When the conference took place one day after the babys birth, the defense teams social worker and parent advocate attended with Ms. Barrow. This is among the distinguishing characteristics of this kind of daily defense advocacy these offices employ. The defender offices employ a wide range of professionals on each clients legal team, including social workers, parent advocates, interpreters, specialized attorneys, experts, and investigators. In 2013, the Legal Services NYC contract ended, and the South Brooklyn Services Office that was handling the Brooklyn Family Court caseload merged with Brooklyn Defender Services, a preeminent public interest law office with contracts to represent indigent defendants in criminal cases as well as immigration and other matters. Although the agency does not permit lawyers to attend these conferences, it does allow parents to bring anyone else to be present. Brooklyn, NY. Ms. Green was a single parent of an eight-month-old daughter, Sophia. If you are arrested, face deportation, or your children are threatened with the foster system, you can rely on us to fight for you. 347-592-2500. It is impossible to wholly disentangle the many interrelated factors that affect how many children are in foster care at any given time, but there is little doubt the outstanding work of the family defenders, both in the courtroom and at high-level policy meetings, has contributed to the continued shrinking of New York Citys foster care population. Easily apply. Dir., Brooklyn Defender Serv. This program, known as City FHEPS, is administered by New York Citys Human Resources Administration. Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS) represents over 35,000 clients in criminal, family, immigration and civil cases annually. Even these remarkable efforts would have been insufficient. 68. The family defender system characterized by the work performed by the New York City offices is a significant contribution to the child welfare field. Compare Child Welfare Watch, Tough Decisions: Dealing with Domestic Violence 15 (2003), https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53ee4f0be4b015b9c3690d84/t/54138debe4b037d2d5803f6b/1410567659179/CWW-vol9.pdf [https://perma.cc/P79M-8T6A], with N.Y.C. They then returned to their permanent residence in New York. Once these favorable reports were introduced, the team focused on settling the case instead of undergoing a highly contested trial focused on whether the original injury was sustained as a result of an accident. Part IV, the heart of the Article, describes accounts of actual cases undertaken by this new breed of family defenders, to help explain their superior ability to achieve the objectives of keeping children safely with their families. See Family Defense, NDS: The Power of Pub. . When these errors are not revealed, the official record supports the erroneous conclusion that a child was removed from a parents home for a substantial reason. These plans are routinely included in the reports agencies are required to submit every six months whenever children remain in foster care. The Brooklyn Officethe Brooklyn Family Defense Projectwas a project of the largest civil legal services organization in New York City, Legal Services for New York, now Legal Services NYC. They specify the steps an agency must undertake to reunify a family and the tasks the parent must perform as the condition for keeping or regaining custody of his or her child. Generally, family court judges look most favorably upon parents who attend visits frequently and are able to work with the foster care agency to gradually increase the independence of visits from those supervised at the foster care agency to unsupervised overnight visits in the home of the parent. In 1972, New Yorks highest court ruled that parents have a constitutional right to counsel in child welfare proceedings.7 In 1975, the legislature codified the ruling and created a statutory right to counsel for indigent parents in child welfare proceedings.8 The legislation delegated authority for funding and managing parental representation to the counties.9. We push for equitable and humane policies by advocating for better laws, filing systemic litigation and educating the public. This is the third in a series of articles discussing the results of child welfare cases in which parents in New York City were represented by a new form of legal services provision: family defender offices whose staff include social workers, parent advocates, and lawyers. The offices social work team, along with the Brooklyn Defender Services immigration practitioners, have developed close relationships with community-based programs serving New Yorks immigrant communities and [are] able to connect clients to culturally competent service providers and access to services in their native language. Schreibersdorf & Shapiro written testimony, supra note 24, at 9. 10. When this happened, not only did she visit her children regularly, her defense team succeeded in persuading the judge (over the agencys objection) to permit unsupervised visits, commonly a necessary interim stage before courts will return children to a parents custody. As the field continues to improve, all parents should be given lawyers working in an interdisciplinary practice. These factors included demographic characteristics of parents and children, family size, severity of allegations and types of allegations, judge, court borough, and prior involvement with the child welfare system. They communicate frequently with caseworkers to rearrange meetings and services, to plan for the next steps, and for many other reasons. Ketteringham & Becker written testimony, supra note 26, at 89. The teams strategy was to have two opportunities to present the judge with positive impressions of the mother even before conducting the formal hearing seeking the babys return to her custody. It requested that Ms. Green participate in dyadic therapy with Sophia, in which a licensed therapist participates in visits between parents and children to develop a healthy attached relationship. FDP represents over 4,000 parents and caretakers each year in Abuse and Neglect and related cases in Brooklyn Family Court. After waiting two additional months, the team filed a motion for enhanced, unsupervised visits, arguing that the agencys refusal to grant unsupervised visits was arbitrary and damaging to the long-term purpose of child protection. Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS) is seeking Entry Level Attorney Candidates for the Family Defense team. See also N.Y. Fam. These criminal justiceoriented officials gave the role of representing parents in child welfare cases to solo practitioners from an assigned panel of available lawyers.10 These lawyers, known colloquially as panel lawyers, were already being used to represent parties eligible for court-assigned counsel in juvenile delinquency proceedings, among a number of other specialized areas of the law.11 These lawyers generally did not work in an interdisciplinary way. 12. 99. 86. We demand accountability from government institutions in court and work to reduce the government's reliance on harmful legal systems to address problems caused by poverty and racism. N.Y. Unified Ct. Sys. It is used whenever the office is representing a mother who becomes pregnant during the course of the case, whether she already is court-involved or not. Her child was placed in foster care. Panel lawyers may be assigned to represent adult parties in a large range of other types of family court cases, including custody and visitation disputes, paternity proceedings, child support contempt proceedings, and cases involving domestic violence, in which the represented party might be the accused batterer or the alleged victim. 94. The examining doctors asked Ms. Greens mother what may have happened to Sophia and her mother was unable to provide them with a satisfactory answer. 41. Hearing (Aug. 16, 2018) (written testimony of Emma S. Ketteringham & Caitlin Becker, at 2) [hereinafter Ketteringham & Becker written testimony]. She asked her mother to take Sophia to see a doctor because Ms. Green had to be at work. Federal law requires states to have written case plans for every child in care in order to ensure that an appropriate long-term plan is identified for each foster child. See also id. 30+ days ago Full Time. Id. Because of Ms. Barrows concern that continuing her medication during her pregnancy was dangerous for the fetus, she stopped taking the medication that was court-ordered. After consulting with an orthopedic surgeon at the hospital, Mr. Sanchez opted for a nonsurgical option to be secured in Mexico. For an excellent recent article describing the sophisticated family defense practice The Bronx Defenders has established when representing parents charged with child abuse based on unexplained serious injuries sustained by children, see Jessica Horan-Block & Elizabeth Tuttle Newman, Accidents Happen: Exposing Fallacies in Child Protection Abuse Cases and Reuniting Families Through Aggressive Litigation, 22 CUNY L. Rev. BDS provides innovative, multi-disciplinary, and client-centered criminal, family, and immigration defense, as well as civil legal services, social work support and advocacy, for tens of thousands of clients in Brooklyn every year. If I hadnt had the support of BDS, I wouldnt have been able to stop ACS from removing my kids. 718-564-6290. for Child.s Servs., Children in Foster Care by Borough/CD of Foster Care Placement, /content/aba-cms-dotorg/en/groups/family_law/publications/family-law-quarterly/volume-54/issue-1/how-family-defender-offices-new-york-city-are-able-safely-reduce-time-children-spend-foster-care, Preserving Families: Parent Representation, Immigration Reform, and LGBTQ+ Rights, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.04.022, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105163, http://ww2.nycourts.gov/sites/default/files/document/files/2019-02/PLR_Commission-Report.pdf, https://www.bronxdefenders.org/our-work/family-defense-practice/, https://www.cfrny.org/our-work/team-model/, https://neighborhooddefender.org/services/family-defense/, http://bds.org/wp-content/uploads/2018.08.16-BDS-testimony-to-the-Commission-on-Parental-Representation-FINAL.pdf, http://www.opd.wa.gov/documents/0047-2003_PRP_Evaluation.pdf, https://cbexpress.acf.hhs.gov/index.cfm?event=website.viewArticles&issueid=208ionid=2&articleid=5378, https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/child_law/project-areas/parentrepresentation/, https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/CITYFEPS/CITYFEPS-fact-sheet.pdf, https://www1.nyc.gov/site/acs/child-welfare/will-acs-take-my-child.page, https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/Pregnancy_Report.pdf, nycourts.gov/ip/Parental-Legal-Rep/PDFs/NYCPublicHearing9-27-18_F.pdf, https://caseyfamilypro-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/media/SF_Quality-parent-representation_fnl.pdf, https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/child_law/resources/child_law_practiceonline/january---december-2019/providing-parents-multidisciplinary-legal-representation-signifi/, http://www.nycourts.gov/ip/Parental-Legal-Rep/PDFs/InterimReport-FINAL.pdf, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53ee4f0be4b015b9c3690d84/t/54138debe4b037d2d5803f6b/1410567659179/CWW-vol9.pdf, https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/2020/incarefostercare.pdf. Add to those situations the countless cases where, even though the out-of-court advocacy failed to dissuade the agency from filing a petition, the agency was persuaded not to seek a removal of the child. at 14. Even though Ms. Green had completed all required services and her visitation rights had been substantially expanded, the agency was now arguing that this new injury proved that Ms. Green lacked the capacity to raise her child safely. & Fam. 18. See Paredes v. City of New York, No. for Family Representation, at 1). 14. . Because the new offices ethical duty is to strive to accomplish their clients objectives, and because almost all of their clients want to keep or regain custody of their children as quickly as possible, family defender offices are in the business of trying to achieve the identical objective everyone else in the child welfare field has: keeping children safely with their families and avoiding the needless placement of children into foster care.95, The interdisciplinary approach is recognized as a best practice.96 In 2019, a panel commissioned by Judge Janet DiFiore, the chief judge of the Court of Appeals in New York, recommended an expansion of interdisciplinary law offices from New York City throughout the state of New York due to their success.97, The impact created by high-level law offices devoted to representing parents in child welfare cases goes well beyond the statistics from the study. Effects of an Interdisciplinary Approach, supra note 1, at 4546. Brooklyn, NY, US. 63. The true meaning of the findings in the quantitative study that these offices secure the return of children to their families significantly sooner than would happen without them is that child welfare practice without the kind of oversight accomplished by the offices wrongfully separates children from families in a significant percentage of cases. Codes R. & Regs. Def., https://neighborhooddefender.org/services/family-defense/ (last visited Sept. 19, 2020). make applications for investigators or other experts where appropriate . The notes of the interviews are on file with the author. Criminal Defense Practice Social Worker. 69. 30+ days ago. Consider this: In 2003, there were over 28,000 children in foster care in New York City; at the end of 2019, there were approximately 7,800.99. Res. Understanding the Effects of an Interdisciplinary Approach, supra note 4, at 7. . Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS) is seeking Experienced Attorney's for the Criminal Practice's legal team. Change 539, 559 (2017). 4. Of those children who could not be returned to their families, 40 percent more children ended up with a permanent disposition of guardianship when their parents had multidisciplinary representation than children whose parents were represented by panel lawyers.41, The study concluded that family defender office representation also saves an enormous amount of money that would otherwise have been spent on children remaining unnecessarily in foster care.42 The study found that full implementation of a multidisciplinary representation model in New York City would reduce the foster care population by 472,000 bed days per year and annually reduce foster care costs by $40 million as compared with exclusive reliance on panel lawyers.43, The qualitative findings in the study were equally impressive.44 Not only did former clients praise the kind of representation and support they received from the new offices, the professionals working in the court system also indicated significant satisfaction with the new kind of representation the offices provide.45 Of the three categories of professionals interviewed in the qualitative study, two were unequivocally positive in describing the important contributions the new offices had on practice in the courts.46 These groups were the judges and court attorneys who serve as the judges trial-level law clerks and childrens lawyers employed by The Legal Aid Society who appear in most child welfare cases as the attorney for the child.47 The third group, the lawyers prosecuting the cases, also expressed very positive things about the contributions made by the new offices but, perhaps expectedly, some attorneys in this group also complained that lawyers in these offices were too litigious and fought too hard on cases that did not deserve it.48, The study found that the professionals in the court system regarded the critical tools the family defender offices introduced into the practice as an insistence that the court conduct evidentiary hearings when the agency seeks a court order that children be placed into foster care, combined with filing motions to ensure that judges oversee case planning decisions promptly.49 Court stakeholders unanimously described a dramatic increase in motion practice, most commonly brought to challenge the agencys request to remove children from their families, to seek the return of children home, and to request other specific orders from judges.50 The study concluded that the increased use of these motions played a significant role in the offices success in securing court orders returning children to their families.51 Using each court appearance to advance the parents case, filing motions to seek better services or eliminate needless ones, and asking for more visits and for the return of children from foster care promptly are leading characteristics of the family defender office model.52, The qualitative study also found that the stakeholders identified out-of-court advocacy undertaken to be a significant, and distinctive, characteristic of the family defender offices.53 This includes accompanying clients to out-of-court case conferences held at the childcare agencies.54 Finally, the qualitative study found that the multidisciplinary offices achieve distinctive results in part because they attend much better to their clients well-being than the panel lawyers do throughout the time the case is active in court.55 The study found that the family defender offices place a premium on attending to the emotional well-being of their clients.56 Emotional supports that help parents believe in their abilities are crucial, since the outcomes of many cases depend on the parents bearing up well during the process, engaging in required services, maintaining a regular visitation schedule with their children when they are in foster care, and otherwise satisfying the requirements of service plans.57. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of these agency meetings. For these and many more questions, we may be able to help, even if you are not a Brooklyn Defenders client. The case examples described in the previous section were provided to give the reader some sense of how the defender offices are able to achieve dramatically better results for their clients as compared with the panel members assigned to represent parents. Ketteringham & Becker written testimony, supra note 26, at 8 (emphasis in original). Instead, the agency has conducted the conferences within a day or two after a newborns birth, at a time when the mother is not in a position to participate effectively. Her defense team at first consisted of a family court lawyer and a social worker. The teams lawyer then filed a motion for an immediate court hearing to determine whether removal was necessary to protect the childs safety. The active family defender community cannot take full credit for this this dramatic shrinking of the foster care population. In those cases, the parent would not have had anyone to attend the child safety conference with her at the hospital. 26 days ago. This, in turn, most commonly means focusing on how parents have changed since the case began. 30+ days ago Full Time. Each office was expected to accept approximately half of the new case assignments to represent parents charged with abuse or neglect of their children (what this Article calls child welfare cases).18 The remainder of the filings were to be assigned, as before, to panel attorneys. He gratefully acknowledges the outstanding research assistance provided by Sean Eagan, New York University School of Law Class of 2019, and also thanks Luke Gerber, Chris Gottlieb, Sue Jacobs, Peter Pecora, and Tim Ross for their support and the careful attention they gave to this Article. Had Ms. Barrow been evicted from her apartment, she would have had to enter New York Citys public shelter system. See N.Y. Fam. Our Medically Complicated Team defends parents facing allegations that stem exclusively from a medical opinion. It added over the years an immigration practice and, in 2007, with this new contract, a family defense practice as well. at 23 n.179. L TO LIVONIA AVENUE. See Will ACS Take My Child?, N.Y.C. In late 2016, Ms. Barrow, the parent of a ten-year-old child and a one-year-old child, was charged in family court with neglect resulting from her struggle to manage the challenges of mental illness and a cognitive disability.68 The petition was filed shortly after she was discharged from a short-term hospitalization for mental health treatment. In those situations, there is no way to give credit to the kind of legal representation the parent was given when comparing outcomes of cases between those handled by panel lawyers and multidisciplinary offices. Hum. Do you need help accessing benefits or fighting eviction? Under New York law, the definition of [n]eglected child includes a child less than eighteen years of age (i) whose physical, mental or emotional condition has been impaired or is in imminent danger of becoming impaired as a result of the failure of his parent or other person legally responsible for his care to exercise a minimum degree of care (A) in supplying the child with adequate . Additional data from The Bronx Defenders presented in testimony to the New York State Commission on Parental Representation indicated that of the 81 children born to clients who already had children in foster at the time they gave birth to the newborn, the office was successful in ensuring that 58 (72 percent) remained at home with their mothers and 17 (20 percent) were placed with caretakers of their mothers choosing. Effects of an Interdisciplinary Approach, supra note 1, at 45. Commn on Parental Legal Representation Pub. This Article is dedicated to the outstanding professionals who work in the family defense practices at the Bronx Defenders, the Brooklyn Defender Services, the Center for Family Representation, and the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. Popular Searches Brooklyn Defender Services Bds Brooklyn Defender Services, Family Defense Practice Main Industry Manufacturing, Test & Measurement Equipment Website www.bfdp.org Contact Information Headquarters 195 Montague St Fl 5, Brooklyn, New York, 11201, United States (347) 592-2500 Brooklyn Defender Services, Family Defense Practice Profile and History Ms. Anderson began therapy that was designed to address her history of physical and sexual abuse in foster care and her previous relationship, helping her to understand how those experiences had shaped her adult life and her approach to parenting. They provide the opportunity to enter a field with an ambitious social justice vision.62. 19, 1989). Part II briefly describes the findings in the quantitative analysis. This may contribute to unwarranted requests by the agency for the hospital to place a social hold on the baby, preventing the mother from taking the baby home.78 This practice is opposed by the family defenders in New York as causing inappropriate disruption of parentinfant bonding and imposing unnecessary stress and anxiety on parents and families at a precious moment in their lives, often resulting in the needless and wrongful separation of children from their families.79.