Brooklyn Defender Services Company Profile | Management and - Datanyze Ms. Barrow disclosed to her defense team that she was pregnant. . Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS) is seeking Experienced Attorney's for the Criminal Practice's legal team. Until such assistance is available, the CPS or case planner must ensure that appropriate services are provided, including payment for such services. N.Y.C. Today (A.B.A., June 4, 2019), https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/child_law/resources/child_law_practiceonline/january---december-2019/providing-parents-multidisciplinary-legal-representation-signifi/. Brooklyn Defender Services, Family Defense Practice - AFFCNY At the end of the six months, the case was dismissed. In this sense, family defenders make child welfare work better. We find safe, temporary families for children and teens throughout New York City and Long Island. It requires more professionals and more room than solo law practices. . Although the courtroom remains an important site for excellent representation of parents in child welfare cases, no less important legal work needs to occur elsewhere. For MAil . (citing N.Y. State Admin. On the judicial side, petitions are filed in family court and the allegations in the petitions are (sometimes) resolved through contested evidentiary hearings. . In the agency process side of the case, parents are obliged to meet with caseworkers, supervisors, and other employees of the agency responsible for monitoring the parents actions throughout the life of the case. What follows is their story. (June 5, 2008), https://perma.cc/L2CZ-Z64X. This case, however, reveals how meaningful efforts by the parents defender team to understand the family and the childs medical condition changed the cases course, without the need to litigate, to call witnesses, or to rely on the court to do anything more than enter an order that all parties ultimately preferred, once the full details of the case were exposed. & Fam. 22. Founded in 1996, Brooklyn Defender Services operates as a nonprofit organization that provides legal services in the areas of family, civil, criminal, and immigration. BDS is a public defense office that represents low-income New Yorkers in criminal, family, immigration, and civil legal matters. Your membership has expired - last chance for uninterrupted access to free CLE and other benefits. Brooklyn Defender Services 4.2. 80. Even when the defenders were unsuccessful in preventing a case from being filed in court, the defender office was already familiar with the facts of the case and had a relationship with the parent. The parent organization employs a large number of poverty lawyers who represent clients in a broad swath of legal matters, including housing, immigration, social security benefits, and custody and divorce, among others. Hum. The in-the-weeds work holistic practices undertake often leads to outcomes that are invisible when all that is described are data in categories of return to parent, dismiss, and the like. Ultimate success in many cases can be achieved by creating and developing plans designed to keep children safely at homeor to return them home as soon as can safely be accomplishedand by pushing hard for the plans prompt implementation. from the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law where she was a Graduate Fellow, participated in the Defenders clinic and interned with the Capital Habeas Unit at the Federal Defenders of Philadelphia, the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem's Family Defense Practice, the Brooklyn Defenders . BDS is a public defense office representing low-income New Yorkers in criminal, family, immigration, and civil legal matters. Rts., Your Rights While Pregnant, Breastfeeding, or Caregiving: A Report on the 2019 Commission Public Hearing on Pregnancy and Caregiver Discrimination 14 (2019), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/Pregnancy_Report.pdf. The third office, the Center for Family Representation (CFR), was a relatively new start-up 501(c)(3) office whose only purpose was to provide legal representation for parents in child welfare cases. These plans are routinely included in the reports agencies are required to submit every six months whenever children remain in foster care. Brooklyn Defender Services serves communities in the State of New York. Hearing (Aug. 16, 2018) (written testimony of Michelle Burrell, at 2). In 2003, a New York State Supreme Court Justice found that the payment rates for assigned counsel resulted in a shortage of panel attorneys and deprived litigants of effective assistance of counsel.12 Panel lawyers would rarely engage the services of a social worker and have their fees paid by the court.13 These lawyers spent virtually their entire professional time in the courtroom, waiting either for a new assignment or for their cases to be called.14 As a result, they were rarely available to their clients out of court.15 Half of court-assigned lawyers billed for less than five hours of out-of-court work in family court proceedings.16. Natl Council of Juv. They also prepared for the birth of the baby, finding a trauma-trained doula and helping Ms. Anderson to set up her home with all the essentials for a baby. Instead, she would have met her lawyer for the first time minutes before her first hearing, and that lawyer would have to make the argument for the return of her baby knowing only what could be learned in that short time. That knowledge commonly results in the offices achieving better, faster results for their clients than the child welfare agency is capable of, with considerably less disruption of the family, eliminating or significantly shortening the time children are forced to live apart from their families. In this case, the office was assigned to represent Carlos Sanchez, after a petition was filed by the local child welfare agency accusing him of neglecting his son by failing to consent to what the agency asserted was necessary surgery. This program, known as City FHEPS, is administered by New York Citys Human Resources Administration. Ct. Act 1046(a)(ii) (McKinney 2020) ([P]roof of injuries sustained by a child or of the condition of a child of such a nature as would ordinarily not be sustained or exist except by reason of the acts or omissions of the parent or other person responsible for the care of such child shall be prima facie evidence of child abuse or neglect, as the case may be, of the parent or other person legally responsible.). The Family Defense Practice at Brooklyn Defenders has been representing parents and other caregivers in Family Court since 2007. But often the agency seeks to remove newborns from the hospital in a case in which the agency has an ongoing involvement with the mother. Recognizing that as soon as the baby was born, the agency would conduct a child safety conference at which it would make fateful decisions involving the family, the new team immediately started planning with Ms. Anderson. Brooklyn, NY, US. Many of those changes need to happen upstream from the time and place children are reported to child welfare officials as being at risk of harm. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of these agency meetings. They also develop training materials to enrich and support the Family Defense Practice. Once the report was provided to the court, the judge ordered that the newborn be returned to Ms. Barrows custody in light of the risk assessment and proof that the conditions in her apartment were vastly improved. 68. Hearing (Aug. 16, 2018) (written testimony of Emma S. Ketteringham & Caitlin Becker, at 2) [hereinafter Ketteringham & Becker written testimony]. You will receive assistance in areas impacting your life, such as immigration, housing, benefits, education and employment. We demand accountability from government institutions in court and work to reduce the government's reliance on harmful legal systems to address problems caused by poverty and racism. It set up a meeting with the surgeon and invited the child protection agency to attend so that it could hear the more complete picture. Do you need help accessing benefits or fighting eviction? Beginning cautiously, New York City first awarded separate contracts for three of its five counties to three different not-for-profit organizations, each one authorized to accept court assignments in one county. The family defender office assigned to represent Ms. Green handles many of these cases each year and has become expert both in cross-examining medical experts called by the agency and at engaging and communicating with knowledgeable physicians able to provide their expert medical opinion on whether an injury is more likely to be the consequence of abuse or an accident. John B. Mattingly, Safety Planning for Newborns or Newly Discovered Children Whose Siblings Are in Foster Care: Child Safety Alert #14 (Revision), N.Y.C. The team met with Ms. Barrow and began the task of coordinating the substantial support needed in managing Ms. Barrows mental illness and disability. After waiting two additional months, the team filed a motion for enhanced, unsupervised visits, arguing that the agencys refusal to grant unsupervised visits was arbitrary and damaging to the long-term purpose of child protection. 2 (updated July 2019), https://caseyfamilypro-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/media/SF_Quality-parent-representation_fnl.pdf; see also Martin Guggenheim & Susan Jacobs, Providing Parents Multidisciplinary Legal Representation Significantly Reduces Childrens Time in Foster Care, Child L. Prac. 33. The cases described in the previous section go well beyond demonstrating the importance of helping shape the services parents will be required to complete as a condition to regaining the custody of their children. Livingston St / Smith St. Skip to main content. Programs, https://www.casey.org/who-we-are/about/ (last visited Oct. 18, 2020). 8. Ct. They provide the opportunity to enter a field with an ambitious social justice vision.62. The offices, unlike the panel lawyers, do not think solely in terms of when is the case next in court. The goal was to secure evidence from an independent, well-respected therapist that Ms. Green possessed the temperament and capability of raising her child safely. He was just what we needed in a lawyer. I think that every parent should have an advocate. Consider this: In 2003, there were over 28,000 children in foster care in New York City; at the end of 2019, there were approximately 7,800.99. 91. The essence of the kind of representation offered by the three offices that were part of the study (as well as the template for the work done by the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, the fourth office doing this work in New York City) is that clients receive a team of advocates, commonly including an attorney, a social worker, and a parent advocate. In addition, the social work staff helped Ms. Green coordinate and expand visitation. . Instead, her lawyers requested that the court order an Imminent Risk Assessment with the courts mental health clinic once the defense team was convinced that Ms. Barrow would be evaluated to present no risk to her newborn. When Mr. Sanchez met with his lawyers and social worker, he provided the fuller picture. Similarly, preventing a parent from being removed from the country for an immigration-related reason is also beyond what agency caseworkers do.92 But real-life events such as these must be given the highest possible priority if parents are to achieve their objective of regaining the custody of their children from foster care. The medications began working after only a few weeks and Ms. Barrow quickly regained her focus. 59. The supervisor denied the request, approved the caseworkers leaving the conference, and explained that the agency had all the information it needed. Commn on Parental Legal Representation Pub. Despite agreeing to attend the meeting, however, the agency caseworker never came to the meeting. 30. The unit is staffed by trained social workers with deep experience negotiating the complexities of child welfare investigations during the time a woman is pregnant and immediately after she gives birth. See also In re Hofbauer, 393 N.E.2d 1009 (N.Y.1979). 72. Before she left, the defense teams social worker called the caseworkers supervisor requesting that she be permitted to remain in the conference because the x-ray results were due in another half hour. The previous studies limited their focus to quantitative outcomes achieved at court or to reporting the views of stakeholders focused on the differences between the two kinds of representation made available to parents in New York City.58 This Article starts where the prior two articles left off. Judges, Improving Parents Representation in Dependency Cases: A Washington State Pilot Program Evaluation (2003), http://www.opd.wa.gov/documents/0047-2003_PRP_Evaluation.pdf (presenting results of an earlier study of pilot programs in two juvenile courts in different settings and locations). See N.Y. Fam. See N.Y. Cty. See N.Y. Fam. Even when these lawyers are skilled courtroom advocates, their advocacy is too frequently hamstrung by antecedent deficits engaged in by the agency when, for example, it proposed and implemented an inadequate case plan. 85. But the defender community maintains meaningful pressure on the system to live up to this rhetoric. Child welfare cases are prosecuted along two tracks: the judicial and the administrative. 61. The social worker, fluent in English and Spanish, also served as a translator for Mr. Sanchez whose primary language is Spanish and whose command of English is limited. Alice received her J.D. We serve the Brooklyn community by providing individual services to thousands of people each year, holding clinics and educational programs in our community office and online, and supporting fellow community organizations. Instead, the agency staff members told Ms. Anderson and her team that they would not allow Ms. Anderson to leave the hospital with her baby and to prepare to go to court the next day when they would be filing a petition alleging neglect based on the allegations in the case of Ms. Andersons previous child. Once Ms. Barrow was living in an apartment too small for her children to live in with her, a new barrier to the childrens return would be to secure suitable housing, which would certainly extend the childrens stay in foster care. Being involved at the earliest stages of a case in designing a case plan, or in accurately assessing the needs (if any) of a parent, is a critical step in minimizing the amount of time children need to spend in foster care because the most important factor courts consider when deciding whether to return children from foster care to their family is whether the circumstances that led to the placement have sufficiently changed. & Youth Servs. at 17, 3839 (oral testimony of Angeline Montauban, parent). When parents are unrepresented at these conferences, the plans are more likely to be boilerplate, requiring parents to do things of little value. The defense team was able to dispose of it in less than three months. Brooklyn Defender Services 566 Livonia Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11207. Brooklyn Defender Services is part of the Law Firms & Legal Services industry, and located in New York, United States. The true meaning of the findings in the quantitative study that these offices secure the return of children to their families significantly sooner than would happen without them is that child welfare practice without the kind of oversight accomplished by the offices wrongfully separates children from families in a significant percentage of cases. Id. Recruitment - ADP at 4648. Our Early Defense team provides advocacy to parents during the initial stages of an ACS investigation. The offices help parents negotiate all aspects of the process throughout the life of the case. The three officesBrooklyn Defender Services (Kings County), The Bronx Defenders (Bronx County), and the Center for Family Representation (New York County)are each structured somewhat differently.19 The characteristic all three offices have in common is that they are multidisciplinary: they employ lawyers on their staff along with social workers and/or parent advocates (individuals who themselves experienced the child welfare system as a parent accused of neglecting their child).20 Each office spends considerable time on their cases out of court, working closely with their clients and advocating for and with them at child welfare agencies meetings.21 Several years later, a fourth officethe Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlemwas awarded a contract to share the representation of parents in Manhattan with the Center for Family Representation, using their community-based model to represent families living in Harlem zip codes.22 In 2011, the Center for Family Representation was awarded a second contract to provide parental representation in Queens County.23 To date, these four providers handle the vast majority of parental representation in New York, Kings, Queens, and Bronx Counties. The social worker helped facilitate a more complete understanding between Mr. Sanchez and the hospitals medical team. It is here, at the exquisite level of facts, that the defender offices make their greatest difference. This meant the team not only had to work towards regaining the custody of her two children; it would have to prepare for the possibility that the agency would seek the removal of her newborn. An X-ray revealed that Sophia sustained a skull fracture. The Article proceeds in five parts. 64. Ketteringham & Becker written testimony, supra note 26, at 89. A goal of this Article is to lay the groundwork for leaders in child welfare throughout the United States to embrace the work new family defenders do.59 There are many ways to reform child welfare practice and policy in this country. There is no question that the in-court advocacy engaged in by the family defender offices is of a much higher order than that practiced by the panel lawyers, as the qualitative study attests. 18. View job. In re Ella B., 285 N.E.2d 288, 290 (N.Y. 1972). Unfortunately, a complication temporarily derailed the effort just when the team was hopeful for a satisfactory resolution of the visitation motion and the underlying petition itself. Because Ms. Green could not say with certainty what caused the skull fracture, the defense team relied on an expert who analyzed the X-rays and determined that they were fully consistent with an accidental fall, thus providing the needed evidence that Sophias injury was not necessarily the result of abuse. Medical neglect is a common charge brought against parents in child welfare cases.82 Depending on the severity of the claimed neglect, the local child welfare agency may be seeking to place the child in foster care to protect the child from the parents failure to provide the child with adequate treatment or, less drastically, to secure court authorization to require that a child have a medical procedure it believes is necessary but that the parent refuses to allow. To be eligible for assignments from the panel, lawyers must have a certain number of years of experience in the field and apply to be placed on the panel by a committee that reviews applications. Brooklyn Defender Services: Employee Directory | ZoomInfo.com Social Worker - Mental Health Practice. But those studies included comparisons between counties (some of which had the program and some of which did not) in addition to comparisons within counties (pre- and post-implementation of the new model). In order for the reader to appreciate fully the contribution of these offices, and the critical need for them to spread throughout the country, it is vital that the reader grasp a fundamental truth about the child welfare system in the United States: it far too commonly makes fateful decisions about children and families that are based on errors that, in the absence of a significant check and balance provided by holistic family defenders, would never come to light. The court ordered the children to be placed in foster care at the first court appearance and limited the mothers access to them to twice-weekly visits supervised at the agency. See Mark E. Courtney & Jennifer L. Hook, Evaluation of the Impact of Enhanced Parental Legal Representation on the Timing of Permanency Outcomes for Children in Foster Care, 34 Child. At the end of the nine-month period, the case was dismissed. In those situations, there is no way to give credit to the kind of legal representation the parent was given when comparing outcomes of cases between those handled by panel lawyers and multidisciplinary offices. Our Law & Appeals attorneys work on special legal proceedings, including appeals and special motions in family court. Brooklyn Defender Services - Immigration Practice - National 40592/88, 1989 WL 1715714 (N.Y. Sup. Our Medically Complicated Team defends parents facing allegations that stem exclusively from a medical opinion. make applications for investigators or other experts where appropriate . Popular Searches Brooklyn Defender Services Bds We are the attorneys and advocates fighting injustice for individuals and families and protecting civil rights for all people. As the field continues to improve, all parents should be given lawyers working in an interdisciplinary practice.