This article follows one of my early civil cases. My eyes were opened when I was appointed to represent a young mother whose parental rights were about to be taken from her.

SECRETS AROUND THE CORNER

Back in 1986. I was appointed by a judge to represent a young mother in a case where the state sought to terminate her constitutionally protected parental rights to her two year old son. At that point, I was one year out of law school and hungry for litigation experience of any kind. I'd been doing insurance defense, antitrust, and all sorts of other business litigation that had nothing to do with personal constitutionally protected rights and everything to do with money. I was a young lawyer, proud of my record in the civil courts, and honored when one of the local judges called to tell me he was appointing me to represent a parent in a case involving the most personal kind of rights. I was quite excited about the opportunity to stretch my talents and try something new.

Then I met my client. It was definitely an eye-opening experience for me.

I worked in a very high end law firm where all of our clients were business people who would never see the inside of what we called "kiddie court," which was my destination for my parental rights case. I was about to go from the rarefied existence of a blue stocking law firm to the unwashed masses that inhabited the dependency courts. In those days, dependency judges didn’t even have lawyers in front of them most of the time. The cases were presented to the judges by local social workers until they got to the point where the State was about to terminate parental rights completely. At that point, a lawyer would come down from the state headquarters for the agency to represent the State and the judge would appoint a local lawyer to represent the parent. The child had no representation at all unless a guardian ad litem lay person was appointed in the case, which didn’t happen very often.

One afternoon our beautiful young receptionist Carole Ann buzzed me and whispered, "Jerri, you better get out here---please." Carole Ann and I had a very good relationship. I always tried to make friends with all of the secretaries and clerical help, with everybody in the office. I could tell Carole Ann was quite upset about something.

I wandered out to the lobby, not knowing what to expect. And there she was in all of her glory, my little girl mother of a client, TM.

I could see immediately why Carole Ann was a little nervous. My client was a fourteen year old girl, and she was sitting on the lap of a forty year old man, making out right there in the reception room. When she stood and turned around, I saw that she had a square hole cut out of the back of her pants that appeared to have no purpose except easy access on the corner. There was nothing but flesh underneath. It was quite startling to see.

I immediately discerned that probably this was a case I would lose---and, in fact, probably a case I should lose. Oh, don't get me wrong. There were about a million reasons why T.M. was the way she was, and many of them were not her fault but the fault of a permanently broken child dependency system. But it was clear immediately that my client, T.M., wasn’t equipped for or capable of or even seriously desirous of being a mother to the little boy, Q.M.

T.M. hadn't even seen her child since he was born two years before. She’d been addicted to drugs and probably starving throughout her pregnancy. Q.M. had been born prematurely and addicted to drugs because of his mother’s use during pregnancy. The very sweet tempered little boy had lived with the same foster parents
since he left the hospital after his birth. He’d been in such bad shape that the doctors had expected his developmental progress to be slow, but the foster parents had given him such good care that he was developed appropriately for his age. He was thriving with the people he knew as his parents.

Q.M.’s recognition of his foster parents as his mom and dad wasn’t caused just because he was living with them. T.M. had been given visitation rights from the beginning, but she had never exercised them. None of her relatives had expressed an interest in having Q.M. live with them. The first interest she'd shown in taking responsibility for her child was after she was served with the petition for termination of her parental rights.

In addition to all of these problems, T.M. didn’t have a permanent place to live. She’d run away from the relatives she’d lived with and was living at the time temporarily with a sister. She’d been in and out of juvenile delinquency courts charged with a plethora of minor criminal offenses including theft and misdemeanor assault. It seemed apparent that she was also engaging in prostitution to support her drug habit. The guy she’d arrived at my office with was gone before I finished talking with her. She said he was just a ride, and that she was on her way back to the corner. I thought she was probably referring to an area known for drug sales and prostitution.

I talked with T.M. about the possibility of consenting to termination. It seemed like the right thing to do for both her and the baby. She couldn’t take the baby with her living situation and wasn’t equipped to take care of a child that continued to need extra care because of things that happened during her pregnancy. She was adamant that she wanted her baby. It was the only thing in life that meant anything to her. I felt like she saw him as a valuable possession instead of a real thing that would make her change her lifestyle. I talked with her about the things she’d have to change to give the child a home, but she didn’t hear me. She’d already made up her mind. This little girl who’d been turned into a bitter lonely woman before she stopped being a child wanted something to call her own.

It was heart breaking, but I was a lawyer, not a social worker. I couldn’t do anything but try my best for her in court. I might not believe my client was making the right choice, but I’d counselled her on the difficulty of her case and she was sure she wanted to go to court. I would do what I could for her there.

So I did what I had to do. I looked for a way to help her have a chance. It was tough. She'd never visited the child, and he was bonded to his foster parents. It was very clear that his best interest would be served by allowing him to stay where he was, but I felt strongly about my responsibility to her so I kept looking for something that would save the day.

It was a very grim day indeed. A fourteen year old mother who'd given birth at twelve, she was also a convicted prostitute with a drug habit and nowhere to live. She'd run away from her grandparents' home several times and then from foster homes as well. She was literally on the streets. It was not looking good---in fact it was looking impossible.

Then I found my ace in the hole, a sister who was twenty-four with two children of her own. T.M. gave me the sister's name as a witness. When I talked with her, the sister said she would allow T.M. to live with her. This possibility gave me something to offer as evidence that T.M. could make the changes necessary to give the child a home.

I went to see the sister at her apartment. It was in one of the most drug infested neighborhoods in town, one where shootings regularly occurred. She lived there because her apartment was low income and she was disabled with two children. It was the best she could do.

I liked the sister immensely. More than that, I trusted her. She was a strong mother and I believe she would do everything in her power to give her sister and nephew a chance.

The apartment was spotless, and the refrigerator filled with healthy, although inexpensive, food. There were two bedrooms, one for the children and one where she, T.M., and the baby could sleep. She told me that she and a few other mothers who lived nearby had formed a support group. They worked together to at least attempt to keep drug activity of their area of the apartment complex. They helped each other protect all of the children living around them. They shared resources and tried to help each other in any way they could.

She gave me some hope for T.M. My case was her and the plan to have T.M. move in with her.

I lost.

T.M. was arrested for battery right after the trial and hauled away to jail in handcuffs. She was crying and attempting to pull away from the deputies even though they were behaving appropriately without any use of undue force. Even if they didn’t want to, they had no choice with a judge and a lawyer watching them as they took her away. She probably got a resisting arrest charge added on though. She was kicking pretty hard.

I drove my star witness, the sister, home after the trial. Even though I knew the little boy was in a better place, I was sad for my client and her sister.

About halfway to her apartment, the sister began to cry. She tearfully turned to me and said, “I know what you must think of my sister, but she’s so young and really never had any chance.”

I was sympathetic. That seemed to open the floodgates.

She sobbed as she began to tell me things that she’d hidden inside for so long.

Once she opened up, she explained that all of her twelve siblings had been placed by the State with their grandparents after being removed from their alcoholic mother's care. She said they all were initially happy to leave their mother because they'd starved with her. She was drunk all day and brought different men home at night. They hoped being wuith the grandparents would be better, but it wasn't.

She continued to sob as she told me all of them were raped by her grandfather by six or seven years old. She said they were frequently punished by whippings with a piece of rebar, which is an iron rod used by builders when pouring concrete. Her grandfather kept the rebar by his chair for punishment purposes. On Friday nights, the children were pushed out the front door and told not to come home until they could bring some money to him. Most of her siblings started very early to help drug dealers or sell their bodies to make money to eat. All of them had been left to fend for themselves if they didn’t bring in some cash for their grandfather each weekend. They would be locked out of the house and left to sleep on the front porch.

Obviously, I was horrified.

I was a little upset that she waited until after the trial to tell me all of this. I could have used it to bolster my case that T.M. should be given another chance. I promised the sister that I’d appeal the judge’s decision, and I did. The appellate court affirmed the trial court and that was the end of any chance for T.M. to bring Q.M back into her life.

This was one of those cases that I didn’t really mind losing in a way. Let's face it, the baby was really better off with the way things turned out. I know this to be true because I know he was successful in school and cared for by loving parents as the years went by. My county was a small place back then, a rural place where secrets at the courthouse are few and far between.

At the courthouse, you could always keep track of what was going on in other people's lives, especially those who'd been part of the system. My little client T.M. went on to have six more children by the time she was twenty-one, all of them taken from her by the state.

The one thing I could do for T.M. and her sister and her other siblings was to make sure that no other children ever go to live in the grandfather’s house. I made absolutely sure that never happened.

I talked to the sister and told her I would sue the state if any child was placed with her grandparents. All she had to do was call me and I’d be there. I also asked her permission to tell the State about what the grandfather had done to all of those siblings over the years. She agreed and promised she’d call if it ever happened.

I then called the state headquarters and the local social workers and told them all the stories. I told them I would be suing them if any child was placed in that house again.

They actually were about to place T.M.’s youngest brother there. They did not. And, to the best of my knowledge, they’ve never placed another child with that grandfather again. I was told that the youngest brother, the one I caused to be placed somewhere other than the grandparents' home, graduated from high school and was headed for college a few years later.

Maybe the saddest part of this story happened about ten years later. One morning, I was in my office drinking my first cup of coffee and reading the papers. I saw a front page news article about a young woman who had been picked up by three men at a corner where crack cocaine was sold. After she performed sexual acts with the men who picked her up, they poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. They left her beside the road, still on fire, burning and crying. She was alive, but hospitalized with horrible debilitating burns all over her body.

It was T.M., the girl who never had a chance.

Back then, in the late eighties, people didn't talk much about child abuse. It was something that happened behind closed doors. I learned during the next few years that there were horrible secrets all over my county, and all of those around me. I was offered a contract to represent the State in cases that were complex or where parental rights were at stake. My eyes were opened to the horror that many of our citizens suffered in the privacy of the home. I can remember telling this story to a men's church group back then. They were in utter shock that such things were occurring just a few blocks from the site where we sat at a lovely dinner enjoying each other's company.

These experiences of mine definitely impacted my writing. Shadows from the world of dependency or “kiddie” court can be discerned between the covers of my book "Black And White" where trial attorney J.T. Lockman's experiences as a child affect the man he becomes and how he interacts with the world around him. Even more, the horrors hidden from the eyes of the citizens of fictional Lincoln County have an impact on the events that drive the story line of the book.

What I write about is fictional and may seem dramatic. However, the drama is based on the real drama of everyday life that surrounds us every day of our lives.