County faults state of California for couple’s continued listing as child abusers

A lawyer for Los Angeles County told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that the failure to remove a wrongly accused couple from California’s index of reported child abusers was the state’s responsibility, not the county’s.

“It’s the state’s database,” said Timothy Coates, a Los Angeles lawyer for the county. “There are no state standards and no specific criteria for removing someone from the list. We don’t have any procedures on how to go about that.”

The case of Craig and Wendy Humphries has highlighted the difficulty of getting off the state index once a person’s name has been reported to Sacramento on allegations of abusing a child. State law requires many agencies and employees, including schools, police and child-care workers, to report instances of suspected child abuse.

More than 800,000 names are on California’s index, and employers consult the list before hiring people to work with children.

The Humphrieses were reported to state authorities in 2001 based on the word of his teenage daughter, but a juvenile court judge later pronounced them innocent of the charges. They have been fighting in court for years to clear their names.

In January 2009, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals described the couple’s encounter with the California system as “nightmarish” and ruled that both the state and county were liable for violating their constitutional rights. “There is no effective procedure for the [Humphrieses] to challenge this listing,” the appeals court said.

But lawyers for the county appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the county should not be liable for the state program. “Where the state law requires a local entity to do something,” Coates said, “it’s essentially the state making the decision.”

As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, the state of California did not appeal the decision, but the Humphrieses remain on the state index.

In 2002, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told the couple that the deputy who filed the original report must submit a new one to Sacramento to have their names removed, according to court documents. But that deputy no longer worked for the department.

Meanwhile, the state Department of Justice said the original sheriff’s report was substantiated at the time, and therefore their names must stay on the index.

Even though court rulings had cleared the Humphrieses, it was not enough to have their names removed from the list, state and county officials told them.

Frustrated, the couple filed suit in federal court in August 2002, and accused the state and county of violating their rights to due process of law. They won before the 9th Circuit last year.

Esther Boynton, a lawyer for the Humphrieses, said she knew the sheriff’s department had instituted a new appeal process in 2008, but she said she was not convinced it would work for her clients. She was also unwilling to have them try that route again.

“There is no statewide process for appeals,” Boynton said.

In response to a state directive in 2008, the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services said it initiated an appeal process for people it reports to the California index.

Michael Watrobski, chief grievance review manager, said the office had heard 313 such challenges this year, but declined to say how many names, if any, had been removed from the list.

Watrobski said the agency thought it was right to give people a chance to challenge their listings.

david.savage@latimes.com