On June 17, 2021, the Los Angeles Daily Journal published a front-page opinion piece alerting juvenile courts to fundamental flaws in the rules of court and judicial forms for a California child welfare transparency law. IPAT Professor Susan Seager and student Benjamin Whittle wrote the opinion piece in the wake of a series of rulings from California juvenile courts that applied incorrect legal standards to clinic client Garrett Therolf’s petitions to unseal the juvenile case files of deceased children.
Garrett is a journalist with UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program who has extensively covered issues in California’s child welfare system, and his reporting formed the basis for the Netflix docuseries The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez. His reporting relies in part on gaining access to juvenile case files of children who died of suspected child abuse. Over 20 years ago, the California legislature created a different standard to obtain the files of deceased, rather than living, children. But the applicable rules of court and judicial forms have not been updated to reflect the standard, leading juvenile courts astray.
When we started working with Therolf in 2018, we were dismayed to learn that the relevant California court rule and Judicial Council forms are over 20 years out of date. For records of children that have died from abuse or neglect, the legislature has instructed that records “shall be released to the public” and that there is a “presumption” in favor of their release—and courts can only deny a petition for the release of those records if there is a showing by the preponderance of evidence that the records would undermine the safety, protection, or well-being of another child connected to the file. This law has been on the books since 1999 (Cal. Welf. & Inst. Code §827(a)(2)), yet the relevant Rule of Court ignores this standard and incorrectly imposes a “for good cause” standard on all petitions. The same is true for the forms that California courts require petitioners to complete when seeking these records.
It’s not just that both the court rule and the petition form misapply the law. The point is that these errors make it much more difficult to understand how agencies tasked with protecting children did their job—and in so doing, they make it much more difficult to hold them accountable.
The IPAT clinic hopes the opinion piece will provide guidance to juvenile courts until the rules of court and judicial forms have been updated to correctly reflect the law.
Click here to read the opinion piece (subscription required).