Utah State Supreme Court Changes Definition of Juvenile Incarceration

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This week, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that children placed in foster, or so-called proctor, homes are no longer considered incarcerated juveniles. The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by Donna Whitney, who alleges that the 2007 death of her son, Dillon, was a result of poor proctor home supervision. Proctor homes are foster homes for youth in the custody of the state’s Division of Juvenile Justice Services. In the court’s opinion, Justice Jill Parish wrote, “We conclude that a juvenile who is placed in an unsecured community-based proctor home in not incarcerated in a place of legal confinement.”

As The Salt Lake Tribune reported, the ruling allows Whitney to proceed with several suits against the Utah Department of Human Services and Division of Juvenile Justice Services, as well as the state of Utah and Quest Youth Services. “Accordingly,” the court opinion continues, “the incarceration exception to the state’s waiver of its sovereign immunity does not apply and the state remains potentially liable for damages related to Dillion Whitney’s death.”

In August 2007, Dillion was placed in a proctor home after appearing in juvenile court several times.

Media Access to Courts Involving Minors Sparks Debate in Los Angeles

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This March, Los Angeles’ dependency courts -- where rulings are made whether children remain in foster homes or return to their parents’ or previous legal guardians’ custody -- opened to the media for the first time since the 1960s. After an attempt to open the state’s children’s courts failed in a state Assembly committee in 2010, Supervising Judge Michael Nash ordered that the dependency courts of Los Angeles County be open to the media last month. A number of organizations, including the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles (CLCA) and the Los Angeles Dependency Lawyers (LADL) have publicly criticized the decision. Supervising CLCLA Executive Director Leslie Starr Heimov said that the decision to allow press in courtrooms places an additional burden on the county’s publicly appointed attorneys, who sometimes work as many as 150 cases simultaneously. “What we’re asking for is an orderly procedure where we get more than three seconds to make our case,” Heimov told the Pasadena-Star News.

Poverty Among Young People Sharply Rising

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A recent report on rural America finds staggeringly high rates of poverty among young people, a growing trend the authors describe as widespread and increasing. The report, Why Rural Matters 2011-12, found that almost 41 percent of the nation’s rural students are living in poverty, with 10 states posting rural student poverty rates of more than 50 percent. Although nearly half of the country’s school districts are considered rural using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the report -- issued by the Rural School and Community Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit -- finds that, on average, rural districts are receiving only one-fifth of state education funds. With an estimated 80 percent of its rural student population participating in federally subsidized meal programs, New Mexico had the highest rate of impoverished rural students of any state in the county. An additional 12 states are listed within the report as having rural education conditions requiring “urgent” attention from legislators.

Federal Judge Strikes Down Mandatory Cigarette Health Warning Labels

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This week a federal judge ruled in favor of tobacco companies challenging a FDA requirement that would force cigarette manufacturers to place graphic warning labels on their products. “The government has failed to carry both its burden of demonstrating a compelling interest and its burden of demonstrating that the rule is narrowly tailored to achieve a constitutionally permissible form of compelled commercial speech," U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said. The ruling stems from a 2009 law passed by Congress that required the FDA to enforce new warning requirements, which included manufacturers placing color labels on their products which covered at least half of the packaging space, as well as on 20 percent of print advertisements for cigarettes. Last summer, the FDA unveiled nine warning labels – among them, photographs of charred lungs and corpses – that were expected to be placed on all cigarette packages in the United States by September 2012. Last year, Judge Leon allowed a preliminary injunction which prevented the mandatory warnings from being placed on tobacco products, a decision challenged by the Obama administration and currently awaiting a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruling.

Expert Says Stress Levels in Children Could be Key Variable in Neurological Development

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“We’re living in the midst of a revolution in neuroscience, molecular biology and genomics,” said Dr. Jack Shonkoff, chairman of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, at Tuesday’s “Breakthrough Research on Building Better Brains” presentation in Atlanta. The lecture, sponsored by the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation Speaker Series and the national nonprofit research center Child Trends, focused on the influence of “toxic stress” on the development of children, which Dr. Shonkoff called both a major psychological and physiological detriment to youngsters. He began the presentation by speaking about the “plasticity” of brains for young children, which he said is firmly influenced by early childhood experiences. “Early life experiences are built into our bodies, for better or for worse,” Dr. Shonkoff said. “Things that happen early in life are creating physiological changes later on.”

He said children that experience a lack of response from adults, primarily parental figures, in their formative “birth-to-5” years are much likelier to suffer from “toxic stress,” which he said may potentially weaken neuroconnectors in the brain.

Federal Appeals Court OKs Class Action Lawsuit for Families Denied Autism Therapy

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Last week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals refused a petition from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan that would have overturned an earlier ruling allowing families denied certain autism therapy coverage to push forward with a class action lawsuit. Last November, a judge’s ruling in Potter v. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan gave clearance to parents to sue the organization for rejecting Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) as an insurable treatment, which Blue Cross deemed an “experimental” form of therapy. The rejection of Blue Cross Blue Shield’s petition gives the go-ahead for two families to press forward with a class action suit, on behalf of all families denied therapy coverage by the organization. The case is the second such class-action lawsuit brought against the organization in three years, following 2010’s Johns v. Blue Cross, a previous Michigan case in which the organization reimbursed almost 100 families that were denied Applied Behavior Analysis therapy coverage. Despite Blue Cross’ claims that Applied Behavior Analysis is an unproven form of treatment, many organizations, including the National Institutes of Mental Health, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have all lauded the treatment as an effective form of therapy.

Coming From Behind, Alabama Education Program Paying Off

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Following disheartening National Assessment of Educational Progress marks in 1996, the Alabama State Department of Education (ASDE) introduced a program, the Alabama Math, Science and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) to improve the state’s lagging test scores. The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, part of the Institute of Education Sciences, recently published an evaluation of the effectiveness of the Alabama initiative

The evaluation compared test scores of class groups that had received AMSTI instruction for one year with a control group that did not. Research findings indicated that students that had received AMSTI instruction scored, on average, two points higher on Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-10) mathematic problem solving assessments than students that had not received initiative instruction. Researchers estimate the total “effects” of a full two years of AMSTI instruction to average an increase of 4 percentile points on SAT-10 mathematic problem solving assessments, with AMSTI students having the equivalent of “50 days of additional student progress over students receiving conventional mathematics instruction.”

Similarly, AMSTI students were found to have higher test scores in both reading achievement and science than non-initiative-instructed students. The report finds AMSTI pupils scoring an average of 2 percentile points, roughly the equivalent of 40 additional days of student progress, than students that had received no AMSTI instruction.

Are You a Teenager Making Out in Mississippi? Better Beware of the Law

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A recent bill passed by the Mississippi House of Representatives could have unforeseen consequences for the state’s youth, according to one juvenile justice judge – particularly the notion that the proposed legislation would inadvertently make teenage kissing a reportable offense. House Bill 16, the Ryan Petit Child Protection and Child Rape Protection Act of 2012, is currently undergoing review by a state Senate Judiciary committee. Meanwhile, Natchez Judge John Hudson says the bill is too far-reaching, with definitions that would require certain professionals to report teenage kissing as acts of “sexual abuse.”

The bill, Hudson noted, would require community members deemed as “mandatory reporters” of sexual abuse – teachers, police officers, health care providers, clergy members and film developers – to contact authorities upon observing or suspecting sexual abuse. The problem, Hudson identified, was with what he considered a vague description of what “sexual abuse” entails within the bill. Under the bill’s current language, “sexual abuse” is defined as “the involvement of the child in any sexual act with a parent or another person, or the aiding or intentional toleration of a parent or caretaker of the child’s sexual involvement with any other person.” Additionally, the bill defines “children” as minors 16 and younger, meaning that certain adults witnessing junior high school students kissing would be legally required to report the incident to local police.

New York’s Highest Ranking Judge Urges Changes to State’s Juvenile Justice System

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Tuesday, Chief Judge of the State of New York Jonathan Lippman presented several proposals to the state Legislature during his annual State of the Judiciary address, including the creation of a new juvenile court to handle cases involving 16-and17-year-olds tried for nonviolent offenses.  Currently, New York is one of only two states in the nation, along with North Carolina, that automatically tries 16-and 17-year-old offenders as adults. According to Judge Lippman, the state’s legislation, “flies in the face of what science tells us about adolescent development.”

Judge Lippman’s proposal would allow judges in adult-offender courts to serve as Family Court judges in cases involving nonviolent 16-and 17-year-olds offenders. Juveniles found guilty in such instances would be subject to Family Court judgments, which generally mete out less harsh adjudications, frequently substituting treatment services for incarceration. Additionally, cases under the arrangement would be sealed, and defendants would not incur a criminal record pending a guilty verdict.

New Report Uncovers “Alarming” Rate of Child Hospitalization Due to Abuse

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The March 2012 issue of Pediatrics will contain the first quantified findings detailing the hospitalization rates of children due to serious physical abuse in the United States. The report, released by the Yale School of Medicine, uncovered 4,569 instances of children being hospitalized due to serious abuse in 2006, with approximately 300 cases in which the children died as a result of serious injuries. According to the findings, children were at their highest likelihood for serious injury within the first 12 months of life, with a projected 58.2 per 100,000 children within the age group being hospitalized for abuse. Researchers at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital used data from the Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID) to estimate the number of incidences in which children younger than 18-years-old were hospitalized due to serious physical abuse in 2006. The Kids’ Inpatient Database was prepared by the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, under the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.