The Case for Child Care at the Courthouse : Noise Interferes With Proceedings, Parents, Judges Say

Elaine Brown pushed her 10-month-old daughter Charlene slowly back and forth in her stroller in the first floor hallway of North courthouse in Fullerton. The baby was sobbing mightily. Tow-headed son Kenny, 3, ran ahead, shouting, ignoring his mother’s pleas for quiet.

Brown, a Fullerton homemaker who had been charged with running a red light, said a bailiff had asked her to wait outside the traffic court until the judge was ready to hear her case because he was concerned that the children would be noisy.

“I had nobody else to leave the children with,” Brown, 26, said. She could not afford a baby sitter, she said, because her husband had landed a job as a graphic artist just the week before after being on workers’ compensation for three years.

As the hands on the clock in the hallway slowly moved from 9:30 past 10:30 a.m., an impatient Brown pushed Charlene’s stroller from the corridor into the foyer leading to the courtroom. She peeked through a narrow window.

Charlene’s crying echoed in the foyer. Kenny whooped as he ran around the enclosure. “I’m going to spank you,” Brown warned. “You’re a little terrorizer.”

Kenny scampered into the corridor, pulled the top off a trash can and began banging it up and down on the can. By now Charlene had climbed out of her stroller and stumbled into the corridor to watch Kenny.

A man leaving traffic court slid by her as she stood in the middle of the doorway and looked back over his shoulder in annoyance. An embarrassed Brown scooped up the baby and held her.

Brown is not the only parent to have struggled with children in the courthouse. On this day, as on every weekday, several dozen young children accompanied their parents there--to the dismay of clerks, judges and courthouse workers.

In fact, children crying in courtrooms and playing in hallways are disrupting an increasing number of trials throughout Orange County, judges and court administrators say, as defendants and witnesses--as well as their friends and relatives--take their preschoolers to court with them.

“I’ve had to send children of witnesses out into the hallway because they were making so much noise,” said Municipal Judge Linda Miller. “It’s not safe for the kids because we don’t have anyone to watch them. And it’s not fair to the parent because he or she can’t concentrate on testifying because they’re worried about their children.”

The parents say that they have no one with whom they can leave their children and that they cannot afford baby sitters.

Plans for Volunteer Center

A new state law requires that courthouses constructed or renovated after 1987 include child care centers. But government money for day care centers in existing courthouses is not available, state and county officials say.

Miller says child care centers are needed now. She has called a meeting Wednesday to find out whether individuals or groups are interested in helping set up an independent day care center at North courthouse that would be staffed by volunteers. (The meeting will be at 7 p.m. at the Volunteer Center, 2050 Youth Way, Fullerton. More information is available by calling Miller at (714) 773-4555.)

Visiting children also are disrupting proceedings at the West and Central courthouses, which include Municipal and Superior courts, as well as at the South and Harbor courthouses, which house only Municipal Courts, officials said.

“I routinely send kids out of the courtroom because I can’t hear,” said Municipal Judge Pamela Isles, who conducts trials at South courthouse in Laguna Niguel. “But even then you can hear them screaming out in the hallway.”

At Miller’s suggestion, the county plans to study the feasibility of setting up similar child care centers at all five courthouses, said Louise Napoli, a financial analyst in the Orange County administrator’s office.

Broader Implications

The lack of child care can have broader economic implications. Miller recalled that two weeks ago, a man stood before her in court explaining why his family should not be evicted from their apartment, although they were behind in their rent. His wife stood beside him, cradling their wailing infant in her arms. The din drowned out the man’s words.

“I couldn’t ask the wife to leave because she was a defendant, too,” Miller said in an interview in her chambers.

The baby’s crying forced Miller to put off a trial for another day. The delay was expensive for the landlord, who had to pay his attorney, and taxpayers had to foot the bill for the continuance.

Nor is the problem confined to Orange County. Unsupervised children are troublesome in courthouses in the rest of the state, where day care centers are rare, said Lynn Holton, spokeswoman for the California Judicial Council.

In fact, the problem is growing as the number of trials in the state mushrooms and affordable child care becomes scarcer, Holton said in a telephone interview from San Francisco.

Waiting Rooms Recommended

The Judicial Council, which oversees the administration of the state’s courts, considered the matter serious enough to recommend last month that waiting rooms for children under 16 be set up in existing courthouses throughout the state. Miller’s action was, in part, based on this recommendation.

Parents at the North courthouse last week voiced the problems with bringing children to the courthouse and the reasons that child care provisions are needed now.

“I had to bring the children with me because I’ve got nobody to take care of them,” Helen Yocum said as she waited in a third floor corridor for her husband, Robert, to be arraigned on a drug possession charge. Yocum, 30, said that she and her husband, a 27-year-old old construction worker, were on a two-week vacation in Orange County from their home in South Dakota.

She held year-old Robert Jr. in her lap. Sitting in chairs on either side of her were her three other children--Robin, 5, Anna, 3, and Nina, 2. They squirmed in their chairs and sneaked down the hallway when they could escape their mother’s gaze.

On the third floor, Allison Thomas of Fullerton carefully watched her niece Leslie and nephew Christopher as their mother, Elizabeth Holzmeiller, 20, appeared in court to request an extension for payment of a $250 traffic fine.

“I think it would be wonderful” if there were a day care center, Thomas, 21, said, “because a lot of people don’t make it to court because they don’t have a baby sitter.”

Thomas or her mother has had to accompany Leslie and Christopher to court over the past six months to watch them while Holzmeiller sought extensions or made partial payments on the traffic fine.

On the fourth floor, Cathy Huston waited outside the courtroom where her brother Douglas Metzger was being arraigned on an assault and battery charge. Huston, 28, a Placentia homemaker, held her 17-month-old son Matthew in her arms. She said that she had driven her brother, a 22-year-old warehouse worker, to the courthouse that morning.

“I want to find out what’s happening to my brother,” Huston said, “but I can’t go in (the courtroom) with the baby because he’d be fussing and stuff.”

In another fourth floor courtroom, Steve Hendrickson of Buena Park held his month-old daughter Stephanie in a layette. He sat in the front row of the spectators’ section waiting for the judge to begin his preliminary hearing on a charge of cultivating marijuana.

His wife, Valerie, suddenly bolted from the courtroom as their other daughter, 15-month-old Dominique, began crying.

“The judge didn’t ask me to leave,” she said as she paced the corridor trying to pacify Dominique. “But (judges) do ask you to leave if the kids make too much noise. I wish there was a place here where we could leave the babies so we could concentrate on my husband’s trial.”