Baby’s Lawyer: Lone Voice for the Defenseless

Children’s books spill out of the bookshelf in the law firm’s waiting room. The chief attorney’s office is decorated not with stuffy diplomas and certificates, but with dozens of photographs, from the Marx brothers to Richard Nixon sobbing on the shoulder of Dwight Eisenhower.

Not the usual trappings of a thriving law practice, but Harold LaFlamme is an attorney with unusual clients. Some come in with broken bones and bruises, others with injuries even more repugnant. Many are not old enough to pronounce their lawyer’s name, or even know what an attorney is.

With a passion to protect children from the failings of adults, LaFlamme holds Orange County Juvenile Court’s contract to represent children who are abused, neglected or abandoned. For the past 10 years, he has handled an estimated 12,000 “300” cases--shorthand for a section of the state welfare and institutions code for these dependents of the court--providing an independent legal voice for the wee ones traveling through the legal system.

LaFlamme has handled many high-profile cases, but few have captured more headlines than the one that kept him in court last week. LaFlamme’s littlest and currently most famous client is Baby Boy Johnson, the child born Wednesday to surrogate mother Anna L. Johnson, who is fighting the child’s genetic parents for custody. (The baby went home to the genetic parents, Mark and Crispina Calvert, on Saturday, after lawyers agreed the couple could have the newborn until a custody hearing next Thursday.) Johnson is the first surrogate mother to seek custody and parental rights to a child not genetically linked to her.

LaFlamme says he does not know yet who he will recommend to get custody of the infant, whom he jokingly calls Bubba. (With custody undecided, the newborn has no legal name, and Bubba “is as good as anything,” LaFlamme said, cracking a grin.) And LaFlamme acts as if he has little stomach for the behavior of the people involved in the case, which has sparked a media frenzy.

“I’m surprised they’re not selling tickets,” he said during an interview Thursday, just hours after attorneys for Johnson and the Calverts held dueling press conferences.

“I have a great deal of compassion for that baby. I worry about the judgment of some of the adults involved,” LaFlamme said. “What I want for him is a stress-free environment, one without split custody, if that is possible.

“I hope to get him through this minefield of litigation intact and into a nurturing environment.”

If that sounds like he wants to cut through the legal quagmire to deal with the basic question of what is best for the child, that’s what others in the court system say LaFlamme excels at.

“He has a real ability to cut through the issues and get to what’s really important in a child’s case,” said William G. Steiner, executive director of the Orangewood Foundation, who has worked with abused and neglected children for 30 years. He is the Johnson baby’s court-appointed guardian until custody is decided.

Still, on the surface, Harold LaFlamme, 49, seems an unlikely person for his own job. Tall and lanky, his deep voice and frank language about the horrible child abuse he has seen give him a gruff edge. He is a voracious reader and an amateur archeologist who goes off for digs in the Mojave Desert to get away from the intensity of his practice.

And he is a former arms dealer in the Middle East (he prefers to say he was involved in “the marketing of sophisticated weapons systems”), a job that helped prepare him for a career in law. Yes, he said, there are similarities.

“You negotiate with people who can execute you. You learn to be diplomatic and come up with solutions,” he said. “And you try to do it and get out intact.”

But he gave up that job because he “didn’t like the treachery and betrayal in that business,” he said. “So I got into law, where there is no treachery and betrayal,” LaFlamme added wryly.

A lawyer at 35, he began by doing juvenile criminal work, “an area where there was a vacuum of lawyers,” and soon moved into representing juveniles in dependency court, where there was also a vacuum. He has obtained the county contract through competitive bidding; his current contract pays his firm $240 for each case, from first appearance in court through initial disposition, plus $200 for each major subsequent review hearing and $240 for the hearing at which the final decision is made.

His office is made up of seven other attorneys and seven investigators, “plus one opening.” They are employees; he has no partners because ultimate responsibility lies with him, he said.

LaFlamme’s clients most often are victims of abuse, physical or sexual, which he calls “the soft underbelly of our culture.” He can rattle off a litany of abuses he has seen, “stuff that would curl your hair.” Babies with flat sides to their heads from being left, unheld, in their cribs. Newborns in agony, addicted to cocaine or heroin. Children who have suffered grotesque sexual injuries.

The papers in his case files are accented with Polaroid pictures of his clients. He pulled one out, showing a smiling young girl he called Kimberly. “Here’s her first photo. See her black eye?” He said he has his staff take the pictures so that, in the large volume of cases he handles, the children do not become numbers. Sometimes, he said, his case files contain more photos of the child than the parents have in their home.

“It’s important that we don’t depersonalize them,” he said. “I like to look at those pictures. Sometimes it helps me as I’m trying to figure out what should be done with their lives.”

Among the cases he has handled:

* A little girl, about 6 years old, who was covered with human bite marks made by her stepfather, who had a prior conviction for child molestation. The girl told LaFlamme that the stepfather “kept biting and biting, and she finally prayed to Jesus so she would die and he wouldn’t bite her any more.”

* Six children who were orphaned when their father shot their mother and then turned the gun on himself. Four of the children were illegal aliens, and extra efforts were made to obtain citizenship for them, in the hope of keeping together what was left of their family.

* A young girl whose foster parents wanted to adopt her but could not afford her $25,000-a-month medical bills, which were paid by the state and county while she was in foster care. A judge ultimately ordered the state to pay the bills, clearing the way for adoption.

Other clients have included the half-Aleut Indian daughter of Jodi Argleben, a Cypress teen-ager who fought in the courts to have her baby adopted by a non-Indian couple. He also represented a former state senator’s toddler son who was unintentionally injured when hair from his mother’s head fell into his diaper, wrapped around his penis and partly cut through it.

But there is one case that LaFlamme says he thinks of every day of his life. It was the case of Julius Caesar Mathis III, a 2-year-old boy who had been removed from his mother’s home because he was being beaten. The social worker, who had Julius placed with a relative, felt so strongly that the boy was in danger that a special court order was drawn up stating that the boy could not go home unless there was court approval.

Nonetheless, when the relative said she could no longer handle Julius, a new social worker assigned to the case sent the boy home, without notifying LaFlamme or the court. A month later, in August, 1981, Julius died of abdominal injuries while his mother’s boyfriend was baby-sitting.

“His liver was dislodged. He died in agony,” LaFlamme said.

(The boyfriend, five years later, ultimately was cleared of all charges after several trials--one of which ended in mistrial because of mishandled evidence by the coroner’s office.)

As for the social worker, “I insisted that he go,” LaFlamme said. And while LaFlamme was not responsible for Julius’ death, it still haunts him.

“I don’t like to make mistakes. This wasn’t my mistake, but if you do make one, your client can come back dead. There is no room for error here.”

His reputation has earned him an appointment by California Supreme Court Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas to the statewide Advisory Committee on Juvenile Court Law. And his experiences have convinced him that parenting classes should be required before high school graduation, in an effort to reduce physical abuse caused by ignorance, such as shaking a baby, which can cause spinal and neurological damage.

LaFlamme has done more than fight for the children through the system; he has also fought against the system. In the early 1980s, he took on the county about the overcrowding and inadequate conditions at Albert Sitton Home for abandoned and abused children. Ultimately, public outrage over the Sitton Home led to the construction of the modern, more spacious Orangewood Children’s Home.

Orangewood Foundation director Steiner, who was director of the Albert Sitton home, said LaFlamme filed a lawsuit to prod the county into improving conditions. “He took a very strong stand on overcrowding at the Albert Sitton Home.”

Because he handles so many cases, “Harold has developed a great expertise in dealing with complicated legal issues involving parental rights, family reunification. That’s why you find Harold appointed to a case like the Anna Johnson case,” Steiner said. But LaFlamme does more than meet the minimum legal requirements of his clients, he added.

“He’s gone far beyond what one would expect a court-appointed attorney to do in representing the interests of a client,” Steiner said, adding that LaFlamme has been known to use his own money to assist children’s emergency needs.

“For him, it’s more than a job. He and his staff take a real interest. They’re truly concerned about those kids and take a deep interest in seeing their best interests served,” said Kari Sheffield, juvenile court administrator.

“I’ve traveled up and down this state, looking at the ‘300’ systems of many counties. There’s no doubt that the system Harold has is the finest in the state of California,” said attorney Gary Proctor, who often is the lawyer for the parents of the children whom LaFlamme represents.

Judge Robert Jameson, who presides over Orange County’s juvenile court, agreed. He said that until recently, other counties did not appoint a single independent attorney for the children and instead relied on a rotating pool of private lawyers--which provided little consistency or expertise--or they employed their own county counsel, the public defender or the district attorney, sometimes causing a conflict of interest. Now, other counties are beginning to follow Orange County’s lead, he said.

“Orange County is very fortunate,” Jameson said. “We are way ahead of most counties because they don’t have a Harold LaFlamme.”