By Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

DETROIT -- Linda Lyte waited silently outside a courtroom at the Lincoln Hall of Juvenile Justice while the judge inside mulled the facts, the law and the morality of taking her only remaining child.

She'd tried so hard since the birth of this baby — the youngest of her nine children — to do what she'd been told by the child welfare agency. She'd gotten counseling. She'd held down a job. She'd visited the baby in foster care once a week, taking three buses to get there.

Still, it seemed everyone was against her. Caseworkers and lawyers for the state and for the child had argued for two days that she should never get a chance to raise her then 2-year-old daughter.

The court should terminate her parental rights, they said, because a boyfriend had bludgeoned and scalded to death another of her children eight years before.

Also, they said, she'd lost her rights to seven other children. And, finally, she'd been given two years and hadn't accomplished something required of her: She hadn't found an apartment of her own.

Normally in Michigan, a parent gets only 12 months to meet the child welfare agency's goals. It has been that way since 1989 when the state legislature enacted a law requiring a hearing one year after a child is placed in foster care to determine the future of the child.

Will efforts to rehabilitate the parents continue or will the state ask a judge to terminate the parents' legal rights and pursue adoption for the children?

The time frame isn't rigid, as the Lyte case illustrates. If the parent is doing fairly well at one year, the judge may grant another three or six months. And even if the state decides to petition for termination at 12 months, the legal and paperwork in that process may take another three months.

Despite this looseness, Michigan is the harbinger state for new federal legislation that requires all 50 states to decide the fate of foster children at one year. The old federal law gave parents 18 months before this hearing. And it never required states to file for termination of rights. The new law says that must be done at 15 months.

The idea behind the new federal law, parts of which took effect in November, is that quicker decisions will end long limbos in foster care.

But Michigan's experience suggests a flaw. While both the state and federal laws provide for quicker terminations, neither can ensure adoptions. In Michigan, the number of orphans — children with no legally recognized parents — has risen every year since the law took effect. Currently, there are about 6,000 "orphans" in Michigan.

Lyte's court-appointed lawyer, Sorenia Whittington, is among those who question terminations that create these orphans. "What in the world does the state accomplish when the kids won't be adopted?" she asks. It would be better, she says, to give the birth parents more time to reform in cases in which there are no adoptive parents waiting.

Most of these "permanent state wards," as Michigan euphemistically calls them, are older children, brothers and sisters who don't want to be separated, and youngsters with emotional and physical disabilities — children for whom it's hard to find adoptive parents.

Linda Lyte's little girl didn't fit that description. Her foster parents wanted to adopt her. She'd lived with them since birth, and all that stood in the way of them getting her permanently was termination of Lyte's parental rights.

A family disintegrates

Linda Lyte was raised in Detroit by a grandmother after her own mother beat her with belts and curtain rods.

She left high school when she got pregnant in 10th grade. Her first child was born when she was 16. She had two more in quick succession.

She admitted hitting the youngest, a little girl named Rose, and the Detroit child welfare agency took all three from her and placed them in foster care.

Eventually, she voluntarily gave them up for adoption.

Then she had three more children, Debra, Denicque and Adrianne. A new boyfriend, Keith Williamson, joined them, and he and Linda had a child, Akiko.

When Akiko was 4 months old, the utility company shut off electricity to their apartment because they hadn't paid the bills. Lyte went to the social services offices to see if she could get it turned back on.

While she was gone, 2-year-old Adrianne wet her pants, and Williamson beat her with a bat and threw her in a tub of scalding water.

When Lyte returned, she found Adrianne alive, but unresponsive. She says she tried to call 911, but Williamson pulled the phone out of the wall. She tried to leave with the limp child, but says Williamson stopped her by holding a knife to her throat. For two days, she says, she waited for him to sleep. Then she fled with Adrianne. But it was too late. The toddler was dead.

She and Williamson were charged. He pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. She pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to three to 15 years.

While in prison her rights to her other children were ended and they were adopted. Also, Lyte was pregnant when she entered prison, and the child welfare agency took that baby, Latonya, at birth and gave her to Williamson's sister to adopt.

After 23 months, Lyte was released from prison and went to live with her sister. Soon Debra and Denicque began visiting her, even staying overnight, with the permission of their adoptive parents. And Lyte's two oldest children, Ray and Edward Lyte, went to live with her. They'd been adopted, but they chose their birth mother.

This sort of thing is rarely mentioned when legislators sing the praises of adoption. And they almost never talk of the failed adoptions — the 3 percent to 15 percent of adoptions in which the new parents return adopted children to the courts like damaged goods to department stores. The actual percentage is unknown because no one keeps nationwide statistics on what is called "adoption disruption."

Detroit Judge Patricia B. Campbell calls them blown adoptions, and estimates that she terminates rights for adoptive parents five times a year.

It happens, she says, because adoptive parents often are unprepared emotionally or financially for what they've invited into their household: "Adoptive parents think love will do it, but these children are very challenging."

Lyte's sons were older teen-agers when they left their adoptive parents and joined their mother and 10 other people in Lyte's sister's household. Judges call kids this age "500-pound gorillas." Adoptive parents may try to get them back, but family court judges know 500-pound gorillas sleep where they want.

A new beginning

Three years after she was released from prison, Lyte got pregnant again. She was 34. The baby was born Jan. 22, 1995. Lyte named her Shaquilla Lashenna Lyte. But that's all she could give her.

The child welfare agency took the baby from her while she was still in the hospital.

Under the new federal legislation, if a parent has been convicted of killing a child, or if the parent's rights to other children have been involuntarily terminated, her children may go up for adoption immediately.

But under the Michigan law of that time, there was no talk of adoption in Lyte's case in the beginning. Her first caseworker had written a plan for her to get custody of Shaquilla.

She signed the plan in May 1995, four months after the baby was born. She had to get a job, go to counseling for her propensity to choose violent men, take classes to improve her parenting skills, visit the baby weekly and attend court hearings every 90 days.

She set about doing it all. The best part, she said, was visiting her baby. Shaquilla called Lyte "Ma" and ran to her. When a psychologist watched a visit, she reported that Shaquilla clung to her mother.

Lyte got a job at a nursing home. Her boss told the judge later that Lyte was among the center's most dependable and cooperative workers.

She earned about $160 a week. She paid her sister $120 a month to stay in her public housing apartment. There were long waiting lists for other units, so she tried to save $1,000 for a security deposit and first month's rent in a decent apartment. When she had $650, her sister's boyfriend stole it, and she started over.

She searched for places that wouldn't require a large deposit. Her lawyer even drove her around one day. But they couldn't find anything affordable that didn't have rats, roaches or peeling paint. Lyte knew the caseworker would never let her take a baby to any of those.

Because Lyte was making progress toward her goals and got along well with her first caseworker, she was given more than a year, Whittington says. But then she got a new caseworker, one who began pushing for termination. By the time all the paperwork was filed and the hearing scheduled, it was 21/2 years after Shaquilla was born.

At the hearing, Lyte gave the judge a list of 92 apartments she'd checked. They were handwritten one after another on notebook paper, each followed by a notation about why it hadn't worked out.

However, the lawyers for the agency and for the child said Lyte's inability to find an apartment was symbolic of her failure as a parent.

Lyte's lawyer Sorenia Whittington countered that the agency had failed to help Lyte as it had helped others in similar situations, sometimes offering money for a security deposit. All it did was give her a list of apartments.

Whittington said private foster care agencies had a financial interest in withholding help to birth parents when they know foster parents want to adopt. If Lyte's rights were ended, and the agency helped Shaquilla's foster parents adopt within five months, the agency would get a $9,000 bonus from the state.

Michigan created the bonuses about five years ago to deal with the orphan problem. The money was intended to spur agencies to quickly find adoptive parents. The bonuses shrink as time passes between termination and adoption.

Robert Ennis, who runs the largest private foster care agency in Detroit and who benefits from the bonuses, said he didn't think agencies abused the system, but, he acknowledged, it could be done.

The new federal law also provides bonus payments, but they go to states that increase adoptions, not to agencies that place children with families.

Whittington noted that Michigan does not offer bonuses for agencies that increase the numbers of families they reunite. And neither does the new federal law.

For Lyte, the judge's decision wasn't between termination or reunification. She'd never had her baby, so she couldn't be reunited with her. The decision, Whittingon said, was whether her actions eight years earlier would keep her forever from raising a child of her own.

Shaquilla was Lyte's last child. She'd had a sterilization operation after the baby was born.

After a half hour's deliberation, Judge Freddie Burton Jr. called Lyte and Whittington back into the courtroom.

Burton acknowledged that she'd met every goal except one. He said, however, that one — locating an apartment — shouldn't have been such a problem. He couldn't believe she'd been unable to save $1,000 when she earned $8,000 a year.

He said her failure was a symptom of her unresolved problems.

"Is the issue of housing sufficient to conclude that parental rights should be terminated as to Shaquilla?" the judge asked.