As retired Washington Supreme Court Justice Bobbe J. Bridge put it, “Welcome to the complex, heart-wrenching, ever-evolving world of child welfare” — namely dependency court at the Youth Services Center. When Judge Bruce Hilyer made his first tour of Juvenile Court after being elected King County Superior Court presiding judge last year, he commented that it looked exactly like it did in 1980 when he did his juvenile court rotation as a deputy prosecuting attorney. Things are now changing.
A dependency case usually begins when a social worker from the Department of Social and Health Services files a dependency petition, alleging that a child in the case is abused, neglected, abandoned or has no parent, guardian or custodian capable of care such that the child is in danger of substantial damage to the child’s psychological or physical development.1 If the child has been removed from the parent by law enforcement or Child Protective Services or by ex parte court order, there must be a shelter care hearing before a judge or commissioner within 72 hours of removal.
Here come the lawyers. Every parent who is a respondent in a dependency case is entitled to counsel.2 The King County Office of Public Defense (OPD) assigns counsel to indigent parents. Most of the attorneys who represent parents work for one of the non-profit public defense agencies.3 A handful of private lawyers handle cases where the agencies all have conflicts of interest or where the agencies have too much business to handle the case quickly.
Children more than 12 years old also get lawyers.4 Children less than 12 are assigned a volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA), acting as a guardian ad litem,5 who is also represented by a lawyer; CASA counsel are employed by the Superior Court. The DSHS social worker is represented by an assistant attorney general.
There are numerous pre-trial hearings proceeding toward a dependency fact-finding hearing, which, if contested, is heard by a Superior Court judge, either at Juvenile Court or Unified Family Court downtown or in Kent. If a judge finds by a preponderance of evidence that a child is dependent, then a disposition hearing follows, at which the court orders the parents to engage in services, often provided or guided by DSHS, designed to correct parental deficiencies. Except where there are aggravated circumstances,6 DSHS is required, as a condition of federal funding, to apply reasonable efforts to assist parents in correcting the deficiencies that were determined by the court in order to reunite the family.
Until recently, King County assigned all dependency pre-trial and post-trial hearings to a court commissioner sitting in the Youth Services Center in Seattle or the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent. The commissioners are responsible for managing hundreds of cases, working with families toward the preferred goal of reunification or, if that is deemed impossible, toward some other permanent plan, including termination of parental rights and adoption, guardianship, third-party custody or, if a youth is approaching majority, independent living.
These pre- and post-dependency hearings, called permanency planning hearings and dependency review hearings, are crucial in reaching the goal of reunification. However, assigning hundreds of cases to judicial officers results in a lack of ownership.
Many families need more monitoring and more judicial encouragement than a preposterously overworked commissioner can provide. Sometimes, DSHS needs to be ordered to provide more services to both the parents and the children. The court is directly involved in placement of children who were removed from the home, often choosing between available relatives, friends of the family and foster parents. The court also monitors visitation.
Again, the huge caseloads that commissioners handle make these decisions even more difficult. Federal funding legislation requires that hearings be held every six months; many families desperately need more frequent judicial oversight. Yet the caseloads of commissioners are so large that it is rarely possible to set earlier hearings.
Partly as a result of the caseload crunch, children languish too long in foster care. With the assistance and encouragement of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges Model Courts program and the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts, judges, dependency lawyers, juvenile and family court staff made two site visits to Pima County, Arizona, which indeed has a model dependency court system.
Pima County — home to Tucson — has 1 million residents. King County has 1.9 million residents. Pima County assigns 14 judicial officers to juvenile court (dependency and offender). King County assigns 10 judicial officers to juvenile court (dependency, offender, At-Risk Youth,7 Child In Need of Services8 and truancy).9 Pima County assigns a dependency case to a judge or court commissioner to manage from filing through reunification and dismissal or through termination of parental rights and adoption or other permanent plan.
It is truly a one-family/one-judge system. The judge knows his or her families, develops a working relationship with the children, parents and social workers, and can set hearings as needed rather than merely to meet federal and state statutory guidelines. While the reunification rate in Pima County is not much better than in King County, the reunification speed is much better.
So, we have begun a pilot project toward the goal of assigning dependency cases to five juvenile court judges and two commissioners. The one-family/one-judge pilot consists of 20 percent of the Seattle dependency cases being assigned to a single judge, thus reducing the commissioners’ caseload. While it is too soon to ascertain statistically whether reunification rates or speed have improved, there is no doubt that the pilot judge’s ownership of families has changed the relationship between the court, the parents and the children.
A significant and serious problem, however, is that there are not enough lawyers who do dependency work to avoid the gridlock resulting from lawyers having to be in too many places at one time. As we move toward implementation of the one-family/one-judge project, efficiencies will follow as the goal is to avoid having dependency hearings, as distinct from trials, in more than one place at a time. We still need more lawyers.
Of course, representing abused, neglected and abandoned children is rewarding. So is representing the parents, although the rewards are often not so evident. Most of these parents with children in the dependency system are working hard to overcome mental illness, addiction, a history of domestic violence and other disabilities and parental deficiencies. Some need to learn how to raise children with special needs.
They all need legal assistance. There is a lot of social work in representing parents and children, but there is also the ability to gain lots of trial practice. Dependency and termination trials are the real thing, albeit to the bench. The rules of evidence apply.
So, here’s the deal: The court, along with the King County Office of Public Defense and the University of Washington School of Law Court Improvement Training Academy,10 is offering 15 free, continuing legal education hours to train lawyers to handle dependency cases. In exchange for the free CLE credits, we ask that each lawyer commit to taking three dependency cases over the year following completion of the training and handle all hearings and trial on those cases, which may last for one year or more, at the OPD rate, which, regretfully, is $45 per hour, about the same rate lawyers were paid when Presiding Judge Hilyer had his first run through Juvenile Court in 1980.
Depending upon the number of lawyers who sign up, there is no guarantee that each lawyer will be assigned three cases. Before being assigned cases, lawyers will need to meet OPD minimum requirements, including liability insurance,11 and become members of the OPD assigned-counsel panel.
If you are interested in helping these families through difficult, heart-wrenching times, earning a full year of CLE credits (yes, we’ll do ethics as well) and getting some good courtroom and trial practice, send your résumé and a letter of interest and commitment to:
Judge Ronald Kessler
1211 E. Alder Street
Seattle, WA 98112
1 RCW § 13.34.030(5)(a).
2 RCW § 13.34.090(2), JuCR 9.2(c)(1).
3 The Defender Association, Associated Counsel for the Accused, Northwest Defender Association and Society for Counsel Representing Accused Persons.
4 RCW § 13.34.100(6).
5 RCW § 13.34.030(c)(8).
6 RCW § 13.34.132(4).
7 RCW §§ 13.34.030(3), .191.
8 RCW §§ 13.32A.030(5), .130, .140.
9 Ch. 28A.225 RCW.
10 http://www.uwcita.org/.
11 Requirements are at http://www.kingcounty.gov/courts/OPD/Partners/~/media/courts/OPD/documents/AssignedCounselPolicies.ashx.
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