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Succinctly summarizing the advantages of the multidisciplinary offices to clients, Chris Gottlieb wrote: For clients, being represented by organizations rather than solo practitioners means having a team on your side: an advocate you can reach on the phone when your lawyer is in court; another lawyer from the office available to step in when yours is on leave or stuck in a different courtroom; the benefit of a brief bank so your lawyer doesnt have to draft every motion from scratch; and office space where your kids can play while you meet with your lawyer. Chris Gottlieb et al., Discovering Family Defense: A History of the Family Defense Clinic at NYU School of Law, 41 N.Y.U. Ct. Act 1089 (McKinney 2020). In the year before the petition was filed, Eduardo sustained an injury that required medical attention. The family defender offices organize themselves around the real-world needs of their clients and continue to work closely with them even when the next court appearance is not scheduled in the immediate future. The petition alleged that the skull fracture could only have been the result of child abuse and Ms. Greens failure to provide a sufficient explanation for the injury justified placing Sophia in foster care. Of the 135 (35%) cases filed in Family Court, 61 families remained together throughout the investigation and subsequent court filing, the children never removed from their homes. Easily apply. 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. Unfortunately, the foster care worker assigned to Ms. Greens case proved to be very difficult for Ms. Green to work with. BDS | Home Funding for the study was secured from Casey Family Programs,28 one of the leading child welfare foundations in the country committed to supporting practices designed to ensure that children are able to be raised safely in their families of origin.29 An important question the study hoped to learn was whether the kind of legal representation made available to parents would have any impact on reducing the time children spend in foster care.30, The quantitative study was a multiyear study of child welfare cases brought in the New York City courts to determine whether the kind of legal representation provided to parents can make a difference in the outcome of cases.31 The researchers examined child welfare cases filed in New York City Family Court between 2007 and 2014; the final sample involved 9,582 families with 18,288 children.32 They used Propensity Score Matching as the statistical design, which equalized the groups of families compared on nearly twenty factors or covariates split into variables.33 This methodology allowed the researchers to attribute differences in outcomes between the two groups to the type of representation the parents received.34, The study compared the outcome of cases based on whether parents were represented by panel lawyers and parents who were represented by one of the family defender offices.35 Ultimately, the researchers traced the outcomes of nearly 10,000 families and their more than 18,000 children through a four-year follow-up period.36, The study found that the kind of representation afforded to parents makes a dramatic difference in the length of time children spend in foster care.37 Giving parents the right kind of legal team results in families being reunited far sooner than would otherwise happen.38 The family defense offices were able to secure the safe return of children to their families 43 percent more often in their first year than panel attorneys, and 25 percent more often in the second year.39 Giving parents lawyers from family defense offices allowed children to be permanently released to relatives more than twice as often in the first year of a case and 67 percent more often in the second year.40 These families may otherwise have been permanently dissolved or the children may have spent their childhood separated from their family. See Family Defense, NDS: The Power of Pub. 61. Practice, Brooklyn Defender Serv., at 2), http://bds.org/wp-content/uploads/2018.08.16-BDS-testimony-to-the-Commission-on-Parental-Representation-FINAL.pdf [hereinafter Schreibersdorf & Shapiro written testimony]. Based on the allegations alone, the agency believed that Ms. Green needed to complete both anger management and a parenting class to secure the return of her daughter. Until such assistance is available, the CPS or case planner must ensure that appropriate services are provided, including payment for such services. N.Y.C. Ketteringham & Becker written testimony, supra note 26, at 8 (emphasis in original). As Ms. Barrow and her defense team were making these strides, two intervening actions were taking place, either of which had the potential to negatively impact the prospects of a successful outcome. Mr. Sanchez again brought his son to the hospital and, again, Mr. Sanchez informed the treating physician that, rather than consenting to surgery, he intended to take Eduardo back to Mexico for more nonsurgical treatment. That was the critical step that led to the successful resolution of the case. Brooklyn Defender Services - Employees, Contact info, Overview - Wiza I think that every parent should have an advocate. Most importantly, the team also began planning for the Initial Child Safety Conference that the agency would certainly convene when the baby was born.70 Unfortunately, the New York City child protection agency would not conduct the conference before the child was born (because New York does not recognize fetuses as within the purview of child welfare law). 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. . In those cases, the parent would not have had anyone to attend the child safety conference with her at the hospital. Who We Are | If/When/How As we will see, the lack of anyone in that office with substantive knowledge of family court or child welfare deeply disadvantaged parents and families for the next forty years. When the new tests were made available to the surgeon later that day, he continued to support Mr. Sanchezs plan for treating his son. . 18, 428.6 (2020). For most panel lawyers, if a matter is continued on the court calendar for six weeks, the lawyer is able to put the case in a folder and reopen it one or two days before the next court date. 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. In this case, the office was assigned to represent Carlos Sanchez, after a petition was filed by the local child welfare agency accusing him of neglecting his son by failing to consent to what the agency asserted was necessary surgery. Child welfare has long been in search of evidence-based programs designed to keep children safely in their own homes. at 17, 3839 (oral testimony of Angeline Montauban, parent). BDS | Contact 105163 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105163 [hereinafter Understanding the Effects of an Interdisciplinary Approach]. Part II briefly describes the findings in the quantitative analysis. View job. Find A Defender; Get Help; Donate; en What do you need help with? 20. My professional experiences in New York City include founding and co-directing the Family Defense Clinic at New York University School of Law; serving as a Founding Board Member for the Center for Family Representation; being a member of the Board of Advisors for the New York City Administration for Childrens Services from 1996 to 2013; and, most recently, since 2017, serving as a member of the New York State Commission on Parental Legal Representation. See N.Y. Fam. Hearing (Aug. 16, 2018) (written testimony of Michelle Burrell, at 2). 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. The teams social workers worked with Ms. Anderson to identify what she needed to support her child and advised her on what the agency and family court judge would want to see. See Id. The parent advocate from the defense team working with Ms. Greens case provided an invaluable role in buffering the relationship with the caseworker, acting as a bridge and facilitating communication between the two. We fight to protect New Yorkers from the trauma of separation from their loved ones and to reunite families as soon as possible. . See Casey Family Programs, How Does High-Quality Legal Representation for Parents Support Better Outcomes? Brooklyn public defenders seek to form union - nydailynews.com tit. Immigration. . Mr. Sanchez further explained that he did not rule out giving his consent to the surgery, only that he wanted one more time to see if it could be avoided by securing alternative treatment. Moreover, the amount of time the lawyer put on the case was a minor fraction of the time and attention the social worker gave the case. His son, Eduardo, suffers from a genetic hip disorder and, as a consequence, he is highly prone to injury. She asked her mother to take Sophia to see a doctor because Ms. Green had to be at work. 10. These team members support the families they serve in everything from applying for public benefits to representing a client in criminal court to finding employment training, mental health counseling, and substance abuse treatment. Social holds may result when a safety planning conference does not happen until after birth. Id. Article 10 Attorney for the Family Defense Practice Team. & Youth Servs. Id. Even when these lawyers are skilled courtroom advocates, their advocacy is too frequently hamstrung by antecedent deficits engaged in by the agency when, for example, it proposed and implemented an inadequate case plan. With the housing crisis abated, the rest of the family defense team could keep its focus on the family court case. As the qualitative study revealed, solo practitioners who were interviewed explained that they do not work with their clients out of court and, if matters involving their service plan ever arise, they will speak with the ACS attorney to look into the matter.86 When one solo practitioner was asked, is there any other type of out of court support you provide to your clients, like talking to their landlords or helping them maintain childcare, the simple answer was No, to be honest, no.87, Two people who were the subject of child welfare proceedings in the New York City courts and were represented by several different panel attorneys over the course of several years testified before the New York State Commission on Parental Representation in 2018. Similarly, preventing a parent from being removed from the country for an immigration-related reason is also beyond what agency caseworkers do.92 But real-life events such as these must be given the highest possible priority if parents are to achieve their objective of regaining the custody of their children from foster care. Admin., The CITYFEPS Rent Supplement Program Fact Sheet, N.Y.C. Admin. . For most parents, this conference, occurring at one of the most emotionally laden moments of their lives, and which will fatefully determine whether they will be allowed to bring their child home with them from the hospital, is something they endure alone without representation or support. In the weeks leading up to the status conference, Ms. Anderson and the team worked to ensure she was able to attend all visits with her daughter, that she completed the mental health evaluation the judge requested, and that her service providers were serving her well. The supervisor denied the request, approved the caseworkers leaving the conference, and explained that the agency had all the information it needed. See id. 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. Mr. Sanchez needed a champion for his cause, one who would persuade the surgeon that he was making a reasonable choice that parents have the lawful authority to make. Although impressed by all the work Ms. Anderson and her team had begun, the agency nonetheless was unwilling to allow Ms. Anderson to go home with her baby. After the second injury, he explained, he brought Eduardo back to the same surgeon with whom he met the year before. for Child.s Servs., https://www1.nyc.gov/site/acs/child-welfare/will-acs-take-my-child.page (last visited Oct. 6, 2020). 27. Brooklyn Defender Services is a public defense office whose mission is to provide outstanding representation and advocacy free of cost to people facing loss of freedom, family separation. 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. The family defender office assigned to represent Ms. Green handles many of these cases each year and has become expert both in cross-examining medical experts called by the agency and at engaging and communicating with knowledgeable physicians able to provide their expert medical opinion on whether an injury is more likely to be the consequence of abuse or an accident. Social hold is a colloquial term used to describe the practice of a hospital separating new parents from their child immediately following birth while a report to the State Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment or an ACS investigation is pending. Among jurisdictions other than New York City that have been national leaders and innovators in parent representation is Washington State under the leadership of Joanne Moore. Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS) is one of the largest public defense providers in the United States. If Mr. Sanchezs lawyer had been a very good solo practitioner from the court-assigned panel, he would have advised Mr. Sanchez to get the surgeon to write a letter saying that Mr. Sanchezs preference to take his son to Mexico for another try at nonsurgical treatment was reasonable. Rts., Your Rights While Pregnant, Breastfeeding, or Caregiving: A Report on the 2019 Commission Public Hearing on Pregnancy and Caregiver Discrimination 14 (2019), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/Pregnancy_Report.pdf. Above all else, what characterizes the differences between the family defender offices and their solo practitioner counterparts in New York City is the purposeful assembly of a holistic team designed to work closely with clients throughout the proceedings. Brooklyn residents are harmed and impacted by government policies and practices that fuel mass incarceration and the destruction of families. 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. Several days after Ms. Barrow was permitted to bring her baby home with her from the hospital, the agency removed the infant and placed her in foster care after a caseworker visited the apartment and found it to be excessively dirty and filled with cockroaches. For over 50 years, SCO's Foster Care practice has been helping children and their families grow, heal and thrive. 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. And once the amount of visits was increased, the next step eventually would be returning Sophia to Ms. Greens custody. And when trouble brews and the local newspapers criticize government officials for failing to protect a child from harm (an unavoidable part of this work), the defender community actively participates in supporting the relatively low foster care population. Recruitment - ADP Brooklyn, NY, US. 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. Brooklyn Defenders provides a wide range of services, including assisting people who are facing an investigation, providing legal representation to people who are brought to court and helping to clear the records of people from databases that impact employment. Before she left, the defense teams social worker called the caseworkers supervisor requesting that she be permitted to remain in the conference because the x-ray results were due in another half hour. Ct. Act 261, 262 (McKinney 2020). L TO LIVONIA AVENUE. The social worker, fluent in English and Spanish, also served as a translator for Mr. Sanchez whose primary language is Spanish and whose command of English is limited. Brooklyn Defender Services Aug 2017 - Aug 2019 2 years 1 month. 6, July/Aug. 6 days ago. The prior quantitative and qualitative studies focused exclusively on outcomes of cases and on the views of professionals who see the work of the family defenders in family court. Before going to housing court, the defender offices housing specialist contacted the City office that was providing the rental subsidy to explain the problem and was able to get the office to write an additional check to her landlord to eliminate all arrears on her rent. The defense team then went into action. . It added over the years an immigration practice and, in 2007, with this new contract, a family defense practice as well. Then the team moved forward on expanding Ms. Barrows access to her older children. 30+ days ago Full Time. Commn on Parental Legal Representation, Interim Report to Chief Judge DiFiore 2629 (2019), http://www.nycourts.gov/ip/Parental-Legal-Rep/PDFs/InterimReport-FINAL.pdf. 73. Three months later, the two children in foster care were reunited with their mother and the family has lived together without further intervention by the agency. Our staff of 300 includes 180 attorneys as well as social workers, investigators, paralegals, re-entry specialists, jail liaisons, education, community organizers and policy specialists. Today (A.B.A., June 4, 2019), https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/child_law/resources/child_law_practiceonline/january---december-2019/providing-parents-multidisciplinary-legal-representation-signifi/. Keeping families together requires striving to establish understanding and ensuring that the parents voice is heard through support and advocacy. The caseworker, her supervisor, and the investigating team concluded that Eduardo required surgical treatment and his fathers failure to consent to it constituted medical neglect. for Child.s Servs. 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. The last 15 months have taken a toll on all of us. See also Jason A. Oetjen, Natl Council of Juv. The goal was to secure evidence from an independent, well-respected therapist that Ms. Green possessed the temperament and capability of raising her child safely. Lawyers Assn v. State, 763 N.Y.S.2d 397 (Sup. They also reveal the critical importance of addressing the needs of clients concerning matters beyond the child welfare system itself. Alice Wang | Columbia Law School