Michigan Child Welfare Is About To Be Riddled With Lawsuits

Here are a few things which were omitted from the op-ed::

• For the first time in the history of Michigan, an individual can petition to be removed off the registry after 10 years.
• It took a class action lawsuit to amend the law to provide due process
• There are over 100,000 on the registry who were never notified
• Political officials did not champion the civil rights violations because the contracted CPS entities contributed heavily to the election campaigns of these politicians
• Individuals who were placed on the registry most of the time, never violated any law nor had a child abuse case.  This was done intentionally for the sole purpose of fraudulently billing Social Security programs such as Title IV-E and Medicaid to the tune of billions of dollars.
• Children who were improperly put in foster care were drugged, raped, beaten, tortured and murdered which denied removal from the registry because the children could return to the family and initiate legal proceedings against the state
• Due to the pervasive fraud, many petitions will end up in court.

Get ready, Madame Corrigan and Steve Yager.  I am coming and I will not be alone. 

Changes aim improve reliability of child abuse registry

Some time between the births of Mary’s two children, she slipped into the snares of heroin abuse. Fortunately, her mother and stepfather welcomed the three of them into their home in hopes that they could care for the children while she got the help she needed. When the situation instead deteriorated, Child Protective Services was forced to intervene. It conducted an investigation and had Mary removed from her children.

The obvious temporary solution was to have the little ones remain with their grandmother, right? Wrong. When CPS did its investigations, it found, to the grandmother’s horror, that her name appeared in the State of Michigan Central Registry for Child Abuse and Neglect. This was apparently due to an administrative confusion with a perpetrator whose name and address were similar.

Over the next several weeks, the confusion was cleared up and Mary’s mother’s name was duly expunged from the registry. The problem, however, was that CPS had to make an immediate emergency decision regarding the children’s temporary placement. As long as the grandmother’s name was on the registry, she was legally ineligible to have them in her home. And by the time of the expungement, the children were already getting accustomed to their new foster home. At this point, CPS judged, perhaps understandably, that it would not be in the children’s best interests to move them again — even back to what had been their real home.

Like every other state in the nation, Michigan has a procedure for maintaining records of child abuse and neglect. Like the vast majority of other states, Michigan authorizes the use of a statewide central child abuse registry. It is a critical component of the Michigan Child Protection Law, the goals of which include protecting children from abuse and providing supportive services to families. Accordingly, the law mandates the reporting — and recording — of individuals suspected of neglecting or abusing children.

The benefit of this system should be clear, at least in its intention. Indeed, it must be agreed that schools, churches, day care providers, and organizations overseeing foster care and adoption, must have a means to screen out candidates who might be unsafe with children.

The problem is that the recording mechanism has effectively served as a dragnet, entangling individuals whose actions were unreliably reported (possibly by mistake, or else, as part of unseemly blackmail campaigns) alongside with actual abusers. This is so because of two ill-crafted features of the law.

One is that the criteria for registry eligibility is established solely by CPS categorizations. The result is that upon completion of an internal investigation of a report of abuse or neglect — and possibly without any consultation with the police or legal community — CPS often decides that, although its findings do meet certain departmental criteria, the case lacks merit to go forward. Nonetheless, the individual’s name may be placed on the registry and remain there for the rest of his or her life.

The other is that CPS is not required to notify the individual. While it’s true that in egregious cases (as when the individual is made subject to official criminal or child protective court actions), he or she may be well aware of his or her placement on the registry, in many others, there is no notification. While the law does establish an administrative process for expungement from the registry, this is obviously a useless remedy if you don’t know your name is on it in the first place. By the time you are notified, either by a humiliating termination from your employment or, as in the case of Mary’s mother, the nightmarish family separation, it will likely be far too late to repair the damage.

Renowned Jackson-based child welfare lawyer Elizabeth Warner got it right when she stated that the child abuse registry is the state’s “biggest civil rights violation.” One suspects that the reason this has been allowed to stand unchallenged is political. After all, the community of alleged child abusers is not exactly a constituency whose rights public officials are rushing to champion.

This is why we all should celebrate Public Act 30 2014. Effective Sept. 7, this law will require that individuals placed on the registry be notified via registered or certified mail with explanations both of the reason they are being placed and the nature of the appeal process. Reasonably, it also sets a time limit within which an individual so notified must exercise his or her right to request an expungement hearing. Absent a showing of “good cause,” he or she must file this request no later than 180 days after having been notified.

It is disappointing that the new law doesn’t also address the other major flaw in the registry: that the individual’s name can still be listed by virtue of CPS investigation alone. These authors find this to an unnecessarily prophylactic protection of children at the expense of the civil rights of the individuals accused. While we urge lawmakers to enact legislation that respects these civil rights without compromising child protection, we also encourage readers to support those legislators who voted in favor of Public Act 30.

It’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Charles “Chip” Farrar is a Waterford attorney.

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