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Random photo from
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THE FAMILY COURT PROJECT HAS COME TO A CLOSE.
Effective 6/1/08, Family Court Chronicles has become inactive (announcement), and
no new information will be added. The page below is retained for
archive purposes, but it could be out of date. Upon request,
the webmaster will
continue to correct significant errors and will consider
removing information that is destructively obsolete.
(Email: FamilyCourtGuy (at) gmail.com) Glenn Campbell's other websites
remain active:
KilroyCafe.com,
RoamingPhotos.com
and
Facebook
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2/28/07:
Smoking fines enter debate: Senator offers idea for measure to stop tobacco use by teens
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/ev)
Entities:
Senate Bill 14 (2007) (subject),
legislature (proposed actions by) - Linkable
Entry
CARSON CITY -- Legislators came up with a solution Tuesday to teenagers who smoke in public -- fine them.
Sen. Mike McGinness, R-Fallon, proposed fining minors $10 if they are caught smoking.
The fine would increase to $20 for the second offense and then $30 for the third offense. On the fourth offense, the youngster would be placed under supervision by the juvenile court system.
Judges would be given the option of ordering offenders to perform community service.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Mark Amodei, R-Carson City, said California fines minors $75 when they are caught smoking. They also must perform community service.
| Comments from the Webmaster |
This topic was the subject of one of our newsletters:
Smoking Kills Brain Cells.
The latest proposal renders the bill relatively
harmless but probably won't accomplish the intended goal.
However, we do have a suggestion that might help.
If the
bill were to pass as now reformulated, what would probably happen
in Clark County
is that no entity would bother issuing the
initial cititions; therefore, three citations
would never accumulate and there wouldn't be any impact
on the juvenile court.
If anyone did issue the citations, this would fall
in the realm of an "unfunded mandate,"—an expense
imposed upon the county by state law—because the $10
fine wouldn't cover the county's cost of processing it.
The $10 fine isn't much to a smoker, given that cigarettes
themselves can approach $5/pack. And many kids won't even bother
to pay the fine because there is no credible threat if they
don't. What are we going to do if they don't pay, throw them
in juvi? Take away their drivers licenses?
Either of these options are impractical for such a trivial
offense.
Word will get out quickly among teenagers: The $10 fine
is a joke, and you don't even have to pay it.
We would actually be more comfortable with the $75 fine like
California has. That is a fairly significant amount to
today's teenagers, and the income to the county (from the
youths who pay) might support
the costs of writing the citation (but certainly not the
costs of smoking treatment).
Smoking is such a huge problem among Las Vegas teens that
anything the government does is going to be mostly symbolic.
We might not be able to address the whole smoking problem,
but what we can address is the ostentatious display
of smoking. What offends society is teenagers openly
smoking in public places and "blowing smoke" in the face of
authority.
This can be addressed with an "open smoking" law for teens,
similar to local prohibitions against drinking in public.
The public drinking laws don't say anything about alcohol abuse
or addressing it,
only that you can't drink in certain places.
Similarly, if our new law only says that teenagers can't smoke in
public, we aren't entangling the government in the problem of
smoking treatment. We aren't trying to address tobacco possession
or what teenagers choose to do in private, only what they choose
to display in public.
Under our formulation of the law,
a law enforcement officer could write a $75 citation to a minor
seen openly smoking in a public place — and that's the
end of it. If the teen does it again, he gets another $75 citation, and
another and another. It's not really much different than
littering.
The $75 fine might probably support the cost of writing the
ticket and the minimal enforcement required from juvenile
probation intake.
There is no need for involvement of the juvenile court, unless the
minor contests the charges, in which case he would be entitled
to the same kind of due process as a littering charge.
Probation could have the power to waive the $75 fine if the minor
shows evidence of attending, at his own expense, a smoking cessation
program.
If the teen refuses to pay the fine or continues to accumulate
citations, there would be no real repercussions for the youth unless he
comes before the juvenile court on another matter. In that
case, the smoking fines could be added to the restitution
he must pay on his primary charge.
It is important that the court not be required to cure the
addiction, because this is beyond its ability or resources.
The court's only
concern is stopping the minor's smoking in public.
It could work!
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 2/28/07:
I-Team: Judge Rules in High-Profile Child Abuse Case
(KLAS-TV/gk)
Entities:
Selena Celebi (victim) - Linkable
Entry
In August of 2006, police began investigating alleged abuse after Selena suffered a fractured skull and nearly died. They found she'd also had a broken arm, bite marks and bruises all over her body, had been punched in the jaw, and had her hair cut off. A systematic pattern of abuse, authorities said.
The girl's mother had moved in with wealthy Iranian businessman Chris Hashemi. The mother, Samaneh Rezai, blamed the girl's injuries on accidents and falls and a, quote, "bad house where things seemed to go wrong for some reason."
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2/27/07:
[National]
Making a choice: Project prevention pays addicts to take long-term birth control
(Las Vegas Sun/Abigail Goldman)
Entities:
Drug Abuse (related to) - Linkable
Entry
Today Project Prevention pays active drug addicts and alcoholics $300 to get on long-term birth control; not pills, but shots, IUDs and tubal ligations. For men, vasectomies.
In nine years the nonprofit organization has paid 2,080 people, the vast majority being women, including 22 from Nevada.
And don't think Project Prevention founder Barbara Harris is going to apologize for her agenda: to cut the number of babies born to drug addicts or alcoholics down to zero.
"Call it a bribe, call it an incentive. Everybody is motivated by money, and drug addicts are no different," Harris said. "It doesn't matter what you call it. What matters is that it's working. It's the best $300 you can spend."
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2/24/07:
Judge's felon friend is now a fugitive: Cecrle skips out on 90-day sentence
(Las Vegas Review-Journal)
Entities:
Steven Jones (mentioned),
Jeanne Winkler (Attorney for Cecrle) - Linkable
Entry
A felon linked through family and finances to a family court judge is on the lam.
A bench warrant was issued this week for Thomas Cecrle, who was supposed to report to the Clark County Detention Center on Wednesday for a 90-day stay. He pleaded guilty last year to attempted possession of methamphetamine.
Cecrle, 49, is a friend and former brother-in-law of Family Court Judge Steven Jones.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
We object to the use of the word "friend" in both the title
and the article. Just because you were associated with someone
in the past does not imply that you are a "friend" in the present
(indicated by "is").
It's Journalism 101:
If you are going to use an emotion-laden and potentially
damaging word like that, you need to
justify it in the body of the text, which the reporter hasn't done.
(The first sentence is actually more accurate: It indicates
the past link without implying a current one.)
It's just more lousy journalism (and dismal editing) from the Rebuke-Urinal™.
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| Review of Everlyse Cabrera's Foster Home |
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2/21/07:
Photos from Yesterday's County Commissioners Meeting
(RoamingPhotos.com/gc)
Photos of a fairly routine County Commissioners meeting on 2/20/07 Entities:
Clark County Board of County Commissioners (photographed),
Virginia Valentine (photographed),
Darryl Martin (photographed),
Elizabeth Macias Quillin (photographed) - Linkable
Entry
Don Burnette, the county's Chief Administrative Officer.
The hot topics of this meeting were a disease outbreak at the
county animal shelter, the financial problems of the county hospital
and the departure of a commissioner. The only (non-consent-agenda) topics that concerned
DFS were (a) the appointment of four people to a citizen's advisory
panel for Family Services (We don't know who.) and (b) the allocation of
about $1.5 million for the "capital costs" associated with taking on
new DFS workers under the Safe Futures Plan (for computers, desks, etc.)
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2/20/07:
Maple Star: A For-Profit Foster Care Agency
(Family Court Chronicles/gc)
Entities:
Maple Star Nevada (subject),
Olive Crest (mentioned),
fostercare (mentioned),
DFS (mentioned below),
St. Judes Ranch for Children (mentioned below) - Linkable
Entry
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
We received an anonymous letter from someone in
DFS asking us to look
into Maple Star, a private foster care agency that contracts with
the county. The writer says that Maple Star is part of a huge
profit-makingi
conglomerate and is making "obscene" amounts of money providing
foster care placements to the county — at a time when the county cannot pay standard foster
parents a reasonable amount.
In this blog entry we describe the issues and do some basic
research, but we don't come to any conclusions.
The combination of "foster care" and "profit-making" is
automatically distressing to us. We had always assumed that
Maple Star, like a similar agency
Olive Crest, was a
non-profit agency. If it is not, it raises some preliminary concerns.
At the least, this information may give prospective foster
parents a means to distinguish Maple Star from other similar
agencies.
Agencies like this are typically used for "therapeutic
foster care" for children requiring a higher level of care
than usual. Since the kids require more care, there is more
support provided for the foster parents via this
intermediate agency. The county pays the intermediate
agency a certain amount per child, and the agency pays the
foster parents a lesser amount. The difference between the
two—you could call it the "mark-up"—is used to fund the
agency's own caseworkers and support programs.
If this agency is a for-profit company, then part of the
mark-up is sent to investors as profit. That's money that
can't be used for support programs. It also gives the
agency an incentive to "squeeze" the mark-up for greater
profit, short-changing services.
This is presumably not a problem in non-profit agencies,
where more of the mark-up is used for services and there is
less incentive to short-change them. In addition,
non-profit agencies can generate their own independent
donations, whereas for-profit agencies cannot. Thus, DFS
can actually get more for the dollar than what they
pay the agency for. (For example,
St. Judes Children's Home,
which provides residential foster care, actually spends
about twice as much on their programs as they receive from
DFS.)
There is an additional risk: If a nonprofit agency is
competing against a for-profit agency for foster parents and
funding, this could draw resources away from the nonprofit agency.
In the limited time available to us at the moment, we did an
internet search to at least confirm that outline of the
organization.
Here is the main website
for Maple Star and Maple
Star Nevada. The website confirms that that agency is
owned by Providence
Service Corporation, a publicly traded company.
Here is the page for Providence's Nevada
Operation. In addition to Maple Star, the company also
runs the Choices drug program, which is the major
drug treatment program for parents involved in the court
system.
We are less concerned about Choices being a for-profit
operation. It is similar to medical business, like any
doctor's office or most hospitals. All of the employees of
Choices are presumably paid, not volunteers, and it is
fairly easy to evaluate performance: people are either cured
of their addiction or they are not, and statistics can measure this.
Foster care is a different matter.
It is inherently a charitable activity, at least from the foster
parents' viewpoint, and it is discomforting to know that
someone is making money from it. This means that the
managers at Maplestar are going to be more worried about the
"bottom line" of their operation rather than the
quality of their product, because this is all that
a publicly traded company ever worries about.
(Privately-held companies can be a little better, since they
tend to take a longer view of profit.)
The pressure of a profit-making company is always to
"squeeze the margin," spending less on services so they
can retain more in profit. Companies like this need
firm regulation, like utilities, and DFS is
certainly in no position to do this at the present time.
We wonder if foster parents recruited by Maple Star
understand that they are contributing to the company's
bottom line, while Olive Crest is purely a charitable
operation.
We don't know where to go with our misgiving.
We are just keeping them in mind.
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2/20/07:
Father describes path out of homelessness: Las Vegas man backs measure to fund housing
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/ev)
Entities:
Homeless (subject) - Linkable
Entry
CARSON CITY -- A one-time homeless Las Vegas father described Monday to legislators how he turned his life around and now is a productive citizen raising a 9-year-old daughter.
"I was a drug addict," James Walker told members of the Assembly Health and Human Services Committee. "I hustled on the street. I made the decision to clean up."
Walker said he could not have made his transformation without help from social service agencies. He joined a line of witnesses who asked legislators to approve Assembly Bill 126, which would appropriate $20 million for housing for homeless.
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 2/19/07:
Lawmakers Seek Accountability in Child Deaths
(KLAS-TV/jh)
Includes video, available for 7 days. Entities:
legislature (hearings before),
leslie (interviewed in video) - Linkable
Entry
For the last year, the Channel 8 I-Team has been reporting on the troubles of Clark County's child welfare system, including a string of deaths of children under their care.
Viewers no doubt remember the heartbreaking stories of children who died while at Child Haven.
The problems at Child Haven and in the Clark County child welfare system are well documented. Children unaccounted for, rooms filled with babies, and workers too stressed and overworked to make a difference.
Monday, during a budget hearing on the welfare department, legislators asked pointed questions about how money was being spent and how much would be enough to make the situation safe for children once again.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
We feel much safer knowing that the "I-Team" is on the case.
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2/19/07:
[National]
Spanking: When parents lift their hands: It's better not to use corporal punishment, researchers agree. But, in fact, people do. Now we're learning the consequences.
(Los Angeles Times/Ben Harder)
- Linkable
Entry
Frequent and impulsive spanking is clearly detrimental, researchers agree. Other kinds of physical punishment, including hitting children with objects, are harmful as well. "Corporal punishment has really serious side effects," says Alan Kazdin, a professor of psychology at Yale University and president-elect of the American Psychological Assn. "Children who are hit become more aggressive."
Yet the mildest forms of spanking have not been proved harmful. "A family that hits once in a while? The research is equivocal about that," Kazdin says.
What the research does show is that spanking is generally no more effective than nonphysical disciplinary techniques in instilling acceptable behavior, that its effects vary from culture to culture and that a greater frequency of spanking increases the risk of negative consequences.
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2/18/07:
New Display Systems for People, Organizations, Cases, Places, Concepts and Articles
(Family Court Chronicles/gc)
- Linkable
Entry
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
Over the past week, we have implemented two new software systems
on this website that we make it easier to access news articles and people records.
In the MediaStream, the change is almost
invisible, but the way we enter and store articles has been
radically changed. Now we can enter and track articles much more
quickly and easily. In the future, we we also be able to more
easily cross-reference articles with people.
In a different area, our People, Organizations and Glossary pages
will all be replaced by a single section that we call the
Entity File. Now, it is very easy for us to
enter people and cross-reference them with other people and
organizations. If you check out any one record, you will see what
we mean.
As a side-effect, we now have a very easy way to display all our
portraits of court people. See our new
Family Court Photo Album.
All of this software is home-grown and came to us in a series of
visions (not enhanced in any way by steriods or illegal drugs).
It may take us a few weeks to carry over all of the data from
our old People and Organizations
pages. When all the records are copied, those pages will vanish.
At that point, we will have maybe 200-300 entities and will be
hungry for more.
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2/18/07:
Court administrator says he has earned every penny of his salary
(Las Vegas Sun/ek)
Entities:
Chuck Short (subject) - Linkable
Entry
Clark County Court Administrator Chuck Short's $172,579 salary in 2006 placed him 43rd among the county's 7,255 employees.
And like the region's other top-paid public workers, Short, relying on familiar arguments - the responsibility is big, the hours long, the staff short - does not view his salary as high.
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 2/16/07:
I-Team: To Protect The Children
(KLAS-TV/cm)
A profile of Metro Police's child abuse and neglect unit. Entities:
Metro (subject) - Linkable
Entry
They are the stories no one wants to hear -- children, abused and neglected, some to the point of death. For an elite team of investigators, those cases are a career, and a calling.
Over the last four months they granted I-Team reporter Colleen McCarty unprecedented access to their world. She now shares it with you.
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2/16/07:
Two students arrested in gun incident
(Las Vegas Review-Journal)
Entities:
Clark County Juvenile Detention Center (booked into),
Clark County School District (arrested by school police at) - Linkable
Entry
Two students were arrested after Clark County School District Police found them trying to bring a handgun onto the Legacy High School campus about 7 a.m. Thursday, said Lt. Ken Young.
The handgun was confiscated and the two students, a 14- and a 16-year-old, were charged with possession of a dangerous weapon on school property, Young said. Their names were withheld by police.
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| Gov. Gibbons in the New York Times |
| Attorney to be Roasted: RSVP |
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2/15/07:
Attorney Tilman to be Roasted Soon?
(Family Court Chronicles/gc)
Entities:
Chris Tilman (subject),
Gerald Hardcastle (mentioned),
Conflict Attorneys for Juvenile Dependency (concerning),
Alan Maimon (predicting upcoming article by),
Juvenile Public Defender (mentioned below),
Clark County Special Public Defender (mentioned below),
Clark County Government (mentioned below),
lerner (mentioned below) - Linkable
Entry
| Comments from the Webmaster |
FROM THE RUMOR MILL:
Word on the street says that the Rebuke-Urinal™ will have an
article in the next few days on the "conflict attorneys" who
practice in the delinquency and abuse/neglect courtrooms at
Family Court. At issue is the huge amount they are costing
the county.
One attorney, Chris
Tilman, is said to have billed the county
$400,000 in a single year.
It's been a while since we've had a public roasting at
Family Court. Usually, it's a judge who gets it, but now
we're going to have an attorney on the spit. (We understand
they are perfectly palatable when smothered in barbeque
sauce and served with white wine, not red.)
A conflict attorney is a private attorney appointed as a
public defender when the normal county-funded public
defender can't handle the case due to a conflict of
interest. For example, if a crime is allegedly committed by
two juveniles, the county Public
Defender's office can handle one of them but not both,
because the two could have different interests (like blaming
each other for the crime). Likewise, in child abuse/neglect,
the Special Public
Defender's Office can represent one parent but not both.
This is when a private attorney is appointed to one of the
parties by the judge or hearing master.
County public defenders are paid a relative pittance in
lawyerly terms, while most private attorneys charge by the hour
at some god-awful rate, which is the county's obligation to pay.
We have long heard grumblings about how the conflict
attorneys are hired—that it is the friends of the
judges and hearing masters who get the gravy. In our
experience, however, all of the conflict attorneys seem
competent and we have no beef so far with how they are doing
their jobs.
The scandal here is that the county spends
two-point-something million dollar a year on conflict
attorneys for abuse/neglect (and probably about the same for
juvenile justice). This number doesn't mean much to the
average bone-headed newspaper reader, but when you say that
one attorney got $400k of that, it becomes more concrete and
inherently scandalous. We wouldn't be upset about
Glen Lerner getting that,
but for a taxpayer-funded "salary," it seems a bit high.
We know Chris Tilman. He's a good egg, and we have no
question that he is giving good representation to his
clients. He gets assigned a lot because he is willing to do
it and is good at what he does. There's also nothing so far
to suggest fraudulent billing. Each bill was approved by
Judge Hardcastle, and
seems reasonable in isolation: roughly $2k per client.
Tilman just got very efficient and racked up some big total
charges. In the process, he made himself a target for the
R-U™.
It is said that Tilman also gave Judge Hardcastle $1000 for
his last reelection campaign about 2½ years ago.
This could result in minor roasting for the judge. The main
onus, however, is on the county. The judiciary just assigns
the case; it is the county's responsibility to pay the bill
and make other arrangements if the bill is getting too high.
(Under Nevada law, the state pays the salary of the judges,
but the county pays for the courthouse and just about
everything in it.) The need for a better contracting system
has been brewing for a while, and county management was
made well aware of it by the judges. It just happens that
two-point-something million doesn't loom big on their $5.9 billion
radar.
The alternative is for the county to contract with law firms
or individual attorneys to represent a certain number of
clients for a fixed fee. This could dramatically bring down
the cost and assure the individual attorneys don't take on
more than a reasonable number of cases. The county has been
moving toward this contract system—but very slowly.
Tilman could become the poster child who speeds up the
process.
Frankly, it's good that the R-U™ is onto this. It is about
time the the paper got off its ass and did some real
independent reporting, even if it isn't Pulitzer material.
In a recent series of articles, they have got all huffy
about "closed cases" in the main courthouse. It's an issue,
but maybe not the multiple-article issue they have blown it
up to be.
What is really happening here is that the Rebuke-Urinal™ and that
other paper (whatever its name is) got severely embarrassed
by last year's L.A. Times exposé on the judges
in our main courthouse. That was real reporting, the
kind you will never get from our local newspapers. Now that
the story has been "legitimized" by the national press, the
R-U™ feels emboldened to clean up the crumbs that the
Times left behind.
The Tilman scandal will probably be another
crumb-cleaning expedition, but at least they're trying to
look journalistic. The Times's (LA & NY) don't come along very
often, and in the meantime, we have to work with what we
got. |
Reader Comments
"It seems to me that Clark County would be a better place with 100 Chris Tilman's. The guy is efficient and charges a fair price to the county. What possible logic could there be cut the workload of such an efficient representative? It seems foolish to farm out jobs simply because one attorney is too good at it." — Anonymous 2/15/07, 4:31pm
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2/15/07:
[National]
Debate Over Children and Psychiatric Drugs
(New York Times)
- Linkable
Entry
Early on the morning of Dec. 13, police officers responding to a 911 call arrived at a house in Hull, Mass., a seaside town near Boston, and found a 4-year-old girl on the floor of her parents’ bedroom, dead.
She was lying on her side, in a pink diaper, the police said, sprawled across some discarded magazines and a stuffed brown bear.
Last week, prosecutors in Plymouth County charged the parents, Michael and Carolyn Riley, with deliberately poisoning their daughter Rebecca by giving her overdoses of prescription drugs to sedate her.
The police said the girl had been taking a potent cocktail of psychiatric drugs since age 2, when she was given a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder, which is characterized by mood swings.
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| U.S. Ranks Low for Children |
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2/15/07:
Woman pleads guilty to killing stepsister's baby: Infant was thrown to floor, fracturing skull
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/kch)
- Linkable
Entry
Kathy Patton explained Wednesday in court that she was tired and on illegal drugs when she arrived at her stepsister's house the morning of Feb. 6, 2006, to baby-sit.
Five-month-old Christian Dircio started crying and wouldn't stop, and there was nothing she could do to comfort him, Patton told District Judge Elizabeth Halverson.
"I just got so frustrated, I just threw him on the floor. I didn't mean to kill him. I didn't mean to," Patton, 29, said through tears.
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 2/15/07:
Group gets youths off streets: More space would help, director says
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/lc)
Entities:
Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth (subject) - Linkable
Entry
Callyce Carroll, 18, never considered himself homeless, even while he was living in his truck.
"I just thought I was the only person in the world in that situation," the man said Tuesday while hanging out at Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth's drop-in center across from UNLV.
Carroll had been homeless, off and on, since he was about 14 years old. He sometimes slept outside or on friends' couches. He worked the odd construction job to earn spending money. For a while, he and several family members managed to rent a downtown motel room.
"It was an unstable environment," he said. "You live day to day. You can't plan ahead because you're worrying about how you're going to eat tonight, where you're going to sleep tonight."...
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 2/11/07:
Jurists seal cases of colleagues: Litigants include relatives of those with ties to court
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/fg)
One of several feature articles on the sealing of civil lawsuits (in the main courthouse, not Family Court). Entities:
Stefany Miley (mentioned) - Linkable
Entry
Litigants whose cases have been sealed by District Court judges include a Clark County Family Court judge....
Clark County Family Court Judge Stefany Miley, her husband, Edward R. Miley and their law firm were sued by a Las Vegas woman just days after Stefany Miley took the bench in January 2005. Attempts to reach the plaintiff, Valerie Carr-Blum, were unsuccessful, and Miley did not return a call placed to her office at Family Court.
The case was sealed and closed Jan. 20 -- exactly a year after the lawsuit was filed. Late last year, the case was assigned to District Court Judge Douglas Herndon.
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2/11/07:
[National]
What irony is, and what it ain't: Sacha Baron Cohen gets it; Alanis Morissette doesn't
(Los Angeles Times/Jon Winokur)
A linguistic discussion of "Irony" - Linkable
Entry
Irony is one of the most misused words in the English language. Much of the confusion comes from the existence of several distinct forms of irony. Verbal irony is the act of saying one thing but meaning the opposite with the intent of being understood as meaning the opposite, as in, "Nice weather we're having" on a rainy day.
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2/10/07:
Case of abused girl now spanning globe: German officials seeking repatriation
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/lkb)
Entities:
Steve Hiltz (mentioned) - Linkable
Entry
A young German girl taken into Clark County protective custody after suffering near-fatal abuse is becoming a point of international contention.
On Friday, German Vice Consul Thomas Scherer joined attorneys representing the 3-year-old's mother and father in Clark County Family Court. Child welfare services in Germany have assumed guardianship of the girl and are now seeking her repatriation.
"What would the U.S. government say if this were a U.S. child being held abroad?" asked Scherer, of the German Consulate in Los Angeles....
But Steve Hiltz, a lawyer with the Children's Attorney Project,
which represents the girl, argued to keep her in the United States. She is still receiving counseling and recovering from her injuries, he said.
Hiltz presented a statement from the girl's physician indicating that she requires additional surgery to repair a shoulder and an elbow.
Most important, Hiltz said, the child has -- for the first time since being victimized in ways that left her with a broken arm, a fractured skull and bruises and bite marks -- finally obtained a measure of security and trust with her foster parents.
"The main thing, to me, is that she's already suffered so much," Hiltz said. "She almost died. Now, she speaks English, she clings to her foster mother, she laughs with them. She's acting like a normal little girl."...
Hiltz said the girl doesn't even recognize photos of her father and can't identify him in a video of them together.
Sullivan set a hearing for Feb. 27.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
It is wonderful that Hiltz is creating an international
incident for us. No really, we love it! We've been saying
for months that Hiltz is an idiot, and now he is proving
it in an international arena. He is nicely illustrating
the problems we have seen all along in the Children's
Attorney Project, namely treating very young children
as though they were adults.
Hiltz can't grasp that he is advocating an international abduction.
In this case, it makes absolutely no difference what the three-year
old tells Mr. Hiltz or whether she is bonding with her
foster parents. She "belongs" to her birth parents in Germany
and is a
citizen of that country. If you are going to violate this principle,
then, as the German representative says, you have to accept
U.S. children being held arbitrarily in other countries.
Hiltz's protestations are not going
to have any end effect under the law—The child
will be
going back to
Germany.—but his position may have delayed the return
and made the whole Las Vegas system look
cruel. It is not the court system's fault, but if it helps us
get rid of Hiltz, we can all afford to take the hit.
Hiltz's boss, Barbara Buckley, has her hands full as Assembly
Speaker in Carson City. We wonder if she'll ever
be smart enough to
sack Hiltz or whether she'll just let the circus go on.
Either way, it's going to be fun to watch.
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2/10/07:
COYOTE SPRINGS DEVELOPMENT: State rejects most of water request
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/hb)
- Linkable
Entry
Over the next 30 to 40 years, powerful Nevada lobbyist- turned-developer Harvey Whittemore wants to create a brand new city in the mostly empty Coyote Springs Valley. His proposal includes 16 golf courses and more than 150,000 homes on 43,000 acres east of U.S. Highway 93.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
We have been following the Coyote Spring development
for a couple of months now. We contend that the
developers are "building a ghost town" in the remote desert
about 50 miles north of Las Vegas.
Here are our photos of the Coyote Springs area from a couple of weeks ago.
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2/10/07:
Accused mother out of coma: Woman booked in stabbing death of daughter, 7
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/bh)
- Linkable
Entry
The mother charged with stabbing her 7-year-old daughter to death was booked into jail Friday after spending six days in the hospital.
Sherri Lynne Love, 46, had been unconscious since taking a large amount of prescription antidepressants immediately after the attack on her daughter and 8-year-old son Feb. 3, police said. She regained consciousness Thursday afternoon....
On the day of the attack, Love was drunk on champagne at her southwest valley home when she killed her daughter, Arabella Moreno, and stabbed her son, Brian Moreno, police said. Love locked herself in a bathroom after the stabbings, took the antidepressants and lost consciousness.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
Probably a mental illness illness. Nevada justice will respond in the
usual manner: 40-years-to-life in prison.
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 2/9/07:
TOBACCO POSSESSION: Juvenile smoking bill opposed: Court officials say Senate bill too burdensome
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/sw)
Recounts a hearing that we attended in Carson City. Entities:
legislature (hearings before) - Linkable
Entry
CARSON CITY -- Officials involved in the juvenile court process told a state Senate panel Thursday that they are not interested in taking on the added cost and burden of supervising minors found in possession of tobacco, as proposed in a bill by Sen. Mike McGinness, R-Fallon.
McGinness introduced Senate Bill 14 on behalf of the Churchill County School District, which wants to stop smoking by teenagers outside the grounds of their schools....
Jason Frierson, representing the Clark County public defender's office, also opposed the bill because of the potential cost and increased workload that would come with enforcement.
He cited a University of Michigan study that found 8.7 percent of eighth graders, 14.5 percent of 10th graders and 21.6 percent of 12th graders reported using tobacco within the previous 30 days.
In Clark County, that would equate to thousands of students that would likely be using tobacco, Frierson said. Even if just a quarter of these were referred to the juvenile court, it would add hundreds of youths requiring supervision and access to programs, he said.
"Clark County's concern isn't that smoking isn't a problem with juveniles," Frierson said. The issue is the added burden to the court system, he said.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
This bill was the subject of our recent newsletter:
SMOKING KILLS BRAIN CELLS ... especially Senator McGinness's.
We were present at the hearing, and our editor was the first to
speak against the bill.
The bill is effectively dead at this point, and it would have
died without our intervention, but it was gratifying to be involved
in kicking it down.
Senator McGinness took our newsletter in good humor. He took issue
mainly with the extra "s" in "McGinness's". We conceded that he
was technically correct: "McGinness'" is proper English. We felt,
however, that we needed to remove any possibility of ambiguity,
hence the extra "s".
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 2/9/07:
I-TEAM: Child Abuse Victim in Eye of International Storm
(KLAS-TV/gk)
Provides more details not in the R-J article. - Linkable
Entry
A three-year-old child abuse victim living in Las Vegas now finds herself at the center of an international tug of war. Friday, a judge denied requests to send the girl back to her native Germany, at least for now.
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2/9/07:
Governor seeking child welfare funds: Budget adds $2.6 million to train caseworkers
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/lkb)
- Linkable
Entry
Gov. Jim Gibbons is seeking legislative support for a $2.6 million plan to better train Nevada's front-line child welfare workers.
His announcement on Thursday drew praise from those who had criticized the omission of training funds in Gibbons' first budget proposal. Gibbons attributed the initial oversight to the lack of time staff had to work with the massive budget draft prepared by his predecessor, Kenny Guinn....
The training money would fund two separate programs for Nevada caseworkers.
The Nevada Training Academy, which is a partnership between the state, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the University of Reno, would give newly hired caseworkers a seven-week program of classroom training, on-the-job exercises and coaching in assessing risks to children in various circumstances.
Caseworkers now on the job also will have a 15-day training course that reviews how to make risk assessments, using data in supervision, documentation requirements and case management.
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2/9/07:
Police saw 'nothing' at house where girl, 7, died
(Las Vegas Sun/ss)
- Linkable
Entry
A top Metro Police official said Thursday that the officers who responded to a domestic disturbance call last weekend at a house where a 7-year-old girl was later allegedly stabbed to death by her mother saw "absolutely nothing" that would have mandated they call Child Protective Services....
Tom Morton, the director of Clark County's Family Services Department, said on "Face to Face" that during the initial police response, Arabella at one point sat in a police cruiser - first with her shoes off before she went to retrieve them - and told them that she didn't want to go to her dad's house....
Morton also defended the police officers' actions. "Simply because she had an altercation with a 14-year-old that resulted in a potentially violent act doesn't necessarily mean that there was a threat of violence to the two younger kids," he said.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
It is really weird that Morton is defending the police in this
case, since it is not his department, and his agency was never called.
It just strikes us as not something a professional administrator
would normally do—like the dog catcher commenting on what the
sewer department is doing.
It seems that Morton has enough on his plate without offering
his opinion on what other departments are doing.
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2/8/07:
Information meeting slated to discuss program for at-risk youth
(Las Vegas Review-Journal)
- Linkable
Entry
The Nevada National Guard and state Department of Education will host an information meeting for parents and teenagers on Project Challenge tonight at the Clark County Probation Center.
The alternative education program is an opportunity for at-risk youth to gain positive, life-building skills and earn another chance to advance to higher education, according to a statement from the Nevada National Guard.
The 17-month education program is open to high school dropouts between ages 16 and 18.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
This program suggests that the Nevada National Guard is
hurting for new recruits since the Iraq war went sour.
It would be interesting to know whether the program started
before or after the war started.
(On the National Guard website, we found
this press release (MS Word), but it doesn't
say when the program started.)
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2/8/07:
ERIN NEFF: Cobb must learn to bite his tongue
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/en)
- Linkable
Entry
It is rare for a freshman to garner front-page news, but Cobb accomplished it in his hometown newspaper Tuesday after casting the lone nay vote against the ceremonial election of Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas as Assembly speaker...
Cobb was quietly reminded of protocol in a closed session with leaders of both parties, and then, as a public rebuke, Assistant Republican Leader Heidi Gansert gave Buckley a belated congratulation speech on Assembly floor.
It was as much to appease the speaker as to knock down any future civil disobedience from her fellow Reno representative.
| Comments from the Webmaster |
The Cobb incident was the subject of our later newsletter:
Love is in the Air, where this article is
referenced.
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2/8/07:
Judge's friend given 90 days in jail: Drug charge followed domestic battery arrest
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/kch)
Entities:
Steven Jones (mentioned) - Linkable
Entry
Thomas Cecrle, the friend and former brother-in-law of Family Court Judge Steven Jones, was sentenced Wednesday to 90 days in jail and a subsequent two years of probation.
Cecrle, 49, was arrested after a domestic battery incident at a Henderson casino in April.
Sitting in the back of the police car, Cecrle lowered his head and told the officer he had a gram of cocaine in his pocket, according to the arrest report.
A lab test later determined the drug was methamphetamine.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
That Cecrle is a "former brother-in-law" of Judge Jones
is a matter of public record. That he is a "friend," in the
present tense, is not substantiated by any evidence that we know of.
Jones doesn't have any control over who his former brother-in-law
is, but to call him the "friend" of a convicted felon implicitly
links them together. There is nothing in the rest of the
article to support this assertion. The use of the word "friend"
is so potentially damaging in this context, that it needs to
be substantiated.
It is another case of shoddy journalism from the Rebuke-Urinal™.
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2/8/07:
Series of fairs to recruit foster parents
(Las Vegas Review-Journal)
- Linkable
Entry
The Clark County Department of Family Services has joined with Station Casinos to host a series of foster-parent recruitment fairs.
At the fairs, county representatives will hold orientation and
pre-screening sessions
to help expedite the application process for potential foster families.
Representatives from local service providers also will be on hand to answer questions about services available to children and families, and about what it takes to be a stable foster family.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
"Orientation" is a good idea, but "pre-screening" seems like a nightmare.
At one foster fair we attended, there was a fingerprint machine,
and people were lining up around the corner to be fingerprinted.
The idea was to "jump-start" the application process by
getting your fingerprints taken early. It was unnecessary
and didn't make any
rational sense, but when you give people a line to
stand in, they'll do
it.
We don't fully understand what prescreening is all about,
but it seems to us that these fairs should be purely informative.
You give people a briefing, then give them a second meeting to go
at a later date. If they actually show up at the second meeting,
then you can begin any pre-screening. Otherwise, the agency is
wasting its resources on people who probably won't be back.
We have seen the people who come into these foster fairs, and
by and large they are scary. The audience includes
every dim-wit viewer of Channel 8, and you can tell just by
looking at them that they can hardly hold their own family
together, never mind manage a foster kid.
You want to give
these people a chance to drop out on their own before you even
bother to "pre-screen" them.
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2/7/07:
EDITORIAL: No more secrecy in child death cases: Snake-pit bureaucracy requires legislative intervention
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/editor)
- Linkable
Entry
Of all the reasons for child welfare agencies to withhold records regarding children killed through abuse and neglect, the idea that keeping such information secret somehow "protects" dead kids is the most offensive, absurd and unacceptable.
"My position is the child has already died. And the excuse we hear is, 'Well we don't want to hurt the child, it's confidential,' " said Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas. "Well, the child has already been hurt. If we can learn something from how a case has been handled to prevent future harm to a child, then we should."
Exactly. But it's going to take an act of the Nevada Legislature to create such common-sense policy. Several bill drafts before lawmakers would ensure the release of more information to the public when children die at the hands of the monsters among us.
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2/7/07:
Cobb vote draws fire in Assembly: Meeting called to discuss protocol
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/mb)
- Linkable
Entry
CARSON CITY -- Assemblyman Ty Cobb, the freshman Republican who was the only one to vote against Democrat Barbara Buckley's ascension to the speaker's post, was taken to the woodshed by both sides of the Assembly leadership Tuesday....
Oceguera said he, too, hoped Cobb had merely made a freshman mistake and would change his ways.
"I think the assemblyman made an error in judgment, he thought about his actions and now he understands that we work together in a bipartisan manner and that there's a certain protocol and decorum to the way we do things," he said.
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2/7/07:
Foster case review surfaces: State official, attorney say they were told file never existed
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/lkb)
- Linkable
Entry
A confidential case review detailing the flawed interactions between Clark County Family Services and the foster parents of a missing toddler has blindsided state authorities and attorneys for the missing child's family.
Nevada Director of Health and Human Services Michael Willden, whose agency has oversight of state child welfare services, said Friday that when he requested the case review from county officials last year, he was told no such document existed.
Attorney David Gibson Jr., who represents the parents of Everlyse Cabrera in a lawsuit against Clark County, said county officials failed to turn over the case review to them as part of discovery and told him and attorney Gregory Mills more than once that no such report existed.
"No one wants to give over the smoking gun," a frustrated Gibson said Tuesday. "It begs the question: What else are they concealing that they don't want us to know about?"...
Clark County Spokesman Erik Pappa took issue with Gibson's statements that the county was trying to hide something and said that Gibson is aware the case review is an attorney work product that was done in anticipation of pending litigation.
"My understanding is that they (Gibson and Mills) knew full well the document existed, that it was attorney work product and that it was privileged," Pappa said.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
There's definitely blood on the water and the sharks are
circling.
This is exactly the situation where the DFS Director should be
front-and-center doing damage control for his agency. Instead,
we have another flack, Erik Pappa doing it.
We understand the "work product rule" that Pappa is referring
to. A litigant is obligated to turn over evidence in
a civil case but not analysis of evidence. As long as
the county disclosed to Gibson and Mills the same information
that the author of the report had, then the report itself does not
have to be released to the lawyers.
But the lawyer way isn't necessarily the smart way. There are
a lot bigger issues here than just the Cabrera
lawsuit. The handling of this case has major public policy
and public relations
implications, and you can't shut down all release of information
just because a lawsuit is pending. At the least, it looks
like a cover-up from the outside and gives the press an
excuse to report on the agency.
If the county had released everything that Ed Cotton
wrote, including both this report and the "missing 8 pages" (albeit
with some names removed), then there would have been "no news"
for these past few days. Instead, the county chose to listen
to lawyers, who often miss the forest for the trees.
We get the sense that there is no leadership presence here.
The ship seems to be sailing along through treacherous
water, but there is no one at
the helm.
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 2/6/07:
GOP freshman casts lone vote opposing Buckley
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/mb)
Entities:
Barbara Buckley (lone vote opposing) - Linkable
Entry
CARSON CITY -- A "nay" echoed through the chamber, and a gasp went up around the room.
A freshman assemblyman, Ty Cobb, R-Reno, had voted against the election of Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, as speaker, defying the rest of his caucus and legislative tradition.
Cobb's surprise lone vote as the Legislature opened Monday set political tongues wagging, largely in disapproval. Cobb said in an interview that he hadn't meant to shock or offend.
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2/6/07:
Family Services, consultant trade blows over case review
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/lkb)
Entities:
Tom Morton (mentioned),
Ed Cotton (mentioned),
reid (mentions),
Michael Willden (mentioned),
Donna Coleman (quoted),
gerhardt (quoted),
rubin (mentioned) - Linkable
Entry
Under increasing state and local pressure to account for the safety of endangered children, Clark County Family Services and an independent consultant are trading verbal blows over the handling of a review of 1,352 open cases.
Ed Cotton, the child welfare consultant whose team conducted last year's intensive case review, said Monday that he identified children of concern to Clark County on multiple occasions, both verbally and in written lists.
A top county official said that Cotton's lists were incomplete.
"He is correct in that he sent some of the information to us," Family Services Director Tom Morton said. "But from our perspective and to our knowledge, he did not send all the information to us."
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
(2/7/06) Whew! this article is a biggie! It suggests that
the honeymoon period for Mr. Morton is over. His role at this
point appears to be purely reactive, and he isn't taking
the actions necessary to preempt problems before they hit
the newspapers. This doesn't bode well.
Continuing with the article....
|
Assemblywoman Susan Gerhardt, D-Henderson, the Blue Ribbon Panel member who obtained a copy of the censored report information, said she's not surprised by how this scenario is unfolding.
Since the panel was empowered last year, it has had difficulty accessing child welfare data in Clark County.
The panel's final report to lawmakers includes recommendations for improving the investigations and handling of child deaths related to abuse or neglect.
"They'd better get moving," Gerhardt said of Family Services latest effort to assemble data on endangered children. "As a legislator and the vice chair of the Assembly's Health and Human Services Committee, I want that information."
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
Gerhardt has her own bill pending which would give state officials
access to any documents or information possessed by the county.
This is reasonable. The feds hold the state responsible for
child welfare, so the state has to hold the county responsible.
If the county was smart, it would have given the state anything it
wanted, and the bill might have been headed off.
Giving the state access to information is different from
"legislative micro-management," which we do object to.
In spite of all the current problems, county control is still
better than state control. We got a big ol' management problem
right now, but at least it's a local management problem that
we have some control over.
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2/4/07:
Mom accused of killing girl
(Las Vegas Review-Journal)
- Linkable
Entry
About 6:30 p.m. a young boy covered in blood went to a neighbor's house on the 6200 block of Alpine Tree Avenue, near Windmill Lane and Jones Boulevard, and told the neighbor that his mother had stabbed his sister to death, police said.
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 2/4/07:
CHILD WELFARE: Inaction on problems with child welfare system unacceptable, assemblywoman warns
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/lkb)
Entities:
leslie (quoted) - Linkable
Entry
At least 13 bill drafts aimed at some aspect of child welfare or juvenile law will be vying for lawmakers' attention. The changes sought include:
- Prohibiting children ages 6 years and under from being placed in group-care settings such as Child Haven and requiring licensing for such institutions.
- Creating a new position within the Legislative Counsel Bureau to audit and monitor current child welfare cases.
- Giving the children's advocate in the attorney general's office the power to supervise and monitor open cases.
- Increasing public access to information on children who die while in government custody.
- Bolstering state authority over county family services agencies.
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2/4/07:
EDITORIAL: Caseworker training
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/editor)
- Linkable
Entry
But given the fact that these professionals are paid good salaries with excellent benefits, including the prospect of early retirement with a generous pension, do they not carry at least some burden in making sure they're trained to do the job for which the public compensates them? Must taxpayers be on the hook for every class, every training seminar as well -- and pay these workers their full salary while they complete the training?
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
A silly proposal from the disconnected folks who never leave the newsroom.
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2/3/07:
Police arrest two teens suspected in Rhodes Ranch crime spree
(Las Vegas Review-Journal)
- Linkable
Entry
Las Vegas police on Thursday arrested two teenagers who they believe were responsible for a home invasion robbery and a string of residential burglaries in the Rhodes Ranch community in the southwest valley.
The 16- and 17-year-old were arrested at a house on the 200 block of Cascade Lake Street after investigators linked them to the crime spree, robbery Sgt. Chris Tomaino said....
Police charged the teens with robbery with a deadly weapon, kidnapping, conspiracy and burglary. They were booked into the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center. Their names were withheld because of their ages.
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2/2/07:
Child welfare training pushed: Gibbons criticized for rejecting funding
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/lkb)
- Linkable
Entry
The state's Division of Child and Family Services had asked for $798,000 to fund specialized child welfare training, which would have included a new worker academy.
Gibbons rejected that request.
Independent consultant Ed Cotton, who last year conducted a case review of 1,352 open cases for the Clark County Department of Family Services, said additional training is critical to the effort to protect children, and "there is a need for a massive amount of training."
During interviews with caseworkers, Cotton said, it became clear that many were confused about their roles and what actions to take in situations where the safety of children was in question. That was borne out in Cotton's overall report, in which reviewers said they were doubtful about the safety of one in every three children involved in the 1,352 open cases.
"We found over and over that a lot of people (caseworkers and their supervisors) out there didn't have a clue," Cotton said.
For example, some caseworkers were interviewing victims of abuse in front of the persons they were accusing, which Cotton said should never happen. Other caseworkers took the denials of the accused at face value and closed cases without interviewing the victims or those who had made abuse and neglect reports.
Additional training in Clark County is especially important, Cotton said, since Family Services doesn't require caseworkers to be licensed social workers.
"If you don't require people to be social workers, or at least have a degree in a related field, the only way to make that up is with training," Cotton said.
| Comments from the Webmaster | |
The training issue is not as simple as it seems. Do we need
more money for training? Absolutely. Do we know how to best use
the money once we have it? That's an open question.
There are a lot of different theories about how training should work and
what it should consist of.
Training was Mr. Morton's specialty before he became our
director. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with his theories.
Mr. Morton has his own set of preferred training
protocols and his opponents have others. We don't know
who is right. All we can say is that there is a legitimate
debate about what kind of training works best.
It is like giving a 3/4 million dollars to a high school
graduate and saying, "Okay, go get an education." The granting of
the money, without further oversight,
doesn't necessarily guarantee a solid education.
BTW: $798,000 doesn't necessarily buy a lot of training,
especially when you rely on outside consultants at
$1500/day. Morton's very first act was to request $56,000
from the county commission to fund a brief training seminar
by a former associate. The seminar is long over and the money
is presumably gone. Did the taxpayers get their money's worth
out of it? We don't know. The point is, you don't have to
give many of those one-time programs before your $798k is gone, especially
given our ever-growing staff and the number of trainers
needed to serve them.
"Training" alone is not a panacea for the problems of child
welfare. The real issue is "active management" and the
presence or absense thereof.
While classroom training is certainly necessary, quality control
is such an important issue in child welfare that we believe it
should be "build in" to system. It is one thing to discuss
cases in theory in a classroom or seminar setting. It is another
to give active feedback to caseworkers in ongoing cases.
To guarantee quality,
there should be active daily debate about real cases up and down the
chain of command.
The line staff should have the knowledge (and credible fear)
that Pecos management
could look in on any case at any time and that this case could be
used as a system-wide example of what should or should not be done.
Active management oversight
is always going to be the most effective form of training.
At present, the only real management oversight and quality control
of individual cases seems
to come from the court. Unfortunately, the court only sees cases
every six months and only sees what the caseworkers choose
to present. The court can approve or reject the disposition of a
case, but it has no control over the day-to-day operation of the
department. To make child welfare truly accountable, there needs
to be similar powerful oversight within the
department, which to our knowledge has never existed.
The best kind of "training" is to receive encouragement when you
are doing something right and get your hand slapped when you are
doing something wrong. We should invest in classroom
training, but that is only to establish the theoretical concepts (whatever they may be). Management
also needs to exercise some form active
control over day-to-day implementation. This is a lot
more complicated, organizationally, that just hiring a consultant
to give a training seminar.
BTW: The "worker academy" mentioned in the article would presumably
take place at the
Williams Family Training Complex |
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2/17/07:
Clark County teacher shortage reaches 477: District officials using substitutes to fill vacancies
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/ap)
Entities:
Clark County School District (subject) 
2/13/07:
Mom in court on charge of killing daughter
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/kch)
2/12/07:
Mother Accused of Killing Daughter Appears in Court
(KLAS-TV)
2/9/07:
A HOME TO BE PROUD OF: Kids at St. Jude's Ranch enjoy renovated cottages and a brand-new lawn
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/lc)
Found in the "teen" section of the paper. Entities:
St. Judes Ranch for Children (subject) 
2/6/07:
SMOKING KILLS BRAIN CELLS ...especially Senator McGinness's
(Family Court Chronicles/gc)
Distributed to every state senator and assembly member, on the second day of the Nevada legislative session in Carson City. Entities:
Glenn Campbell (author) 
2/3/07:
Family Services review sought: Child safety report red-flagged 55 cases
(Las Vegas Review-Journal/lkb)
Entities:
reid (quoted),
Michael Willden (quoted),
Ed Cotton (mentioned),
rubin (mentioned)