Family Rights and Child Abuse News

Child removed from foster home, taken to hospital

Eight children between the ages of 1 and 15 have been removed from a Sandy home after one of them, a foster child, was found in critical condition by emergency workers.

Foster parents Thelma and William Beaver have not been charged with a crime. Thelma Beaver told responders that the girl had fallen and hit her head on a coffee table the day before, said Joel Manly, spokesman for the Clackamas County Sheriff's department. The child was flown by life flight to Doernbecher Children's Hospital in Portla.

The Daily News Online (OR)

December 10, 2004

Woman finds she wasn't given up at age 2 for adoption

by Caitlin Cleary

When Darlene Jones was growing up in Pittsburgh, she was told that her mother gave her away when she was a baby to Mose and Marilee Minifield, the couple who raised her along with their three other foster and adopted children.

Jones wouldn't know her birth mother's version of events for many years -- that she had not been given away, but had been spirited off as a baby and taken to Pittsburgh. But over the years, suspicions took root. Once or twice, she spied a different name on her birth certificate and on a driver's license learner's permit, before Marilee Minifield whisked them out of sight. The Minifields would ask her not to write their Pittsburgh return address on Christmas cards to an aunt and uncle in Arkansas, saying they didn't want anybody to find them.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

January 9, 2005

Social worker's attitude angers clients

by Joel Rutchick

While Latisha Smith waited for a critical child-custody hearing to begin in Juvenile Court last spring, a woman she didn't know approached her with some advice.

Donna Butler, the county social worker who had taken Smith's children away, was someone to be wary of, the woman told her: Butler was known for mistreating people and beating them down. Had the warning come from a lawyer with an ax to grind, or from another mother trying to regain custody of her children, it might have been easier to ignore.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer (OH)

January 16, 2005

Dupuy v. Samuels

Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law

No. 97 C 4199 (N.D. Ill. Feb. 3, 2005); Clearinghouse Number: 51679 Seventh Circuit Rules that Child Care Workers Have Liberty Interest in Employment, Upholds Credible Evidence Standard for "Indicated" Child Abuse Reports.

povertylaw.org

February 3, 2005

Fight brewing over county plan to open hearings in juvenile court

by Emily Fancher and Amy Yarbrough

Alegal clash that could force open juvenile court proceedings is about to take place in San Mateo County - where a judge will decide whether secrecy or openness is the best way to protect abused children.

If open court advocates win, this county will become the state's first to routinely allow public access to juvenile dependency hearings, and a trend toward openness could move through the state's courtrooms. But a fierce opposition to openness has arisen, promising to show that openness is the worst thing that could happen to abused children. If Diaz rules against them, they threaten to plug higher courts with appeals.

San Mateo County Times

February 26, 2005