Texas Plans to Fight Return of Children
Simple Justice:
The Wall Street Journal reports that Texas is going to appeal the ruling that handed them a stunning defeat for seizing 460 children from the Yearning For Zion ranch.
Texas officials sought Friday to retain custody of more than 460 children seized from a polygamist ranch after an appeals court ruled the children should be returned to their parents, but they also agreed to reunite 12 children with their parents while the case moves on.
The state apparently believes that what it is doing is the right thing. In the face of widespread criticism, coupled with the stinging rebuke of the Austin appellate court, somebody must feel very strongly about this.
The most significant point in the article is this:
In a case in which everything is big — the number of children, the severity of the child-abuse allegations, the sprawling legal proceedings — a sense emerged among dueling experts that all involved are wielding blunt instruments.
It is a fault with all cases involving large numbers of people and broad-stroke allegations. When there’s one child involved, the claims are specific. The state proffers individualized evidence of claimed abuse, and the parents can refute it with equally specific allegations.
Here, it’s one big, vague, non-particularized mess. What is fundamentally wrong with this approach is that each child, and each parent, has an individual right to be told of the specific allegations against them so that they can contest them. You can’t contest broad-stroke vagaries. Absent a specific allegation of wrongdoing, there’s nothing to dispute.
The motivation behind the Texas push harkens to their own past failures.
In the back of the minds of Texas child-welfare officials, said Mr. Choate, a lawyer in San Angelo, Texas, was the federal government’s 1993 raid on a compound in Waco, Texas, where members of a religious sect known as the…