Dave Yacovone (left), commissioner of the Department for Children and Families, and Doug Racine, secretary of the Agency of Human Services, testify before a committee looking into problems at DCF. Photo by Katie Jickling/VTDigger
Attorney General Bill Sorrell has recommended that the Legislature relax confidentiality rules in family court.
In testimony before a committee looking at child protection Tuesday, Sorrell asked legislators to take a hard look at transparency within family court to determine which statutes protect privacy and which merely obstruct justice.
“Vermont is one of the states where the doors are locked” to the general public, Sorrell said, suggesting that courts should be open as a default, with exceptions in instances of abuse or other sensitive cases.
The attorney general spoke before the lawmakers as part of their ongoing effort to prepare recommendations to the Legislature in response to the deaths of two toddlers with ties to the Department for Children and Families this year.
Vermont Attorney General Bill Sorrell. Photo by Roger Crowley/for VTDigger
In his hour-long testimony, Sorrell made several other recommendations to the committee, including that Vermont consider legislation to designate a child to be at “high risk” if child pornography is found in the home and emphasize the risks to children of an opiate-addicted caregiver. He also recommended that the court system conduct training and have minimum requirements for guardians ad litem, and to make it a criminal offense for a caregiver not to report child abuse or neglect, even if he or she is not the perpetrator.
Currently, non-juvenile family court proceedings such as divorce or custody cases are open, though the public is barred from cases that involve a minor and do not involve criminal charges.
Although the regulations are meant to protect the privacy of children, they often do more harm than good, Sorrell said. He gave an example of a case in which it took three years for a court to remove a baby from a homeless, drug-addicted mother. Only after five attempts did DCF gain custody of the child, while the mother violated probation, was placed in prison and had several relapses.
“I question whether some of the cases would have been handled quite in the same way or had the same results had the general public been aware of the proceedings,” Sorrell said. Besides greater transparency, open family court would allow all those involved, including foster parents or DCF, to be present in the courtroom.
About 17 states are open as a default position, he said, and some have partially closed courts, allowing the media but not the public, or open the proceedings to the public with the agreement of one or more party.
Committee co-chair Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, said the committee, which will present its recommendations to the full Legislature next winter, hopes to act on some of Sorrell’s proposals. Increasing transparency in family court makes sense, he said.
“We don’t want to identify who gets abused or who’ve been neglected and all that, but at the same time, the cult of secrecy harms the ability of the public to have confidence in the department,” Sears said. “There are 19 states that have a variety of more open laws than we do and I think it behooves us to look at what we can do to improve the openness of that system.
“But that would just be one piece of the legislation,” he added.
The committee also took on issues of confidentiality on a variety of levels within the Agency of Human Services, including among departments in the agency, with the public and with community services providers.
As AHS Secretary Doug Racine and Department for Children and Families Commissioner Dave Yacovone testified, the death of 2-year-old Dezirae Sheldon in February loomed as a backdrop to the conversation, when DCF came under fire for the multiple lapses in communication among department workers leading up the death.
Racine acknowledged that confidentiality rules within the agency need to be addressed.
“With confidentiality as strong as it is in the state, people always think we’re hiding something,” he said. “People always think we’re covering something up, protecting ourselves. That’s not good for public confidence in the agency. It also allows for a lot of misinformation and gossip and innuendo going out there. And we can’t correct that.”
Confidentiality for children is necessary, he added. “Where that balance is struck, I don’t know.”
As the committee moves forward on all fronts, co-chair Sen. Claire Ayer, D-Addison, said her goal is to adjust any legal framework that hinders AHS from doing its job.
“We have these ideas of what confidentiality means, what the best interest of the child means, about the suitability of parents, and those sorts of things that may need to update so that social welfare organizations that take care of children can have clear, more sensible, workable standards to use,” she said.
The post AG urges more access to child protection proceedings appeared first on VTDigger.