State officials have discovered that a flaw in a system used by the Department of Child Safety has let judges make decisions on removing children from homes without having all the information that they needed.
And now Attorney General Kris Mayes is going to review more than 650 closed cases to see if any of the documents that were not disclosed would have changed the outcome.
All that that raises the question of whether any of the court decisions about terminating parental rights, guardianships or adoptions will be overturned.
“I think it would depend on the circumstances in the case,” said David Lujan, the agency’s new director. But he told Capitol Media Services Monday that even if DCS did not directly provide the documents to the parties — like the parents involved — the chances are good that they got them through other means, like subpoenas to the private providers who prepared them for DCS in the first place.
Those closed cases may only be part of the problem.
Kristen Wright, an assistant attorney general, is sending letters today to the presiding judges in all 15 counties asking that they suspend action on all pending cases for the next two weeks while her agency and DCS determines what records may be missing.
“Our preliminary assessment of the situation has determined that a minimum of 3,800 juvenile dependency cases statewide may be impacted,” wrote Wright, the chief counsel of the Child and Family Division of the Attorney General’s Office.
The problem is with a system put in place by DCS two years ago to track all documents.
Known as Guardian, it was billed as a better solution to CHILDS, the Children’s Information Library and Data Source. First implemented in 1997, the agency found various problems, like limited reporting capabilities and poor data quality.
The new system had some of its own bumps, including delays in payments to foster parents.
But what Lujan discovered has much more serious implications.
D
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;
n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,
document,’script’,’https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
————————————————
