 
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Tuesday, September 25, 2001
By Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In Pennsylvania's secret juvenile courts, this is how justice can work:
These incidents were discovered because of flukes -- class-action lawsuits, open appeals hearings and scrutiny by privileged court observers.
What Pennsylvania residents don't know is what else goes on behind closed doors. Advocates of open court believe the public should know, arguing that admitting the public to hearings is the only way to expose improper practices and reveal the consequences of inadequate funding for both the court and the child welfare system.
"It's long overdue," says Ira M. Schwartz, provost of Temple University, of open juvenile court.
Schwartz, who was dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work and director of its Center for the Study of Youth Policy until earlier this month, adds, "If the media were let in and saw what was going on and how these cases were handled and the quality of personnel and practice, it would do more to reform the system than anything else."
From bad to worse
A decade ago, a nonprofit group in Philadelphia managed to get a free pass to enter the secret world of juvenile court.
Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth observed hundreds of cases, then wrote a critical report. The group found short hearings and long delays.
In response, court officials ripped up the free pass.
The group couldn't get back in for a decade. Then, in 1999, it got a new pass.
This time, it found the situation worse.
Cases on which judges spent five minutes or less had risen to nearly half -- 48 percent. Only 9 percent of teens charged with crimes got hearings lasting 15 minutes or more.
Another group slammed the court in a report in February. A coalition of Philadelphia nonprofit organizations says too few judges and inadequate pay for lawyers mean entire lists of abuse and neglect cases are postponed without notice. Some families wait eight hours, only to be sent away with new court dates, when they will return and wait again.
"Neither the bar nor the judiciary would tolerate substantial delays, inadequate lawyer practice and questionable satisfaction of due-process protections in any other area of practice," the report says.
But it has continued for decades behind closed doors in juvenile court.
Confidentiality was conceived to protect the children, but, Schwartz says, "over the years, it has essentially come to mean more protecting the system and the people working in the system than the children."
It certainly protects those lawyers in Philadelphia who conduct hearings without judges. There's no way, Schwartz says, that they'd take such a risk if they thought for a second that a journalist would walk in on them and write about it.
A brief peek inside
A Pittsburgh organization similar to the one in Philadelphia decided that community leaders needed to see just how shabby Allegheny County's juvenile court was and just how shabbily many children and families were treated there.
Child Watch of Pittsburgh got permission from juvenile court to parade politicians, business leaders and foundation executives through the dreary, hot, crowded hallways and courtrooms of the old juvenile court building in Oakland.
Seeing was disbelieving. The community leaders granted that peek were shocked, says Child Watch coordinator Vicki Sirockman. And that was persuasive in winning their support for a new court building, hearing officers to relieve overburdened judges and snacks for waiting children.
But after the tours ended, the court closed again. The doors are sealed so tightly that lawyers who work in juvenile court kicked out a screenwriter for a weekly series of fictional television shows focusing on child welfare.
Scott Hollander, director of the agency that represents children, got permission from the juvenile judges to bring to court a writer for "The Guardian" who wanted to get a sense of what child welfare is really like. But a lawyer for Allegheny County's Children, Youth and Families agency in one courtroom and a lawyer for parents in another objected, so Hollander and the writer had to leave.
The CYF lawyer protested despite the fact that her boss, Marc Cherna, director of Human Services for Allegheny County, supports open hearings. Because he is prohibited from explaining the agency's side of a story, he believes CYF would benefit from having reporters attend hearings at which they could learn why caseworkers acted as they did.
He is concerned about protecting children's privacy, but he is also concerned about the damage done to his agency when it is falsely accused and unable to defend itself.
With Cherna are Common Pleas Judge Cheryl Allen Craig, supervising judge for Allegheny County's juvenile court, and David Herring, dean of the University of Pittsburgh's law school.
Herring worked in Michigan in 1988 when its juvenile court opened. "There were all the 'sky is falling' predictions," he recounts, "But I did not see it happen in terms of harming children or other family members."
Instead, he says, "Opening it up, getting that exposure, benefits the system and benefits children and families in the end," he says, "The only way to improve the system is to have people see it."
Judge Craig agrees. As long as judges retain the authority to close hearings on those occasions when they think it's necessary to protect children, she says, "Let the sun shine in."
A judge in Beaver County refuses to bring imprisoned women to hearings at which he terminates their custody of their children, denying them their right to defend themselves. A lawyer in Allegheny County, representing a 5-year-old client he has never spoken with, tells a judge the little girl should remain with a foster father who had impregnated his own 13-year-old daughter. Lawyers in Philadelphia County, frustrated by the dearth of juvenile court judges, sometimes conduct hearings with an empty bench, deciding for themselves how to proceed, and violating the right of parents and children to have their case decided by a judge.