Family Defense

by Diane Redleaf
Editorial from the Chicago Tribune
July 13, 2006

Just as Hurricane Katrina gave middle-class Americans a view of poverty they were not accustomed to seeing, the recent case of the six-year old boy left by his mother gives happy-go-lucky Taste of Chicago goers a small taste for the fundamental failures of our state's child welfare system. That system continues to fail to address homelessness, abuse, and the basic needs of children for stability in their care. It failed the boy's mother by placing her in an abusive adoptive home. It has failed to do more than put bandages over the underlying problems of poverty and neglect that leave single-parent families and especially parents raised by the child welfare system itself-- at high risk for permanently unstable lives. Now the State s immediate solution prosecuting the mother for child endangerment and potentially locking her for a good while in a jail cell promises to turn a heartbreaking story into another longer-term child welfare system failure.

May 2006

"Your obligation to your clients extends to saving their lives." So said my professor Tony Amsterdam in an interview published in the Stanford Lawyer that I would read and reread from time to time after I graduated from law school. I don't represent people on death row, though my clients' cases involve life and death struggles. I'm a family defense lawyer, a strange and nearly unique kind of lawyer who tries to stop the State from seizing children from innocent parents. I'm also a vanishing form of a lawyer--a social policy litigator and legal services refugee, still working to compel state agencies to live up to their constitutional and statutory obligations.