The state high court ruled in favor of Los Angeles County social workers who placed two young boys in foster care after their 18-month-old sister, held on the lap of an aunt, was killed when a driver ran a stop sign and plowed into the car their father was driving.Lose one child... then lose them all.
July 6, 2012
"When a child is transported without a car seat and dies, the siblings may be removed from the home by child welfare authorities..."
"... the California Supreme Court rules in a Los Angeles County case."
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76 comments:
People should be rather paranoid that the State could remove their children from them for even trivial reasons... including reasons much more trivial than the one here.
If these parents were appropriately paranoid about that, they never would have been driving without the kid in the car seat.
Hard to see how this is anything but terrifying for the children being removed... but I don't think we Americans take the needs to children into consideration, especially when those needs are being weighed against State Power.
Coming soon: Fat kids put into foster care for being fat. Reports will be initiated by public school personnel.
California should just cut to the chase and take everyone's children from them at birth. It seems inevitable, one way or the other.
How could anyone defend this?
I guess I'm 0.0001% mollified by the fact that the court says they may be removed, not that they must be removed.
How soon before that wording gets changed?
How could anyone defend this?
Have you never been to California?
California requires that paints containing earth pigments (dirt, basically) to be labelled as carcinogens, because there might be some silica in there!
I don't have kids, and I know that you don't do that with small children. I think though, in this case, that is just the excuse to act on this:
"County social workers received a report a week later that Valerie's siblings, Ethan, 3, and Jesus, 8 months old, were being neglected.
The county investigated and determined that the children lived in a household with about 20 people. They also found evidence of unsanitary conditions and reported that the children were dirty and appeared unsupervised. Ethan was suffering from severe developmental delays and had rotten teeth that required extraction, according to the court."
Which isn't how law is supposed to work. But, I can see wanting to help the other kids if this is true.
This is a natural progression for the left. They know how to live you life better than you. In their ideal world, everyone would send in all of their earnings, the state would then send you what they think you need.
This ruling is a moral obscenity.
Charge the father and aunt for criminal neglect, but I'm not sure that justifies taking all the kids.
But, yeah, Matthew may well be right.
PS Himmler and Sanger are smiling.
One step closer to Lebensborn.
A couple more interesting facts:
The father, who brought the case to regain custody of his children from foster care, wasn't driving the car at the time of the accident.
Also, the reason the girl was not in a safety seat was because she was being comforted by her aunt after injuring her arm. She was being driven to the hospital.
How could anyone defend this?
No one needs to. The problem is that there is no way to go on the offense against it.
Even if these particular two children were being neglected, that is not what the CA supreme court ruling was about.
Keep it up, America!
Keep voting Democrat.
This is just a hint of what's to come.
And when the case challenging this reaches the USSC, Roberts will rule removing the children is a tax, not a penalty.
Yea, of course, because putting children in foster care has never presented any risks of its own.
At least none that you can hold a public official accountable for.
William was en route to a hospital in June 2009 after his daughter, Valerie, fell off a bed and injured her arm, according to court records. William said he had loaned his car, which contained a car seat, to someone else and drove another vehicle to the hospital with the injured daughter on her aunt's lap.
@Matthew, after I commented, I read the article, and I agree. The accident is a crutch to extract the kids from their environment.
Well-meaning bureacracy, I'm sure. But I can't see how this will help the boys who, having lost their sister, then quickly lose their Dad and their home environment. I hope the kids aren't like my own son who couldn't function at that age outside the routine. He's a little better now.
There are probably studies that show this is a good outcome.
I am a huge fan of treble damages, when applied to judges, social workers, especially D.A.'s and their assistants, Joe Paterno and friends, and cops anytime they break the law. Rather than the expectation of fraud and abuse to save their corrupt ass, those law-breakers in these professions should expect ignominy and pain.
"Coming soon: Fat kids put into foster care for being fat. Reports will be initiated by public school personnel."
Yep.
Just another tax under Obama's ACA.
They'll be called "Michelle's Camp."
"Arbeit Macht Frei" will read the slogan over the gate.
Our strange Kenyan Big Brother is setting up new controls over us every day as a Jobs Program. Who knew we were so helpless and so destructive to the Goddesses Earth.
The control strategy seems to be to force us into living inside cities with government rail transport in lieu of cars. Then our food deliveries and medical care can be rationed by government payments either being made or being withheld.
That kind of strategy used to be called using Concentration Camps so a targeted population could be easier to hit.
DENVER -- The Civil Service Commission has overturned a decision to fire a Denver cop who admitted to speeding while intoxicated. It is a decision Denver's manager of safety is fighting to overturn.
Officer Derrick Saunders was sentenced to five days in jail after pleading guilty to charges he was drunk and driving 143 mph in a 55 mph zone on June 17, 2010.
The manager of safety fired Saunders last December. Saunders appealed, arguing his termination was unfair and excessive.
"California should just cut to the chase and take everyone's children from them at birth. It seems inevitable, one way or the other."
Yes, but one will allowed only one child, but even then, only after the mandatory abortion of the first pregnancy.
There is the liberal Democrat sacrament that must be fulfilled before anyone can have the privilege of giving birth to a child for the State.
Palladian said...
California requires that paints containing earth pigments (dirt, basically) to be labelled as carcinogens, because there might be some silica in there!
7/6/12 9:24 AM
Prop 65. A gold mine for 'public interest' lawyers to mine, courtesy of the CA public.
God, An Original A-hole said...
A couple more interesting facts:
The father, who brought the case to regain custody of his children from foster care, wasn't driving the car at the time of the accident.
Also, the reason the girl was not in a safety seat was because she was being comforted by her aunt after injuring her arm. She was being driven to the hospital.
Interesting, but not necessarily extenuating.
Still, the kid should have been in the seat.
The aunt could have comforted her just as well.
Dare we ask the musical question, where were the parents?
(assume the Supreme Bean would know)
It disturbs me that the social workers seem to be using this issue as a pretext. They didn't take the other kids until they followed up on reports of neglect and discovered them living in the squalor of a 20 resident group home and had untreated developmental delays.
Plus the summary doesn't mention the trip the death ocurred on was an emergency trip to the hospital. The parent had the make a difficult judgement about relative risks (leave of the other children home without the parent?) or break the law.
We shouldn't allow social workers such a hodgepodge set of rules they can effectively enforce anything. They should have been constrained from making this argument if they could not explain their inaction immediately after the accident, and forced to justify it on the children's contemporary surroundings.
That'll be good for those other children, who are suffering from the trauma of losing their brother or sister... yank them from their family! Wow, they'll surely grow up normal now.
I would suspect there are stories that children raised in foster care and such do not fare nearly as well as children raised by their own family, on average. Why isn't it negligence by the state to remove children from their homes in such circumstances? Shouldn't the state have to prove to a judge that the risk of harm to the child from remaining in the home with his or her family is so great that it outweighs the near certain harm that will be done by removing the child and placing him in the foster care system?
This is why there is a second amendment.
It's getting easier to take seriously the idea that there may be another violent revolution somewhere in our near future.
If/when it happens, it will as much because of crap like this (and lightbulbs) as taxes.
NotquiteunBuckley:
Saunders previously had been cleared of pointing a gun at a McDonald's employee in Aurora in 2009. The employee said Saunders, an officer assigned to Denver International Airport, grew impatient when his order wasn’t filled fast enough. He was in the drive-thru with another off-duty officer when he pulled the gun on them on May 2009, according to the McDonald's workers.
The article doesn't say but I would guess that the police union played a large part in getting this guy reinstated. Happened in Omaha when Jackie Dolinsky was fired for brutally kicking a man who had already been dogpiled and tasered. Video [at the link] shows her kicking him while he is on the ground. The union required binding arbitration and--surprise!--the union-provided arbitrator reinstated her.
Cops are crooks. Cops are thugs.
Let's note this case in passing. It does give one a certain frisson. It is, however, a bit too daring to think that this says something about governments, their subjects, and the role of courts in sanctifying state coercion.
But this could never happen in Wisconsin.
Well, it could never happen to someone well-educated and respectable, in Wisconsin.
Maybe, elsewhere to paranoid types, who smoke and drink - maybe obese and hispanic - or maybe those tinfoilhat types who rant about freedom and such, but it could never, ever happen to rule-abiding, New-York-Times quoting, well-educated, respectable professor types, in Wisconsin.
Thank the fates that upper-middle-class meretriciousness has its rewards.
So, I guess the question is: are the problems cited, besides the death, enough to take the kids away from the parent? If not, should they be? The kid's teeth were rotting (allegedly)!
Kim Nemoy, principal deputy county counsel, said the county had sympathy for the grief-stricken father and worked to ensure he would be able to regain custody once his parenting skills improved.
"This was a family that was greatly in need of social services," she said.
This was a family in need of social services so, instead of providing help, they provided social services. I know there are good social workers trying to help out there. The problem is that their definition of 'help' is different from mine.
Safety regulations don't make you safer, is anybody's interested.
Behavior adjusts dangerward to compensate for the regulation.
The Peltzman effect.
Yes, California, of course I see the need to protect childrens' welfare. I'm not convinced that this is the way to do it.
------
FYI, anyone else rather shamefaced that in Argentina, someone's getting punished by their courts for taking children away from their families, while in California the court is ordering that behavior? Yes, I know the situations are different, but the resemblances are striking nonetheless, and the ultimate point is the same in both cases: Where do government powers end in regards to taking children away from their families? It seems as though the question really needs to be put forward, since just letting government function without questioning them is leading to events like this.
I really don't like where we have been going as a society with health and safety - the new state-enforced religion. But, state-enforced or not, we have changed dramatically from when we grew up just a few decades ago when none of the people in the car would have had even seat belts on, and there were no kid seats, unless you count climbing onto the platform under the rear window, or riding in the bed of open pickup trucks, which you can't even do with dogs now.
It's not that terrible things didn't happen, they did, but nobody would blame people for accidents. The understanding was that living life comes with them. When I grew up, I don't recall a single kid being hurt because of lack of a kids seat. It may have happened, but I never met anyone who it has happened to.
Today, nothing is accidental. Everything bad has a victim and they are never the victim of bad luck. There is always a culprit, who must be found, widely attacked by all good people, and then punished. Preferably, we can find multiple culprits tangentially involved, but still worthy of attack, regardless.
It's not that there aren't people who we can find responsible in some way, we are really good at that. It's that there are always risks to waking up each day, but most of them are extremely small, and it's impossible to avoid a bunch of them no matter how hard you try. We assume once one of these very slim risks works against us that "we should have known better." Somehow we should have known that the one in a million chance was gonna happen today.
Sure you could have all the kids in car seats, but they could killed a hundred other ways today too, some even more likely, have you covered them all, every time? If not, then I think people should be a little understanding that sometimes we just have bad luck, reducing that significantly comes at great expense to enjoyment of the time we have, which is always limited by bad luck to some degree.
Zero Tolerance. Thank you attorneys, oh and FUCK YOU! To take kids from parents[and I was involved in cases like that] you need more than just a stupid decision by a parent or court. You need to investigate,evaluate, and you need to have a stong case. Taking a child from a parent is much more punitive than putting a person in prison. Terminating parental rights were always the toughest and nastiest cases.
Considering the relative risk probabilities, which is worse: letting parents drive with their kids not in car seats or affirmatively taking children away from their parents?
If you could go back and make that choice for yourself, would you choose to be taken away from your parents?
Which harm is worse: 1/1 million chance of dying in the car, or 100% chance of having the family destroyed?
cubanbob said: Prop 65. A gold mine for 'public interest' lawyers to mine, courtesy of the CA public.
The infuriating thing is that, as part of my courses, I have the very important duty of teaching students industrial hygiene in the artist's studio, where the use of dangerous solvents, chemicals and painting pigments is a regular aspect of work. I now have to start out telling students to ignore the California safety labeling because it presents inaccurate information. But I also stress that students shouldn't assume that, just because they are to ignore California labeling, doesn't mean that they should become cavalier about their materials handling practices.
In other words, the insane regulation has the effect of harming people's ability to keep themselves safe because it renders all safety information suspect.
Our problem today is that we value staying alive more than living. I don't see the point, since only one is really possible.
Forty-one comments and no one has mentioned this part of the story: ". . . was killed when a driver ran a stop sign and plowed into the car their father was driving."
If they're going to be taking away someone's kids, maybe they should take away the kids of the creep who ran the stop sign and directly killed the little girl, not the parents who indirectly contributed to her death. The actual killer is a truly awful role model for any kids he or she may have.
Palladian, I see that all the time in my manufacturing business. The regulations, if followed are more dangerous than the risks they are intending to reduce. And as you say, the sheer amount of it and it's common stupidity makes it unusable, but worse it also makes people not respect any safety instruction or policy. If you put enough bad ingredients in the soup, nobody wants to eat it.
I watched the original "Cheaper by the Dozen" a few months ago.
At one point, I thought it was going to turn into a horror movie when all 14 (kids and parents) piled into the car for a trip from Rhode Island to New Jersey. An opentop convertible, rows of kids, including 3 sitting up on top the wayback, a baby in mom's arms in the front seat, no seat belts. I could practically hear the violins as they pulled onto the road.
But then the weirdest thing happened.
They made it to New Jersey.
Alive.
This is why there is a second amendment.
Try owning a gun in California.
In my view, the Second Amendment is effectively dead, because, even though citizens are (barely) allowed to own guns, the State has made sure it has the biggest guns of all.
It's also the tendency of people to simply resign themselves to tyranny. As the Declaration states:
all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
The problem is that, after a century of gradually increasing repression, our tolerance of "sufferable evils" has concurrently increased.
Our increasing reliance on the power and reach of the State has made us like a drug addict; the drug that once brought us pleasure and comfort has, slowly and almost imperceptibly brought us to ruin. Our tolerance to the effects of our drug has made us increasingly insensitive to its effect, and so we require more and more and more of it to bring us the false peace that we once enjoyed so easily. We're nearly at the point where we consume so much of the drug that the next increase in dosage will surely kill us. And yet, like an addict we are powerless to stop, because stopping is so painful and so difficult that death seems preferable.
The State of California has recently passed bills that make access to syringes very easy. Tie up, fellow citizens.
I am normally not in agreement with the pack of self-righteous feminist lawyers at child protective services agencies that seem to believe no man is fit to raise children, foster care preferable over an evil penis possessing father.....Or the very same lawyer-social worker harridans that believe the State is better than a relative or a mom with problems then demand they have no accountabilty when horrors happen in foster care.
But!!!
In this case if you read it, while investigation does mitigate the death in the accident..(kid was being driven to the hospital for emergency care, the car with the child seat had been loaned to someone else when the emergency happened....the investigation revealed huge other problems.
1. The kids were living in a filthy hovel with 20 other people, a S Cental slumhouse.
2. Both children had serious evidence of neglect. Unwashed, rotting teeth, mental development problems.
3. The "mother", or breeder, was never in the picture as she was too cognitively impaired to raise her chilluns from the start as each came out of her.
4. All other available "relatives" appear to have been in the same dirty slumhouse...so no "send the kids to a nice green farm an aunt has" option existed.
I am sure California has made some horrificly bad calls at the hands of the feminists running the family court system and social services in that state....but in this case, removal seems to have been for the best...
Just don't wait for either of these two kids to be more successful and contribute to society than their dregs of parents are.
I can remember our family of 6 piling into our big Buick La Sabre convertible and driving for hundreds of miles on vacation including the PA turnpike - no seat belts all around. The car had them, but nobody ever used them back then. That was considered a fantastic fun day, which it was, but today that would get my parents arrested, and us kids into foster homes. It makes me want to punch someone, which also used to be acceptable when they deserved it. Back in the day, things were cool. Today, we suck.
Geez, we never even heard of car seats when I was young. As children, traveling in a car, towing a trailer across the United States, we just lolled around in the back seat (tormenting each other to the point of our parents threatening...
Don't make me come back there!!!") about every 100 miles. When it was a station wagon, we climbed into the back and played games or fell asleep on a pile of pillows.
We also ate junk food, drank sodas (Squirt was my favorite), hamburgers, milkshakes. We probably spent more time on Route 66 than Buz Murdock and Tod Stiles. Just not in such a cool car.
We lived and no one thought it was child abuse.
What a bunch of weenies we have become as a nation.
If Cedarford's expansion is correct then that changes everything in this case.
I had friends who never rode around un-seat-belted, because mom did't own a car, and the guys she brought home every night - drunk off their ass who would abuse them - never had one either. Those kids did need to be taken.
The only reason to take kids is because their home is truly bad and dangerous in a real (NOT just hypothetical) way.
Palladian said...
California requires that paints containing earth pigments (dirt, basically) to be labelled as carcinogens, because there might be some silica in there!
California should be labeled a carcinogen...I'm pretty sure there's some silica in there.
I agree with Ceaderford on this however.
The children were in a terrible environment and should have been removed. The car seat issue is just another way to do it.
BUT...that doesn't change the fact that we are ever more and more under the thumb of an over reaching government staffed with incompetent morons.
Now, context: While nothing has changed about my previous post and the libertarian notion of less government being better, I do have to note that we should all have a bone to pick with the LA Times headline and subhead. There's actually more to the case than just the child car-seat problem; there were apparently other issues that raised alarm. Or in short, the child car seat problem was only one of several.
So, the bottom line is that this is a bit more of a detailed situation than the headline indicates.
But again, that said, it's still shocking to see such powers exercised by the state. As bad as the situation is, it's still a valid question to ask whether state intervention is appropriate or not. At what point is state power tyranny? And is the alleviation of an admittedly problematic situation such as this really best solved via government removal of children? The entire problem with the purely libertarian stance is that removing government intervention entirely leaves in place a problem, but using the blunt tool of government on such a situation induces its own problems. Which may not be as immediate, but still has very long term impact on everyone.
It's still a good idea to check government ask say "Slow down. Is this proper?" In this case, the answer may be "Yes" anyway, but the question should still be asked.
And it seems as though others managed to cover the ground in my second post while I was away. Heh. Should've read new posts before posting myself.
God, An Original A-Hole,
Coming soon: Fat kids put into foster care for being fat. Reports will be initiated by public school personnel.
Hell, it's been a reality in Britain for years. See here, for example.
I think it is a bad precedent to set that the state can do this. It seems like it should have argued the other things were important, and that the death is simply what happened to cause them to look that way.
I am just thankful that my kids were grown before car seats were mandatory. We had a couple of the kind that would never be allowed now. Basically they hooked over the back of the front seat so the kid could see. Now, with air bags, you can't have a car seat in front so parents sometimes leave an infant in a car seat when they get to work and the kid dies of heat stroke.
I drove from California to Boston and back in a VW bus with my oldest son in a crib mounted over the middle seat. Now, we'd be stopped by a SWAT team.
So when will the passive citzenry awaken and pull a Warsaw Ghetto on the Federal Gestapo agents with drones being deployed everywhere? The answer my friend is blowing in the wind.
The children were in a terrible environment and should have been removed. The car seat issue is just another way to do it.
BUT...that doesn't change the fact that we are ever more and more under the thumb of an over reaching government staffed with incompetent morons.
It is easy to look at this one case and say, Oh, well, yeah. THESE kids lived in a filthy house so they needed to be taken away. But that really isn't the story here. The story is what the CA Supreme Court decided:
The ruling permits counties to remove children in such cases even if the child's death was not caused by criminal negligence or abuse. Social welfare agencies also are not required to show that the fatal conduct posed a risk to the surviving children, the court said.
California is saying that we should open the door wider to those DBQ calls "incompetent morons." This is giving the government "just another way to do it."
There are so many other paths the social workers could have taken. They could have found homes for some of the other 20 people living there, making it easier to keep the place clean. They could have worked with the dad, helping him deal with grief and housecleaning. Taking his children away should be done in matters of criminal neglect--this dad was doing things poorly but not criminally.
Social services will be happy that the court made their jobs easier--and social workers often play God, shifting families around to suit the social workers' sense of what should be. PLUS, who said the place was filthy? Whose standard of "filthy" are we using? I don't believe everything i read. And as far as those rotten teeth? I work with a man whose lives in a nice house--not filthy--and his little boy needed some bad teeth pulled. That isn't evidence of criminal neglect.
I am glad there are some good socworkers out there. It is possible, maybe even likely, that this father needed some help. I am quite sure, though, that he did NOT need his children taken away.
The only long-term answer to this is to make sure that bureaucrats find actions like this hazardous to their health.
California requires that paints containing earth pigments (dirt, basically) to be labelled as carcinogens, because there might be some silica in there!
That's right, natural minerals are incapable of causing cancer. . . .
Asbestos?! Damn, forgot about that one.
It's not that terrible things didn't happen, they did, but nobody would blame people for accidents.
Gee since the good ol' days (1980) when kids were permitted to stand on the front seat and seat belts were for pussies, <a href= 'http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/pl08021/fig7_5.cfm".the death toll has only dropped by 20% while the fatality (fatalities per passenger mile) rate has dropped by almost 50%.</a>
Freedom is worth 10,000+ lives a year!
When I grew up, I don't recall a single kid being hurt because of lack of a kids seat. It may have happened, but I never met anyone who it has happened to.
In other words, you have never met anyone who was killed in a car accident when they were young. Not really very surprising.
I have to agree with DBQ and Cedarford, (has hell frozen over?) the kids were living in a filthy hovel with a whole slew of people. Environment rife for sexual abuse, physical abuse and neglect. HOWEVER, the parents should be given the opportunity to improve their living conditions and prove they can be responsible, to regain placement of their children.
Environment rife for sexual abuse, physical abuse and neglect.
Oh, please. Take the kids away because the parent was criminally negligent, maybe... but take them away because your imagination is running away with you?
Oh, I know. It's only children's lives we mess with.
No, wait! We do this FOR the children.
I'm so confused.
Oh I know Prarie Wind, if we ignore it it will all just go away.
They're ONLY children after all.
"AllieOop said...
Oh I know Prarie Wind, if we ignore it it will all just go away.
They're ONLY children after all."
If only all children could find their way to the nirvana that is fostercare children everywhere would be safe. Let's not acknowledge either path has risks, let's just pretend anyone with a different opinion wants to ignore the problem. Then we can go about our life both woefully ignorant and smugly superior. That's so much better.
Marshal, no one thinks being in foster care is Nirvana. If you think their living conditions as described were better than foster care, temporarily, then you are being unrealistic.
I agree with the ruling in this specific case, but not the court's broader interpretation that wholly expands state power.
If the child is transported without a car seat and dies . . .
What's the difference between that and the sibling of a child who is injured in an accident and lives? Or a sibling of a child in an accident who is not injured? Or a sibling of a child who is not in an accident and gets to the destination safely?
The level of negligence is precisely the same in each instance. Only bad luck makes the outcome different.
Therefore, if California can justify taking a sibling because the child is killed, they can just as easily justify taking a child away just for failure to use a car seat.
Is failure to use a safety improving child restraint bad judgment? Of course? Is it negligent? Perhaps? Should it be punished in some way (like a fine?) Again, you can make a decent case for it.
But the state taking away a child because a parent has been negligent or showed bad judgment? Even good parents screw up and make mistakes. The state should be separating parents who do from their children?
Can we stop this insanity now please?
Half the progressives are creating new laws to "protect", while the other half are "rehabilitating" the poor sods who fell into their trap in the first place.
Get OFF the seesaw!
It was never designed to be a perpetual motion machine.
If we follow this analysis to its logical conclusion, then we must acknowledge that the government is wholly unqualified to care for human beings. It has a record of losing them by the millions, from conception to grave. That is in addition to effecting progressive corruption of individuals and the society within which they live, and normalizing behaviors which engender evolutionary dysfunction. It represents a progressive effort to denigrate individual dignity and devalue human life. The government is the last institution to pass judgment on anyone before its own mortal and fallible members.
Palladian,
Re the 2nd Amendment: First New York, now California? You really should get out a bit more, other states that are still part of the Land of the Free have a totally different outlook on firearms, and about whether the lower echelons of the military would be eager to start shooting at their moms, dads, and siblings.
This reminds me of the scene in the Wizard of Oz when the nasty, soon-to-be Wicked Witch demands that Toto be taken from Dorothy, and poor Aunty Em has to accede to the Demands of the Law even as she sees the gross inhumanity of it all. It was a wonderful cinematic moment, anticipating all of the excesses of the bureaucratic State, where the rules are set by the well-meaning, socially certified Experts for the presumed betterment of lesser folks.
If the idea of taking away a grieving family's kids strikes you as excessive, you rae well on your way to rejecting the modern Leviathan in all its oppressive intrusiveness.
My nephew is an only child. I will not take him ANYWHERE. My life would be OVER if anything happened, I don't care how not-my-fault it was.
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