Prisoner’s Custody of Daughter, 4, Reinstated : Courts: Mother also keeps visiting rights. County plans appeal on grounds that transporting children would be undue burden on government.

For the second time in two days, Sheri Woods had good news about the future with her 4-year-old daughter.

On Tuesday, a state appeals court ruled unanimously that the 30-year-old prison inmate could retain visiting rights and custody of her daughter, Brittany, overturning action by the Orange County Social Services Agency.

Then on Wednesday, Woods’ lawyer said, the prison system approved Woods’ request to attend fire-training camp, which meant she would probably be moved from the prison at Chowchilla to a Southern California facility closer to Whittier, where Brittany has been living with her paternal grandmother.

But Woods also had some bad news Wednesday when Deputy County Counsel Michelle L. Palmer said the county planned to appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court--meaning no visitations will take place until that court decides the issue.

Palmer said Tuesday’s ruling could create an undue burden if state officials are required to transport children to visit their parents in prison.

The Social Services Agency had ruled that, because Woods was serving an eight-year sentence for robbery, she could not comply with regular visitation requirements to be reunited with her daughter.

“While ‘use a gun, go to prison’ may well be an appropriate legal maxim,” wrote David G. Sills, presiding justice of the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana, “ ‘go to prison, lose your child’ is not.”

In a precedent-setting ruling, the court found that the Social Services Agency acted improperly in denying Woods visiting rights while in prison. Then, because Woods was not fulfilling visiting procedures required to reunify families where the agency has taken temporary custody, the agency terminated Woods’ rights as a parent.

Instead, social workers placed Brittany with Diana Atencio, her grandmother. While Brittany was living with her parents, her father was murdered.

Woods then sought the assistance of Atencio, the mother of the slain man, in raising the child.

“You can’t lose your child just because you go to jail,” said Woods’ attorney, John L. Dodd. “Just going to jail shouldn’t make you lose your child automatically.”

Dodd said that Woods was “basically as rehabilitated as one can be in prison. She works as a clerk, she learned to type 90 words per minute and she gained job skills. She completed every parenting and counseling program available to her in the system. Then she went to the prison law library and found a parenting correspondence course that she is now taking. She has realized the error of her ways and has turned her life around.”

Palmer said the agency had acted appropriately in Woods’ case and that the cost and logistics of ferrying children to prisons around the state could be considerable.

“If this case were to be upheld, it would put a very hard and unreasonable burden on the department of social services, as well as the child,” Palmer said.

Both attorneys agreed that the decision could have wide-ranging impact.

“There are a lot of incarcerated parents out there,” Palmer said. Forcing social service agencies to transport the children to prisons around the state could place “a real burden on the taxpayers of California as well.”

“There are thousands and thousands of parents in prisons in this state and hundreds of thousands around the country” who will be affected if the appeal-court ruling is upheld, Dodd said.

Woods was sentenced in 1991 to eight years in prison following two robbery convictions. While in Orange County Jail, Woods was allowed monthly visits with Brittany. The visits ended after Woods was sent to the women’s prison in Frontera.