February 19, 2001
A Daily Disaster for Children
By JODY ADAMS
In its ability to remove children from their parents, the state has extraordinary power. Because of the implications for the fundamental rights of families, New York State law requires that when a child is removed involuntarily, there must be an immediate review by a Family Court judge. Both parents and children must have legal representation, and if they are poor, the court must appoint lawyers for them. In the Family Court in New York City, most of these lawyers are drawn from the Assigned Counsel Panel, a group of lawyers that do this work as a major part of their practices.
These panel lawyers are paid $40 an hour for work in court and $25 for each hour worked outside court. These fees, set by the State Legislature, have not changed since 1986, and after years of unsuccessful appeals for a pay increase, the lawyers are protesting. Panel attorneys in most of the city are refusing to accept new cases.
These lawyers represent most of the parents and many of the children in Family Court in New York City. They have a legitimate grievance that should be addressed. In the meantime, their action has provoked an acute emergency in the city's Family Court.
For a month, there have been no lawyers to appoint. So chaos and suffering reign in the courtroom. Small children remain in foster care; adolescents remain in pretrial detention, their cases unreviewed past the statutory deadline, while their mothers weep in court. But only if they're poor.
Last week, a wheelchair-bound 11- year-old girl with cerebral palsy sat at Laight Street (the processing office where children await foster home placements) for seven days and nights. Her indigent grandmother, from whose home she had been removed, had no assigned attorney, so a hearing that might have sped the case up was delayed. (Because she was disabled, she needed a specialized placement.) The grandmother was unable to reach a caseworker to arrange a visit, so these two, who had never been separated since the girl's birth, had no contact with each other.
The Family Court cases that involve the involuntary separation of children and parents are in two broad categories: juvenile delinquency, in which children under 16 are accused of criminal acts, and abuse and neglect, in which children are said to be abused or neglected due to the actions or inaction of their parents.
In Family Court, cases of depraved, intentional abuse of children are not routine. The bulk of the abuse and neglect cases come about because of universal human afflictions: alcoholism and drug abuse, domestic anger and strife, mental illness. And among the juvenile delinquency cases, many grow out of the typical defiance and poor judgment of adolescence.
Some of our cases — involving both abuse and delinquency — affect families of means who have heard the knock of the police or Social Services workers at the door. Because these families can pay their own lawyers, prominent members of the bar often appear in Family Court, exerting all of their firms' best efforts to protect the interests of their clients' children. Poor children and parents should also have reliable access to vigorous representation.
Chief Judge Judith Kaye and Gov. George Pataki have recognized the need to raise assigned counsel fees. Judge Kaye has long warned that the current crisis was coming, and for the past three years, she has proposed a $75 hourly fee, a figure that is now gaining wide acceptance. Governor Pataki has appointed a task force to devise long-term solutions.
In the meantime, the lack of lawyers for poor children and parents is no abstraction; it is a daily disaster in the lives of many of New York City's children. I invite members of the Legislature, leaders of the bar, academics, advocates for children and striking attorneys to spend a day in the courtroom, to see the human consequences of this impasse.
Jody Adams is a Manhattan Family Court judge.
