Dependency Court: Lives in the Balance

Marble-faced in sea-foam green and tan, the Betty Lou Lamoreaux Juvenile Justice Center looks like the headquarters of a prosperous Southern California corporation. An atrium rises seven floors at the building’s center, the courtrooms boast cushy theatrical seating and the corridors gleam.

By 9:15 a.m., its hallways reek of dirty clothes, soiled diapers and nervous sweat. A man swats his wife with a roll of court papers, hissing, “Keep your mouth shut.” A teenager with pant legs as wide as manhole covers spits her gnawed fingernails on the floor. A grandmother wails in Spanish. Attorneys, lugging stacks of manila files, burst out of courtrooms bellowing the names of clients they’ve never met or don’t remember.

Cases are supposed to be confidential. But above the din, family secrets are broadcast. “It says here you hit your daughter in the head with a frying pan?” an attorney asks one woman. Nearby, a father yells, “This is all lies and I ain’t going to no sex class!” Down the hall, another lawyer calls the name of her client over and over while the woman’s head bobs to a drug-induced beat. “Great. She’s out of it,” the lawyer says before clattering downstairs to a holding cell to meet a handcuffed dad brought in from a state penitentiary.

This is Dependency Court, last stop for the county’s most seriously beaten, molested or neglected children. Last chance for parents who never learned to parent, or never cared. This is where mothers and fathers are put on trial and the verdicts can be devastating: They can lose their children forever.

“It’s a crazy-making machine,” one attorney says, as a fresh file, another kid’s life, slips from his grip. A diving grab saves it before it hits the floor.

He’s not talking simply of the anger and despair that suck at anyone who walks these halls, but of the sense of futility, of families disintegrating and the court’s often fruitless attempts to patch them together, of the future unraveling behind closed doors.

On average, 220 new families a month--from the poorest ghettos of Santa Ana and Anaheim to tony Newport Beach and the planned neighborhoods of Irvine--wind up here. For the families, the chances are 50-50 they will not leave with their children. All told, more than 4,600 children are now under the court’s protection; 3,800 live with relatives or in foster or group homes.

Since 1990 the number of children whose cases land in these courts has risen 54%. Judges, attorneys and social workers say there is no clear explanation why child abuse cases in this seemingly tidy suburban county have been increasing at more than double the rate of its sprawling urban neighbor, Los Angeles.

“A few years ago, the prevailing attitude still was, ‘This is Orange County, [child abuse] doesn’t happen here,’ ” says Michael Riley, director of the Department of Children and Family Services. “I think people now are more aware that . . . Orange County has the same problems as anywhere else.”

In six sleek red and natural oak courtrooms, dozens of times a day, in hearings that often last just minutes, judges decide whether children should go home with their parents or be taken away for a few days, a month, a year or forever.

Judges make rulings based on little information, guided not just by laws, but by gut instinct, prejudice and a fear so gnawing that one jurist thanks God in her nightly prayers that one more day has passed without a child dying because of her rulings.

Unlike criminal and civil courtrooms, Dependency Court by law is shrouded in secrecy: there are no juries and spectators are barred.

“People really don’t want to know what goes on here,” says Rod Johnson, a 32-year veteran with Orange County’s Department of Children and Family Services. “It’s kind of like garbage collecting. People want their garbage picked up, but they don’t want to know how it’s done or what happens to it after it’s gone.”

The secrecy is said to be in the best interest of the children; in theory it provides families the chance to repair themselves outside the public view. But it also has allowed the court to become a judicial backwater, hidden from scrutiny.

Historically, Dependency Court--disparagingly referred to as “kiddie court,” where real law is not practiced and careers are not made--has attracted few judges. It has been a place for presiding judges to stow those out of favor, or in need of seasoning. For one stretch last year, just one judge served where there should have been five. Most cases are heard by commissioners and referees, stand-in judges of varying levels of skill and knowledge hired by the county. Even traffic court has more judges.

The public defender’s office, which represents most parents in court, stashes many of its greenest recruits, its burn-out cases and bad apples here. For the parents, this practice can mean the difference between keeping their kids or losing them, because public defenders provide a check to the accusations of social workers. “If [the public defenders] don’t know what they’re doing or they’re lazy,” says Harold LaFlamme, whose firm represents children in the court, “their clients get the short shrift.”

For attorneys in the county counsel’s office, who represent social workers in court, dependency is considered such a low-level assignment that some were once told by their supervisor: “A trained monkey could do your job.”

“We’re like the unwanted stepchild in our office,” says one deputy county counsel.

As a consequence, the legal system’s most far-reaching decisions often are left in the hands of some of its least experienced, or least motivated, judges and attorneys. For the court’s harshest critics, among them its own judges, nothing could be more shortsighted.

The Dependency Court system “is not accorded the attention and resources it deserves,” says Appellate Justice Sheila Sonenshine, who reviews many of the court’s cases on appeal. “Parents can’t get services. Their attorneys fail to make arguments or call witnesses. The judges we get either don’t want to be there or can’t wait to get off. Given these as premises, could the system possibly function as it should?”

Courting Despair One Folder at a Time

The files wait in a two-foot-high stack in the judges’ law library. Twenty-four children’s lives. Clean, flat folders for the newcomers. Tattered, stained, two-volume sets for the veterans, the kids stuck in the county’s child welfare system. A day in the life of Orange County Superior Court Judge Richard F. Toohey.

There’s a picture in the first folder, a Polaroid of a blond, 2-year-old girl staring at the camera. Both eyes are black. Fist-shaped bruises and scratches cover all but a half-dollar-sized section of her tiny body. A two-inch patch of her hair is missing.

Like some perverted baby book, the file describes the toddler’s life: the urine-soaked pillow where she slept; daily meth-fueled beatings that started before she could walk; the day a social worker came, and her stepfather hastily smeared the girl’s body with pinkish make-up to cover her injuries.

The girl’s 20-year-old mother was in jail on drug charges. She’d seen the bruises, but her husband, a convicted robber and child molester, promised not to hit the girl again.

The second file is no better: a battered 10-year-old girl so traumatized by her mother, brother and her mother’s boyfriend that she runs through the county children’s shelter screaming “He’s after me,” or crouches on the floor growling like a dog and trying to bite anyone who comes close.

Nor the third: a Santa Ana woman whose baby was born drug-addicted. “I put [the cocaine] in a bottle of beer and drank it,” she told the social worker. “I’m not an addict or nothing.” It was her fifth drug baby, each fathered by a different man, all now in various state lock-ups. Beaten by her own parents, the mother has a file as well.

Everything that could possibly go wrong with a family unspools on these pages. Drugs are numbingly pervasive. In four out of five cases, the mother or father is a drug user. Dozens of little girls are named Crystal after the rock form of methamphetamine. Hungry kids with mouths full of rotting teeth who learned young that food, shelter and clothing take a back seat to mom’s habit. One toddler is called Pea Bee Cola, street slang for pure blown cocaine.

The files show children’s lives disintegrating years before the court stepped in. In one pile, more than half the children had four or more abuse reports, three had more than 10, and one family had 17 calls reporting abuse before the mother abandoned her 9-year-old daughter and her two sons, age 7 and 2 1/2, in a motel. They were taken into custody.

“You think that’s bad?” says Judge Toohey, “Wait until you read this one,” smacking another fat folder on the table. His face twists in disgust and wonder.

On the bench, the 47-year-old jurist presents a stoic front to the daily pageant of horrors. But in his chambers, surrounded by photos of three children he didn’t start having until he was nearly 40, he frets. As a former Orange County homicide prosecutor, he saw some of the most unspeakable things one person can do to another. But what he observes in his courtroom torments him.

Disorder in Dependency Court

“You go through the calendar on a daily basis and the number of cases that include the word methamphetamine are staggering,” says Toohey, a well-respected former municipal court judge on his first superior court assignment. “These children, they’re not being properly nurtured. And the state, we’re not designed to be parents. Yet that’s what we’re doing, and not very well.”

For Toohey, Criminal Court was an ordered world; if he did his job right, the bad guy was punished and the judge went home with a clear conscience. There’s nothing ordered about Dependency Court. Yes, a father has hit his child. But was he dogged by poverty? Stressed? Never taught how to be a parent? Should this child be deprived of his family? Should he send the dad to a parenting or anger management class? Are such classes enough?

“You’re a judicial officer and this is the deck you get dealt every day,” he says, flipping down a court calendar covered with his crabbed notes: “smell of urine, dirty, COCAINE, HEROIN, mother unable to do residential program, wants kids back.”

Knowing the law, he says, is not enough. He also must be psychologist and parent. He is acutely conscious of the differences between himself--a married, white, staunch Catholic who mentors teenagers at his San Juan Capistrano parish and thinks moms and dads should be married--and the people whose lives he determines. He is the lone moral arbiter for lives that bear little relation to his.

Unlike criminal courts, where “beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard, Toohey needs only to find a “preponderance of the evidence”--or a better than 50% likelihood--that abuse has occurred to take a child away. Faced with losing their children for good, the parents can appeal Toohey’s rulings to the Court of Appeals. But that court routinely affirms the vast majority of the Dependency Court’s decisions.

If he gives a parent another chance, a child could be further abused. If he takes a child into custody, that child may be traumatized anew by a foster parent who doesn’t like him, or a group home that doesn’t care. Much of the time, he is faced with choosing the least worst of some awful options, and sometimes he has just minutes to decide. But some days, he hopes, he has given a child a future.

Late one afternoon, he returns a 2-year-old boy to his parents. “You know the term ‘terrible twos’?” he tells them. “I’m just finishing that myself. It can be tough. I’m hoping your situation is better now than it was a couple of years ago. I’m hoping you can celebrate many more birthdays with this precious child.”

Among his judicial colleagues, the tension has led to burnout and sleepless nights. One commissioner sighs her way through the worst files in her chambers, at times ending up in tears, then steels herself for another long day on the bench. Toohey pours out his despair to his wife, who has a master’s in social work, and silently counts his blessings: two daughters, a son and a puppy, adopted from the pound a few blocks from his courtroom.

“We can’t be guarantors to place the children in Ozzie and Harriet homes,” Toohey says. “We can’t be guarantors of anything.”

Lives Changed in Minutes

Outside Toohey’s courtroom, parents wait hours for five- or 10-minute hearings they seldom understand with attorneys who often have had just moments to review their cases. On hard benches they wring copies of court reports like wet rags, or roam the hallways, proffering the papers like a map they can’t follow: What does this mean? When is my turn? One man in an expensive blue suit lifts one knee and wipes his backside with a report as his attorney walks away.

Once the Department of Children and Family Services files a petition alleging abuse, and a judge rules that the abuse has occurred, parents typically get 12 months to prove they should get their kids back. The slightest screw-up, however--an absent attorney, a missing report, a sick social worker--can keep a child from her family or strand her in a group home for months longer.

Parents are supposed to receive “reunification plans” tailored to their needs. But most end up with nearly boilerplate plans of counseling, parenting and anger- management or drug classes--if they can get into the heavily overbooked classes at all.

Each parent is appointed an attorney, unless he and she can afford to pay one. So is each child. County social workers are represented by the county counsel. A minimum of four attorneys--but as many as 10--sit at tables before Toohey or slouch along the walls.

Toohey relies heavily on the social workers’ reports, which range from the barely adequate to the comprehensive. They include everything from gossipy observations of neighbors to hospital records; they can be based on a 10-minute visit or a phone call or exhaustive interviews. Yet, like the testimony of cops, a social worker’s word counts more here than anyone else’s.

Unless the parents’ attorneys choose to challenge the report, they have no way to dispute the allegations. If a parent does protest, the case will proceed to a trial, where every mistake they have ever made can be presented as evidence.

But most cases don’t go to trial. Many are hashed out by the attorneys before the families get past the heavy set of courtroom doors.

In the space of half an hour, Toohey warns one father that if he doesn’t clean his house he could lose his five kids six months down the road. He listens to a grandpa plead for his battered grandson, then says he can’t have the child because he once abused his own son. He issues a warrant for a 17-year-old foster girl on the run.

Some mornings Toohey zooms through 20 cases before the lunch break.

The juggernaut slows for good news. One morning, Toohey gives a beaming father full custody of his giggly 3-year-old daughter, who races forward and climbs on the lap of her attorney. The girl’s mother was lost to drugs. Dad had proudly completed parenting classes.

“She’s the cutest girl we’ve had in here in many months,” Toohey says, marveling over the dad’s ability to adorn the toddler’s head with a dozen tiny braids.

That afternoon, Toohey “terminates” the parental rights of some drug- and alcohol-abusing parents who have divorced and treated their two young kids like shuttlecocks for five years.

The father’s attorney halfheartedly argues that the man deserves a chance at drug treatment classes. Toohey cuts him short and directs his ire at the parents, who seem more concerned with shooting vicious looks at one another.

“When your daughter was asked who loved her, she indicated the television set,” Toohey says, in a rare flash of courtroom disgust. “It would appear to the court that both of these minors have a limited attachment to either parent.”

More often than not, mothers do not have husbands. Fathers are classified as “presumed,” “alleged” or “de facto,” then trooped off for paternity tests.

This day, a prim county counsel spends 15 minutes playing an embarrassing version of “The Dating Game” (Question: When did you have sex with the mother?) to sort out which of three sullen men, each with attorneys hired by taxpayers, is the father of a little girl.

One man doesn’t remember when he married the mother. The mother can’t remember when she had sex with the second man. When asked if he was the father, the third man shrugged, “Don’t ask me. Ask the woman. I can’t get pregnant.”

Nearly every day, parents receive the “death sentence”-- the termination of their rights to their child or children.

Last year, in Orange County, parents were legally severed from their kids in more than 250 cases, and another 23 sets of parents voluntarily gave up their children; in addition, some 180 children were placed permanently with guardians or in foster or group homes, even though their parents’ rights were not severed.

Stephanie Enright, 17, got the death sentence just before lunch in a courtroom just down the hall from Toohey: a referee ruled that the son Enright had been accused of neglecting deserved the stability of another family’s home.

Parents Don’t Get Benefit of the Doubt

Such scenes happen with increasing frequency in the six courtrooms here. Following the death of a Los Angeles County boy who was returned to an abusive home, dependency courts throughout the state have become more punitive toward parents. Reunifying families was once the reigning mantra; now a child’s safety comes first.

New laws shorten the time that parents who abuse their young children--or those who have already lost one child to the system--have to convince the court they have changed. The court is no longer required to offer such parents counseling or drug rehabilitation classes. Some drug-addicted parents simply give up, certain they cannot kick their habit in the six months the court allows.

According to court records, Enright was 15 when she kidnapped her baby boy. The state had taken him away temporarily at birth because it said she couldn’t take care of his medical needs. Two months after the baby boy had heart surgery, she grabbed him and fled with his 24-year-old father to Oklahoma. Enright says she was convinced the state wanted to give her baby away.

A year later, when welfare officials tracked down the family, they said the boy was malnourished and covered with lice. Now, another year having passed, the court was taking Enright’s baby for good. Neither she nor her boyfriend, the court said, had “bonded” with the boy.

During court testimony, the boy’s social worker said that the boy would suffer no ill effects if he never saw his mother again. An assistant social worker who monitored Enright’s visits with her child testified that the boy never called out “mommy” when his mother left. The boy, she said, seemed almost frightened of his father, who dreamed of becoming a bounty hunter. In contrast, the worker said, the boy was attached to his foster parents and called them mom and dad.

Like many parents in dependency court, Enright understood little of the proceedings: the arguments over whether her child was “bonded” to her, the idea that her biological link to her child could be severed. Phone calls to her attorney in the weeks before the hearing went unanswered. “They’re so overbooked,” she said. “When I do catch her I have to talk so fast that I forget what I needed to tell her.”

Social Worker Will Supervise Visits

During the hours she waited outside the court for her case to be called, she wondered how the judge could decide whether her child needed her, when she was only allowed visits with her son for an hour every other week--under the watchful eyes of a social worker. She worried that her ties to the boy’s father, her only true family, worked against her.

“I just feel like I’m screwed,” she said, “They’re not going to believe me over a social worker.”

On the stand, she was already defeated. Pale, shy and freckled, she barely looked up as she spoke. “I know I made mistakes,” she testified. “I did make mistakes, but now I just want my kid back. I want the court to know that I can be a good mother.”

Enright’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Loel Jones, argued that the social workers wanted the boy to be adopted and were determined to mischaracterize Enright’s relationship with her son. But Jones’ presentation angered the referee, who told her she was offering irrelevant arguments and stating things without evidence.

“Where are you getting this?” the referee snapped at one point, after Jones made several legal gaffes. “You can’t just say these things without substance.”

The attorneys for the county and the boy accused Enright of refusing to accept responsibility for fleeing with her child. She had no plans for the future, they said, except to live with the boy’s much older father.

The referee ran through the legal justifications for breaking or honoring the biological bond--but then ruled that it was too late. “The court is required to act in the best interests of the child,” he said. “I believe I’ve done so.”

His last words were punctuated by Enright’s sobs. She would be allowed one last good-bye visit, he said. Then he picked up a file from the stack before him and called the next case.

Enright doubled over at the waist, wadding a balled tissue to her eyes and rocking in her courtroom seat.

Afterward, her attorney patted her shoulder. “I was hoping that the judge would find you were more bonded to [your son],” she said and turned to go.

Outside, Enright sobbed. “They’re taking my baby. They’re taking my baby. I hope they’re happy now.”

She reached for her second child, a 1-year-old son the court left in her care, and cuddled him.

*

Shoulders sagging, Toohey heads off for the train and his three waiting children. In a month, after just a year on the job, he transfers back to criminal court. Back where the bad guys are the ones who get punished, and the cases don’t follow him home at night.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Inside the Series

When children are taken from abusive parents, they enter a secret and frightening world--ostensibly for their protection. To see how well the theory works in practice, Times staff writer Tracy Weber and photographer Robert Gauthier spent most of a year behind the closed doors of Orange County’s child welfare system.

Ronald Owen, presiding judge of Orange County Juvenile Court, granted The Times unprecedented access to group homes, shelters, closed hearings and court files. The paper observed children interviewed behind one-way mirrors and lined up for their morning doses of mind-altering drugs; we went along on arrests and heard judges, social workers and kids speak about the horror they confront.

The Times found a system that too often inflicts pain on the children it is supposed to protect. Although the system examined is in Orange county, there’s no reason to think it works any better elsewhere in California.

No child in this series is identified based on confidential information or without a release form their parent or guardian.

* THURSDAY: Abused children as young as 18 months old are mixed together in group homes designed for some of the system’s most disturbed children--though many of them do not suffer from mental problems--ignoring state laws aimed at correcting such problems.

* TODAY: Dependency court judges cross their fingers as they take families apart or put them back together, making decisions with what is sometimes scant or inaccurate information.

* SATURDAY: Social workers, some saddled with three times the number of child abuse cases they should have, often face a cruel dilemma: Should they leave children at risk of further abuse in their homes, or expose them to abuse of another kind in what everyone agrees is an overburdened system.