Legal News
Phila. Public Defenders, Lancaster Co. Foster Parents Hit with $4.5M Judgment in Child Abuse Case
For a period of three-and-a-half years, the children were taken to the basement of the Lancaster County home in which they lived, were told to lie down on a freezer, and were beaten by hand or with objects, according to court papers https://www.law.com/thelegalintelligencer/2018/11/26/phila-public-defenders-lancaster-co-foster-parents-hit-with-4-5m-judgment-in-child-abuse-case/?fbclid=IwAR0ZUqTWgk3_wNqH6AhENR7jdmt9Uuop9oP0qRsLHoLG2eREpuOTjQ9HDWs&slreturn=20190101095057
Read MoreQuick Take: Good and Bad News
Good news: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against counties examining “the genitals of children removed from homes on suspicion of abuse without a court order or consent from their parents.” Bad news: San Diego County had been performing these examinations “even in cases in which sexual abuse was not suspected.”…
Read MorePaid to Pull Children from Their Homes
“The federal government has always paid us only if we pull children from their homes” Crouch is West Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Resources, head of the department of the same name. Last week Crouch spoke to state lawmakers about upcoming changes resulting from the Family First Prevention Services Act, recently passed as part…
Read MoreNew Guidance Protects Student Privacy, Parents’ Rights
New Guidance from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) is bolstering protection for student privacy, while sending a warning to organizations who might abuse the ACT and SAT testing systems for your child’s data. Background Traditionally, students registered and paid for the tests on their own with parental consent. The nature of the privacy relationship…
Read MoreArizona’s New Law
Arizona recently passed a law that limits the situations in which children can be removed from their parents without a court order. https://www.azcentral.com/…/new-law-defines-when…/509555002/ It remains to be seen, though, if the law will indeed help limit needless removals, as this article from last fall explains. https://www.azcentral.com/…/arizona-department-c…/705733001/ Now is the time to continue pushing for parental…
Read MoreThe Law Versus Judge Lyris Younge
Photo from Google.Room 5A of the Philadelphia Family Court is one of those places parental rights go to die. Or it would be, if presiding judge Lyris Younge had her way. “She has the capacity to be a good judge,” one lawyer who has served before her told The Legal Intelligencer for a recent article,…
Read MoreStrip Searches Harm Children
Three-Year-Old Girl Strip Searched Without Parental Knowledge Parental Rights Foundation & Friends File Vital Court Brief This morning the Parental Rights Foundation filed a friend of the court brief (“amicus brief”) with the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in the case of Doe v. Woodard. Our brief provides the court scholarship…
Read MoreNinth Circuit Court Gets It Right
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last week ruled in Demaree v. Pederson that there is no “qualified immunity” for investigators who remove children from a home without a warrant or exigent threat of serious physical harm to the child.This is a welcome decision from a court that had not always been…
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