- Taxpayers on hook: “N.J. boy left blind and brain-damaged after being beaten by father awarded $166M by jury” [Newark Star-Ledger]
- “Psychic Love Spell Center stole my money, lawyer alleges in lawsuit” [Houston; ABA Journal]
- “You can’t win these suits… Move on with your life.” Good advice for someone falsely accused of rape? [Roxanne Jones, CNN]
- Critical look at California judge’s lead paint ruling [Daniel Fisher/Forbes, earlier here, here]
- $6 check and apology over “F-word”: “Pub owner’s sarcastic response to Starbucks cease-and-desist letter goes viral” [ABA Journal]
- Suburb doesn’t want to accept public transit, but feds force its hand by use of controversial disparate impact theory [Dayton Daily News]
- Randy Barnett: libertarianism as a vehicle for moderation, toleration and social peace [Chapman Law Review/SSRN; one of my favorite academic papers from last year]
Posts Tagged ‘Child Protective Services’
Crime and punishment roundup
- Is there mens rea in the tainted-cantaloupe prosecution? [Politico, Marler-backed Food Safety News]
- “Some unanswered questions about private prison quotas” [Paul Gowder, Concurring Opinions]
- “Smoke A Joint, Lose Your Kids” [Radley Balko]
- Senate “Stand Your Ground” hearing postponed [earlier, and check out our new stand your ground tag];
- “From Streaking to Possible Sex Offender to Tragedy” [Free-Range Kids, Reason; related on sex offender registries, Jacob Sullum, ABA Journal]
- Also related: New app for anonymous denunciation, courtesy of the feds: sure, what could go wrong? [Free-Range Kids, FireDogLake]
- Florida prosecutors consider seeking death penalty for pain doctor whose customers overdosed [Sentencing Law, Broward Palm Beach New Times]
September 23 roundup
- Drunk driver leaves road, hits power pole, Washington high court allows suit against property owner to proceed [Lowman v. Wilbur, PDF]
- State attorneys general pressure clothing maker to drop t-shirts with drug names [ABA Journal, related earlier]
- More transparency needed in Child Protective Services [Reason TV] One lawyer’s critique of CPS [Laurel Dietz, Straight (Vancouver)]
- While aspiring to nudge us into more farsighted financial practices, government has trouble staying out of dumb bond deals itself [Coyote, and more (Detroit)]
- You can care about safety but still think some speed limits are set too low [Canadian video on Jalopnik]
- Trial lawyers aim to extend to Indiana their Idaho victory over “Baseball Rule” on spectator liability [NWIT, earlier here, here, here, etc.]
- New “fair-housing” assessment and planning process propels federal government into social engineering [IBD editorial via AEI Ideas, HUD]
Mom ate poppy seed dressing, state holds baby for 75 days
Some folks think that by posting so many stories of public agencies doing horrible things, I’m improperly undermining confidence in the government we must all depend on. Every time I try to taper off, however, I seem to run into a story like this. [Eugene Volokh]
Great moments in child protective services
“State Seizes Two-Year-Old Child From Parents Because They Smoked Pot, Child Dies in Foster Care” [Rockdale, Texas; Ed Krajewski, Reason] On the propensity of some local authorities to seize kids in marijuana cases, see this report last year on one California county.
Parents check infant out of hospital against medical advice, CPS swoops down
They were seeking a second opinion on whether the baby needed heart surgery, and didn’t trust the care they were getting from Sutter Memorial Hospital in Sacramento, so parents Anna and Alex Nikolayev went over to Kaiser Permanente to get a second opinion. Police and Child Protective Services then showed up at their house to seize five-month-old Sammy. “A judge ordered Monday that the child be moved to Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto, a decision which the Nikolayevs consider a win,” and also ordered that they obey all medical advice. [KSL, Today, Good Morning America (auto-plays)]
Police and prosecution roundup
- Tsarnaev case: Orin Kerr on how the public often miscontrues Miranda rights, and on how courts decide when house-to-house police searches are proper.
- Two-month-old falls on patio and hurts head; then begins Minneapolis family’s encounter with Child Protective Services [Free-Range Kids]
- Dilatory criminal lawyer in Bronx: “Courts in Slow Motion, Aided by the Defense” [NYT via Legal Ethics Forum]
- Former Monster exec imprisoned on backdating charge: if you’re making it in the business world, inform yourself about criminal law [Alex Cohen, Atlas; related Fox Business video] “Ira Stoll on the Compliance Boom” [Reason]
- The Senator from Doonesbury disappoints again: Liz Warren blasts GOPer as soft on legal pot [Jesse Walker, @radleybalko] “A Heartbreaking Drug Sentence of Staggering Idiocy” [Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic]
- Why does Arizona keep trying to put Debra Milke to death on the word of a multiply perjurious cop? [Popehat]
- Top cop’s $400K disability deal was part of the sleaze-scape in Bell, Calif. [Tim Cavanaugh, City Journal, earlier]
A Letting Kids Walk Around Legal Defense Fund
Someone needs to organize one pronto, to judge by stories like this one from Ohio, where parents say they need pro bono help against a Child Protective Services attempt to seize custody of their six year old daughter for “neglect” that appears to include letting her walk around the neighborhood [Free-Range Kids, Shackford]
P.S.: Another story from Australia last year; and a happier one from Canada.
“15 Mid-Century Modern Dream Homes that will Kill Your Children”
Floating staircases, indoor rock formations, open firepits, moss-slicked ledges: if you try to raise a family in a Mid-Century Modern home, don’t be surprised if someone calls Child Protective Services on you. [Projectophile]
“Smothered by safety”
Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids is the guest essayist at Cato Unbound. Excerpt:
..any time a politician, principal, or bureaucrat wants to score points, he or she lets us know that kids are even more precious—and endangered—than we thought….
How far has society gone in dreaming up new dangers to protect our children from? Until you take a step back and look at all the new laws and regulations, you probably have no idea….
Over the summer, according to the Manchester, Connnecticut Patch, a local mom was charged with “risk of injury to a minor and failure to appear after police say she allowed her seven-year and 11-year old children to walk down to Spruce Street to buy pizza unsupervised.” This was a walk of half a mile….
…in the “real world,” stranger abductions are so rare that if for some reason you actually WANTED your child to be kidnapped by a stranger, do you know how long you’d have to keep your child outside, unattended, so that statistically the abduction would be likely to happen?
The answer is about 750,000 years, according to author Warwick Cairns. And after the first 100,000 years or so, your kid isn’t even cute anymore. …
At the same time, there is a parallel process going on the regulatory world, with bureaucrats looking ever more intently for ever less likely dangers, on the grounds that kids can never be safe enough. This explains things like the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recall of a line of children’s jackets last year because the elastic waistbands had toggles on it “that could become snagged or caught in small spaces or doorways, which poses an entrapment hazard to children.”
Yes, it’s true: Those toggles could snag. Does that make them inherently more dangerous than, say, pigtails that could get caught in a door, or a charm bracelet that could get snagged on an electric window? I’m just free-associating products and problems here, because that’s what it feels like the CPSC does, too.
In the discussion, Skenazy is joined by Anthony Green, James A. Swartz and Joel Best.