A hearing is scheduled Tuesday for California State Assembly Bill 73, which would change state law to allow Children’s dependency hearings to be open to the public—unless the court determines that in a specific instance, that opening the hearing would be injurious to the child.
This is a long needed and important piece of legislation. Only by letting the sunshine into children’s court will we cure some of its ills. Let us hope that the state legislature has the good sense to pass it.
The San Jose Mercury News explained the issue very well earlier this month:
Marking a dramatic shift in the scrutiny of how California protects its most vulnerable children, the courts overseeing the state’s vast foster care system would be open to the public for the first time since 1961, under legislation now working its way through the Assembly.
Proponents, including the state’s most influential juvenile court judges, say the exposure will improve performance by allowing outsiders to view and evaluate the state’s dependency courts, which last year decided the fate of more than 58,000 children in foster care who were removed from their homes following allegations of abuse and neglect. The change would bring California in line with a growing number of states nationwide that have opened those courts.
“In the 17 states that have prior experience in the open courts, there has been no determination of harm to kids,” said the bill’s author, Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-West Hollywood. “There has, however, been even closer scrutiny, more accountability and more attention paid to the system.”
The bill comes more than three years after the Mercury News coaxed Northern California judges to allow a reporter into closed dependency hearings. The result, a 2008 series of stories following a yearlong examination, revealed widespread dysfunction in the dependency courts — including overwhelmed judges, and court-appointed lawyers who failed to meet even basic standards of adequate representation. In some dependency courts,
judges rule on more than 100 children’s cases in a single day, and lawyers for parents and children are so harried they have only minutes to confer with clients in the hallway before life-altering hearings.
The stakes are high: Accused parents face a permanent loss of their children, while kids taken from their homes are often consigned to a revolving series of temporary homes and shelters.
Feuer said in light of the newspaper’s findings, his bill would improve the quality of justice for children and parents, whose cases typically involve neglect due to poverty and substance abuse. “All the participants in the system, from judges to clerks to social workers to advocates will be more accountable,” Feuer said.
In 2000 and 2004 similar bills were introduced, but they never made it out of committee.
This one needs to pass. No failures permitted.