Additional data from The Bronx Defenders presented in testimony to the New York State Commission on Parental Representation indicated that of the 81 children born to clients who already had children in foster at the time they gave birth to the newborn, the office was successful in ensuring that 58 (72 percent) remained at home with their mothers and 17 (20 percent) were placed with caretakers of their mothers choosing. Article 10 Attorney for the Family Defense Practice Team. J. Juv. Judges, Improving Parents Representation in Dependency Cases: A Washington State Pilot Program Evaluation (2003), http://www.opd.wa.gov/documents/0047-2003_PRP_Evaluation.pdf (presenting results of an earlier study of pilot programs in two juvenile courts in different settings and locations). Homicide Unit Mitigation Social Worker . info@bds.org. N.Y. Unified Ct. Sys. (June 5, 2008), https://perma.cc/L2CZ-Z64X. My professional experiences in New York City include founding and co-directing the Family Defense Clinic at New York University School of Law; serving as a Founding Board Member for the Center for Family Representation; being a member of the Board of Advisors for the New York City Administration for Childrens Services from 1996 to 2013; and, most recently, since 2017, serving as a member of the New York State Commission on Parental Legal Representation. See also Jason A. Oetjen, Natl Council of Juv. Rev. Hearing (Aug. 16, 2018) (written testimony of Lisa Schreibersdorf, Exec. Caseworkers visit parents in their homes and talk to them and their service providers on a regular basis. Under New York law, the definition of [n]eglected child includes a child less than eighteen years of age (i) whose physical, mental or emotional condition has been impaired or is in imminent danger of becoming impaired as a result of the failure of his parent or other person legally responsible for his care to exercise a minimum degree of care (A) in supplying the child with adequate . Other times, the agency has been involved with the person in other ways, for example, when a young woman in foster care becomes pregnant. A non-profit public defense office in Brooklyn, New York. Within nine months, Ms. Green had completed both the anger management and parenting class, all while working full time and finishing her GED. You will receive assistance in areas impacting your life, such as immigration, housing, benefits, education and employment. Because of Ms. Barrows concern that continuing her medication during her pregnancy was dangerous for the fetus, she stopped taking the medication that was court-ordered. 94. 105163 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105163 [hereinafter Understanding the Effects of an Interdisciplinary Approach]. Child welfare cases are prosecuted along two tracks: the judicial and the administrative. Codes R. & Regs. This dedicated team works closely with parents to achieve family reunification even when their children have been in the foster system for a long time. Caseworkers are a critical player in each case. 24 The Center for Family Representation represents approximately 1,300 new clients each year in child welfare cases and between 2007 and 2018 has represented more than 7,000 parents with more than . In an effort to settle the case promptly, the defense team requested a court conference where they explained to the agency attorney and caseworker, as well as Eduardos court-appointed lawyer, what transpired since the petition was filed. Among jurisdictions other than New York City that have been national leaders and innovators in parent representation is Washington State under the leadership of Joanne Moore. Even when the defenders were unsuccessful in preventing a case from being filed in court, the defender office was already familiar with the facts of the case and had a relationship with the parent. 93. It turned out the agencys support for releasing Ms. Barrows newborn did not last one week. That is what it prepared for when it represented Ms. Anderson. Lucas A. Gerber et al., Effects of an Interdisciplinary Approach to Parental Representation in Child Welfare, 102 Child. Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS) is seeking Entry Level Attorney Candidates for the Family Defense team. Without the offices housing advocacy, Ms. Barrow would have had no home for her newborn to return to. It is here, at the exquisite level of facts, that the defender offices make their greatest difference. Without Ms. Anderson having the team working with her, she would be expected to attend this conference alone with agency caseworkers and supervisors. To provide even a sense of the breadth of this work, the Brooklyn Defender Services Family Defense Practice litigates more than forty emergency hearings each month (or about 500 a year) to keep children home or have them returned from foster care sooner than the agency is prepared to allow. If you are not a current client and need assistance, click here to get help. Even though Ms. Green had completed all required services and her visitation rights had been substantially expanded, the agency was now arguing that this new injury proved that Ms. Green lacked the capacity to raise her child safely. Mr. Sanchez was permitted to take his son to Mexico for the treatment he preferred. 6, July/Aug. Had Ms. Barrow been evicted from her apartment, she would have had to enter New York Citys public shelter system. But, as the examples in this Article show, the offices undertake significant out-of-court work that dramatically impacts the child welfare practice in New York City. Based on the allegations alone, the agency believed that Ms. Green needed to complete both anger management and a parenting class to secure the return of her daughter. 67. When the new tests were made available to the surgeon later that day, he continued to support Mr. Sanchezs plan for treating his son. After the baby was born, the agency convened the anticipated child safety conference. The teams strategy was to have two opportunities to present the judge with positive impressions of the mother even before conducting the formal hearing seeking the babys return to her custody. Each office was expected to accept approximately half of the new case assignments to represent parents charged with abuse or neglect of their children (what this Article calls child welfare cases).18 The remainder of the filings were to be assigned, as before, to panel attorneys. Browse 12 jobs at brooklyn defender services near Brooklyn, NY. L TO LIVONIA AVENUE. at 4648. Ms. Barrow was assigned a family defender office. 6. Prior to joining If/When/How, Noran began her legal career as a public defender in 2018 at Brooklyn Defender Services in the Family Defense practice representing parents and families who were impacted by the family regulation system. The parent organization employs a large number of poverty lawyers who represent clients in a broad swath of legal matters, including housing, immigration, social security benefits, and custody and divorce, among others. That was the critical step that led to the successful resolution of the case. Judges, Improving Parents Representation in Dependency Cases: A Washington State Pilot Program Evaluation. Brooklyn, NY. Nonetheless, Ms. Barrows defense team ensured that it was fully prepared for the conference, having secured letters from Ms. Barrows mental health providers laying out her treatment plan and documenting her increased engagement in services and subsequent progress in her mental health. It's time to renew your membership and keep access to free CLE, valuable publications and more. No case is filed; no court time is taken up; no court personnel are assigned to the matter. 31. at 3940 (oral testimony of Caitlin Becker, MSW, Managing Dire., Soc. 97. Because the bump did not immediately appear on Sophias head, Ms. Green could not be certain how the injury was sustained. This catch-22 problem made preventing Ms. Barrows eviction vital on multiple fronts. 81. Ct. Act 1039 (McKinney 2020). But often the agency seeks to remove newborns from the hospital in a case in which the agency has an ongoing involvement with the mother. from the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law where she was a Graduate Fellow, participated in the Defenders clinic and interned with the Capital Habeas Unit at the Federal Defenders of Philadelphia, the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem's Family Defense Practice, the Brooklyn Defenders . None of this work is possible when parents are assigned panel attorneys who work as solo practitioners on their cases. for Child.s Servs., Children in Foster Care by Borough/CD of Foster Care Placement (Dec. 31, 2019), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/2020/incarefostercare.pdf. Wholly apart from holding conferences during the time a case is being prosecuted in court, an even more critical component of the administrative process is ongoing. The family defender offices met regularly over the first decade of practice to strategize how to challenge unacceptable practices engaged in routinely by child welfare agencies. . Id. See N.Y. Cty. For most panel lawyers, if a matter is continued on the court calendar for six weeks, the lawyer is able to put the case in a folder and reopen it one or two days before the next court date. He gratefully acknowledges the outstanding research assistance provided by Sean Eagan, New York University School of Law Class of 2019, and also thanks Luke Gerber, Chris Gottlieb, Sue Jacobs, Peter Pecora, and Tim Ross for their support and the careful attention they gave to this Article. . Our Medically Complicated Team defends parents facing allegations that stem exclusively from a medical opinion. BDS provides innovative, multi-disciplinary, and client-centered criminal, family, and immigration defense, as well as civil legal services, social work support and advocacy, for tens of thousands of clients in Brooklyn every year. 42 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.04.022 [hereinafter Effects of an Interdisciplinary Approach]. We work alongside people harmed by unfair systems to fight injustice and change things for the better. New York law does not require that the agency prove how certain injuries were sustained.71 Instead, when the injuries appear to be the result of abuse, it is sufficient for the agency to allege that the child sustained an injury that most likely was the result of child abuse, creating a rebuttable presumption where the parent may present evidence either proving how the injury was sustained or why the parent should not be held legally accountable for the injury.72 When a petition alleges no direct evidence of abuse, but rather that the nature of the injury is such that it must have been the result of abuse, parents and attorneys are placed in a difficult position. In the weeks leading up to the status conference, Ms. Anderson and the team worked to ensure she was able to attend all visits with her daughter, that she completed the mental health evaluation the judge requested, and that her service providers were serving her well. Brooklyn Defender Services 177 Livingston St., 7th Fl. And by so doing, these defenders improve child welfare practice for everyone: the agencies, the court, and, of course, the families who are brought into the system. Family defense has been transformed in New York City. They also develop training materials to enrich and support the Family Defense Practice. 30+ days ago Full Time. . See, e.g., In re Philip M., 624 N.E.2d 168 (N.Y. 1993). Less than a year later, Eduardo sustained another injury in his hip. Do you need help accessing benefits or fighting eviction? Because Ms. Green could not say with certainty what caused the skull fracture, the defense team relied on an expert who analyzed the X-rays and determined that they were fully consistent with an accidental fall, thus providing the needed evidence that Sophias injury was not necessarily the result of abuse. With the positive evaluation from the court mental health clinic and letters the team gathered from Ms. Barrows service providers, the judge agreed to allow the children to return home for overnight visits, commonly a crucial step that leads to the eventual return of children to their parents custody. View info about Brooklyn Defender Services (bds.org). Ms. Shapiro oversees an interdisciplinary staff of over 90 attorneys, social workers and administrative staff and directs the litigation and policy activities of the practice. Rts., Your Rights While Pregnant, Breastfeeding, or Caregiving: A Report on the 2019 Commission Public Hearing on Pregnancy and Caregiver Discrimination 14 (2019), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/Pregnancy_Report.pdf. In response to persistent advocacy, the agency agreed to permit the visits to take place in a more hospitable environment so long as the visits were supervised by Ms. Greens mother. Instead, the agency staff members told Ms. Anderson and her team that they would not allow Ms. Anderson to leave the hospital with her baby and to prepare to go to court the next day when they would be filing a petition alleging neglect based on the allegations in the case of Ms. Andersons previous child. Noran attended and graduated from CUNY School of Law where she worked with CLEAR to counter post-9/11 policies . Need assistance with an ACS investigation or court case. The previous studies limited their focus to quantitative outcomes achieved at court or to reporting the views of stakeholders focused on the differences between the two kinds of representation made available to parents in New York City.58 This Article starts where the prior two articles left off. Then she engaged a cleaning service to address the roaches and the condition of Ms. Barrows home. 42. Hum. They then returned to their permanent residence in New York. Brooklyn Defender Services had to scramble to find a new, stronger cloud system something many smaller public defense offices and private attorneys contracted for public defense work lack the capacity to do. When parents are unrepresented at these conferences, the plans are more likely to be boilerplate, requiring parents to do things of little value. We demand accountability from government institutions in court and work to reduce the government's reliance on harmful legal systems to address problems caused by poverty and racism. The practice was recently the focus of a critical report issued by the New York City Commission on Human Rights. Once Ms. Barrow was living in an apartment too small for her children to live in with her, a new barrier to the childrens return would be to secure suitable housing, which would certainly extend the childrens stay in foster care. In fiscal year 2018, the office was assigned to represent more than 1,500 parents with approximately 3,500 children.26 The Neighborhood Defender Service has represented over 1,600 parents between 2014 and 2017.27, This arrangement, assigning a portion of new filings to a family defender law office and the remainder to panel lawyers, created an opportunity to study which kind of representation works best. For most parents, this conference, occurring at one of the most emotionally laden moments of their lives, and which will fatefully determine whether they will be allowed to bring their child home with them from the hospital, is something they endure alone without representation or support. The essence of the kind of representation offered by the three offices that were part of the study (as well as the template for the work done by the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, the fourth office doing this work in New York City) is that clients receive a team of advocates, commonly including an attorney, a social worker, and a parent advocate. Senior . The agency agreed to settle the case and allow Sophia to be returned to her care if Ms. Green accepted responsibility for the original injury sustained by her daughter (as an act of neglect instead of abuse) with a plan to end entirely supervision of the case in six months if nothing untoward happened during that time. Brooklyn Defender Services is a company located in Brooklyn, NY, United States. The agency then filed a neglect petition in family court charging Mr. Sanchez with failing to provide his son with medically necessary treatment and seeking an order that the agency be granted permission to consent to the required surgery. In this sense, family defenders make child welfare work better. 89. 65. For current information on these offices, see Family Defense Practice, Bronx Defenders, https://www.bronxdefenders.org/our-work/family-defense-practice/ (last visited Oct. 18, 2020); Family Defense, Brooklyn Defender Serv., http://bds.org/practice/family-defense/ (last visited Oct. 18, 2020); Family Defense Teams, Ctr. In the agency process side of the case, parents are obliged to meet with caseworkers, supervisors, and other employees of the agency responsible for monitoring the parents actions throughout the life of the case. Rev. We serve the Brooklyn community by providing individual services to thousands of people each year, holding clinics and educational programs in our community office and online, and supporting fellow community organizations. . Moreover, in my experience, judges rarely overrule (or reconsider) the agencys assessment of what services are appropriate. & Fam. The family defender system characterized by the work performed by the New York City offices is a significant contribution to the child welfare field. for Family Representation, at 1). Brooklyn Defender Services is part of the Law Firms & Legal Services industry, and located in New York, United States. One might reasonably suggest they are much more important than what happens in the courtroom itself. Even these remarkable efforts would have been insufficient. 88. In every example, the key to this success is the extraordinary amount of out-of-court time spent on each case and the proactivity engaged in by the defense team.85, The critical characteristics of each of the cases described in the previous section concern the defender teams proactive planning, anticipating next steps, and developing a plan for success calculated to persuade either the agency caseworkers investigating the case or the court. But among the most important reforms needed in child welfare once investigations into families are started is to offer the family the services of a committed preventive and reunification service, precisely what the family defenders in New York are. Then the team strategically planned with Ms. Barrow how to share the information with the agency and the court. Unfortunately, a complication temporarily derailed the effort just when the team was hopeful for a satisfactory resolution of the visitation motion and the underlying petition itself. 85. They communicate frequently with caseworkers to rearrange meetings and services, to plan for the next steps, and for many other reasons. However, the defense team knew that having this conference in front of the judge provided another advocacy opportunity to build on the judges favorable impression of Ms. Anderson. Child welfare has long been in search of evidence-based programs designed to keep children safely in their own homes. Unless otherwise noted, the discussion in this Article concerning the history and practice of parental representation in New York City is based on my own experience and knowledge from almost fifty years of working in this area as a litigator, clinical professor, scholar, policy advocate, and board member and advisor for government agencies and nonprofit organizations. Full-time. 18. As the field continues to improve, all parents should be given lawyers working in an interdisciplinary practice. Law 409-e(2) (McKinney 2020) (mandating preparation of case plans by the social services district in active consultation with the childs parent or guardian).
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