Bill in Michigan Senate would raise bar for removal of children

Absent court order, police could act only if risk is imminent

In April 2008, Christopher Ratte was looking forward to a fun afternoon with his 7-year-old son, Leo, at a Tigers game in Detroit.

By the end of the day, Ratte was facing a parent's nightmare when a misunderstanding over an alcoholic beverage led authorities to question Ratte's fitness as a father and place Leo into the state's foster care system.

Ratte's offense? In his haste to get to their bleacher seats, the Ann Arbor man says he mistakenly bought his son a Mike's Hard Lemonade beverage, an unfamiliar brand he says he did not know contains alcohol. Comerica Park security officers notified Detroit police.

"I couldn't believe what had happened. I felt a rising sense of panic," Claire Zimmerman, Leo's mother, said of learning she and her husband had temporarily lost custody of their son. "I had a vision of Leo in his stocking feet with disinterested strangers."

In a new attempt to balance the rights of parents while still protecting children, the state Senate now is considering a bill that would raise the hurdle authorities have to clear before they can remove a child from a home.

Under the bill, proposed by Sen. Rick Jones (R-Grand Ledge), social service workers or police could remove a child from a parent's care only if there is imminent risk of serious harm to the child or a court order.

"What we have is a situation where the child can be taken inappropriately," Jones said. "The goal is to make sure there are good standards."

Ratte and Zimmerman have been pushing for passage of such a law since the 2008 incident. Their child remained in foster care for more than a day until a judge agreed to allow the child to return to Zimmerman's care on the condition Ratte stay at a hotel. The case was dismissed a week later and Ratte was allowed to return home.

In March, Ratte and Zimmerman sued the Department of Human Services and the city of Detroit, contending the entities violated their constitutional rights to due process. That case is pending in U.S. District Court Eastern District of Michigan.

"The current law is unconstitutional because it allows the state to seize a child from his family without any showing that it's necessary to show immediate danger to the child," said Michael Steinberg, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. "Now, it can take weeks, sometimes even months, for the courts to rectify a mistake when a child is wrongfully brought into the system."

Officials at the Attorney General's Office declined to comment on the lawsuit. But Gisgie Gendreau, a DHS spokeswoman, said the department is not opposed to the concept of Jones' proposed legislation.
"The department supports the intent of the legislation and will continue to work with our House and Senate partners as it makes its way through the legislative process," she said. "In the end, we have a shared goal to provide clarity in emergency situations to ensure children are safe."

Donald Duquette, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic at the University of Michigan, said no state has a lower threshold for removing children into foster care than Michigan.

In Michigan, a child can be placed briefly in foster care without a judge's order even when the child faces no imminent serious harm. Duquette said other states require police or social service workers to show the child faces serious harm.

"To the credit of the child welfare leadership of Michigan, most were embarrassed by the (Ratte) case and recognize that the child welfare system is plagued by poor decision-making, resulting in both over-and under-intervention in families," Duquette said. "This is one of the reasons Michigan has so many children in foster care."

Currently, there are 14,700 children in the state's foster care system, according to state officials.
Because of ambiguities in the current law, Duquette said, authorities at times also have hesitated to remove a child from a harmful situation when action was warranted.

"DHS can go the wrong way either way," Jones said. "My goal is to create a good balance in Michigan."

So far, there has no been no vocal opposition to the bill, which remains in the Senate Judiciary Committee that Jones chairs. He said the Michigan Probate Judges Association has proposed some minor word changes in the bill that will be reviewed in coming days, and it should reach the Senate floor in June.

"We want to do what we can to make sure that no child again is treated like my son," Christopher Ratte said.

This was my response: 

There is a morbid sense of celebration of a legislative action to raise the bar for the removal of children because it sends a resounding cry across the nation that Michigan removed children from families for arbitrary and capricious reasoning, of which is impossible to prove in a court of law. Just ask Bill Johnson.


There is a severe need to amend the language of this bill as it expands the powers of Department of Human Services to cross over into the judicial realm, with the tanks of Maura Corrigan, of course.


For the first time in history, Michigan had its child protection workers take an oath of office, This is symbolic as it signifies that children were removed from homes, parental rights terminated and children adopted out if they were lucky with no opportunity of due process or any civil rights, the precursor model to the Emergency Financial Manager.


There is a severe need to amend the language of this bill. As these workers have taken oaths, they are now "County Agents", with the ability to perform pseudo-law enforcement activities of warrantless searches and removing a child without a court order.


Another serious issue within the context of the bill is the matter of Wayne County being the only County where the State Attorney General has jurisdiction to prosecute these cases. The bill neglects the inherent conflict of interest with the AG as it "advises and advocates" contemporaneously: it defends the fraudulent activities of these "contracted agents" which boils down to the promotion and defense the filing of false claims.