Suing DHS – Not As Easy As It Should Be
Posted by sunce on September 25th, 2008
According to Craig Straw, chief deputy in charge of civil rights in the city of Philadelphia’s Law Department, in the last decade, only 67 child-abuse lawsuits were filed against the Department of Human Services. Child-abuse cases are typically filed as civil-rights cases. This is about ten percent of the police-brutality cases filed in the same period, and a tiny fraction of the over 1,600 lawsuits filed against the city in fiscal year 2008. Of those 67 child-abuse lawsuits, 16 were settled with payouts totaling $2 million, 7 remain open and 44 were dismissed without payment.
The case Danieal Kelly serves as a perfect example. Kelly who had been in the care of DHS and a private contractor hired by the agency, who had cerebral palsy, died in August 2006, when she was 14 years old, suffering from severe malnutrition and bedsores.
According to Shaw, the reason so few cases are filed against the authorities is that ”these are hard cases to win. A plaintiff has to prove that DHS is accountable for abuse or a death caused by someone else, such as a parent or foster parent.”
A sad example is that of Porchia Bennett, in which the estate of a 3-year-old girl who died of multiple beatings, asphyxiation and malnutrition claimed that a DHS worker failed to act on her behalf. In 2003, the case was dismissed.
According to some experts, another possible reason there are so few child-abuse cases, is that the victims are too young to sue and the guilty parties are often the parents. In the absurdly paradoxical circumstance of the Danieal Kelly case, the parents who are being blamed for her neglect were the ones who initially filed suit.
During the same ten year period in Philadelphia, there were 652 lawsuits alleging excessive force by members of the police. While Shaw did not have figures on how many of these cases were settled and/or thrown out, he said that the city paid $13.3 million to litigants.
According to Harvey Rice, first deputy city controller, the largest settlement in the last decade in a child civil-rights case in the last 10 years was a $1 million payout.
Rice described other hair-raising examples of ineptitude and neglect of DHS which is supposed to care for the young people who are its often unfortunate charges:
An 8-year-old girl identified in court records as T.J. was assaulted by John Aloysius Lyles III, a convicted bank robber, whom DHS had considered a “good caregiver”. T.J. contracted HIV after the assault:
In 1995, 4 year old M.B., was raped by a man living in the home of her foster mother working for Women’s Christian Alliance, which received children placed through a contract with DHS. The city settled with M.B.’s aunt in 2003 for $500,000. The aunt was awarded an additional $2.8 million in a federal suit against the alliance.
In 1999, a 3-year-old boy was found naked and battered with a broken leg in the basement of his Port Richmond house. His godparents were awarded $275,000. The boy’s mother, Andrian Huymaier, was sentenced to 15 to 34 years for child abuse.
The boy’s attorney, Patricia Hoban who a personal injury lawyer in Center City in addressing the issue of monetary compensation for children who suffer this type of abuse, explained, “Children can never be fully compensated for injuries inflicted by adults. A child’s innocence is taken, and then you throw some dollars at him and say, here, this is to make up for all the shortcomings.”
She said, “In cases like these, an attorney has to show that DHS consistently did not follow normal procedures.
Leonard Fodera, a Center City trial lawyer, who represented the aunt in the M.B. case added, “You can’t go forward with the rogue-employee theory — that one person at DHS was acting outside the norm. You must prove that maltreatment was widely known and ignored.”
In 1993, DHS paid $1.6 million to the estates of four foster children who were killed when a fire destroyed the home of their foster parents Rose and Hubert Artis, in 1989. The Artis’ also paid $1.6 million. Lawyers for the city held DHS accountable in this case for not following its own regulations for foster home inspections.
In 1990, the A.C.L.U. filed a class-action suit against DHS on behalf of several children, including Baby Neal, an infant who was born in 1990 with syphilis and with cocaine in his system, alleging that abused and neglected children were systematically denied their civil rights. In response, DHS promised to institute improvements and allow monitoring by private advocates for two years.
Still, it is difficult to determine if lawsuits make a difference in the way DHS operates.
According to Frank Cervone, who, in addition to serving as executive director of Support Center for Child Advocates, a program of volunteer lawyers working for abused children, was an attorney on the Baby Neal case, “We tried to fix neglect in a DHS system which is designed to remedy neglect of family and parents. In 1990, DHS didn’t know where the kids they were supposed to be caring for were, and their case loads were dramatically high. As a result of the lawsuit, caseloads were reduced and DHS workers were better trained.”
”At the same time”, he added, “lawsuits tend to make an agency defensive, which can hinder efforts to self-correct.”
Leonard Fodera believes that under the new commissioner, DHS was seriously trying to be the best they can.
September 25th, 2008 at 8:08 am
It’s like one big team of corrupt people designed to cover for each other. It should be much easier to sue lying social workers, rubber stamping judges and anybody else involved. If the system were based on honesty, they would all be sued.