corporate empire, retained
several law firms in the U.S. and Germany to retrieve his two American sons
after his estranged wife brought them here to her parents for one to have
surgery in 2007.
The mother told me she had confronted her
husband in Germany with evidence that he was sexually abusing their sons. She
said she had walked in on this happening and found disturbing photos on a
laptop computer her husband had given her. She related that her sons had
pointed out a store where their father got hardcore pornography. They allegedly
told her that he forced them to watch it and act it out.
The father hired a former U.S. official
at $700 an hour as one of his lawyers, who reached out to Family Court Chief
Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah, Jr., and paid the chief’s assistant David Tassoni
over $2,300 to help. The father’s attorneys met alone in chambers with U.S.
District Judge William E. Smith and intervened to end the involvement of Family
Court, DCYF, and the FBI. They secured attorney Sharon O’Keefe, who had been
assistant child advocate in Rhode Island, to serve as guardian ad litem.
O’Keefe contracted with Dr. Jenny to
evaluate some of the father’s photographs and a stack of German legal documents
with apparent translations. O’Keefe’s bill exceeded $13,000, including at least
$2,000 to be paid directly to Dr. Jenny.
O’Keefe hardly talked with the boys, and
Jenny never met them. Both concluded they saw no evidence the father was a
pedophile. Judge Smith gave the boys and their American passports to their
father, who took them back to Germany in April 2007.
Judge Smith ordered the father to give
the boys plenty of time with their mother. But the father has forbidden her to
see or communicate with the boys since 2007. On Mothers Day 2010, one son wrote
a plaintive note asking why “these people” would not at least let them Skype
her.
It is troubling that Dr. Jenny never
talked to the boys, who might have helped her interpret the photos. Nor did she
demand an independent search of the hard drive by state police who are specifically
trained to examine electronic evidence of child pornography and do not accept private payment for their services.
The delays Beale writes about are a
strategic part of adversarial litigation, which should have no place in
deciding visitation and custody. Family Court exists for a political purpose –
to reward legislative insiders with lifelong judgeships while allowing lawyers
and clinicians to profit off of families in crisis.
Clinicians must recognize the motives and pitfalls
when officers of the court reach out to them. Lawyers are hired to zealously
represent their clients, no matter who gets hurt. Doctors trained to “do no
harm” are easy prey for them; children suffer the consequences.
Notes
In order to protect children's
identities, I am referring only to case numbers.
First Case: P92-4797 in Rhode Island Family Court; Carole Jenny, MD, signed the
Child Safe Clinic #0629-23-38 report of January 14, 1997. After an extensive
sexual abuse assessment by St. Mary's Home (April 16, 1997), DCYF sent a letter
(April 18, 1997) to notify the father he had been "indicated." He
appealed and a year later threatened to sue DCYF and its senior counsel Kevin
Aucoin for failure to schedule a hearing. DCYF asked Dr. Jenny to review her
records. Her report (July 29, 1998) led to a revised DCYF report (August 6,
1998) and Aucoin's motions (August 6, 1998, etc.) to launch an expedited trial.
DCYF investigator Edward J. O'Donnell sent a letter (August 18, 1998) to the
father stating that the findings against him "are hereby overturned . . .
pursuant to . . . a forensic review of the investigation and all associated
material conducted by Dr. Carole Jenny" (DCYF Administrative Appeal of SCR
425142 I/6).
Second Case: N04-0106 in Rhode Island Family Court and 1676-86-32 AC 000119896231
at Rhode Island Hospital. Before Lise Iwon asked Judge John Mutter to seal the court file, I found her Motion (March 31,
2006) regarding her communications with Nancy Harper, as well as Iwon's Motion (April
5, 2006) asking to release clinical reports and court documents to Harper,
whose report (March 21, 2006, signed April 5, 2006), shows that Harper already
had those documents. Iwon's bill documents her search for mental health professionals. I interviewed the mother and secured documents from her
as well as the court file until Judge Mutter imposed a gag order forbidding all
parties to disclose anything further about the case and sealed both the divorce
and DCYF files, on or about August 16, 2007.
Third Case: 07-46S in the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island, which holds
transcripts, including the ex parte chamber conference of January 31,
2007, and court orders, including the decisive order of March 28, 2007; Jenny's
report to O'Keefe (March 15, 2007); and the father's documentation of payments
to Tassoni and others. The mother provided scores of documents, including the
rental list from the German video store (October 2005), an initial DCYF report
by Paul Ventura (January 31, 2007), O'Keefe's bills (March 12 and 28, 2007), hundreds
of photographs from the laptop, and her son's letter (Mother's Day 2010). I met with state police, who confirmed that these photos included child pornography.
Anne Grant (parentingproject@verizon.net) writes several blogs, including LittleHostages@blogspot.com and others. Her chapter on Rhode Island appears in "Domestic Violence, Abuse, and Child Custody: Legal Strategies and Policy Issues," ed. Mo Therese Hannah, PhD, and Barry Goldstein, JD (Civic Research Institute, 2010).
