International Adoption Racketeering

Using a strategy pioneered by my law firm in this 2006 lawsuit against JCIS and NCFA-certified World Child International Adoption Agency, five couples recently filed a federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) claim against Main Street Adoption Services, based in (where else - the epicenter of bad adoptions) Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The plaintiffs claim the international adoption agency that promised each a baby from Guatemala scammed them in a "bait and switch" scheme. They accuse the agency and three individuals of conspiring with one another "for the illegal purpose of committing fraudulent adoptions through a bait and switch ...

Court Okays Student’s MySpace Principal Parody

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has finally ruled that school officials cannot discipline students for ridiculing their principals on MySpace during their hours away from school. As I discussed last year in the blog here, the Court agreed to re-hear both cases en banc (with the Court's entire 14 judges considering the case). In the first, J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District, the judges were sharply split, voting 8-6 to overturn a 10-day suspension of a student who posted a fake profile on MySpace that portrayed the principal as a pedophile and a sex addict. The majority opinion rejected the school district's argument that such lewd speech̵...

Judge Overturns 6-Year-Old’s Expulsion Over Touching

A Philadelphia judge has ruled that a kindergartner should not have been expelled from a charter school because he allegedly touched his teacher’s thighs. Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Paul P. Panepinto, writing an opinion explaining his decision to the Commonwealth Court May 23, said that, on the record before him, no reasonable person would have reached the same decision as the First Philadelphia Charter School for Literacy’s Board of Trustees to expel a student who allegedly touched his teacher’s legs after she complained that they hurt. The decision to expel the kindergartner was arbitrary, capricious and prejudicial to ...

NY’s $1.4 million per disabled child = death and despair

Today's NYTimes has an excellent article about the horrors in New York's residential care system for the developmentally disabled. Despite spending as much as $1.4 million per resident, the "system" has failed most of its residents with sub-standard care, abuse and death. These institutions spend two and a half times as much money, per resident, as the thousands of smaller group homes that care for far more of the 135,000 developmentally disabled New Yorkers receiving services. But the institutions are hardly a model: Those who run them have tolerated physical and psychological abuse, knowingly hired unqualified workers, ignored complaints by ...

Sex Trafficking: The Girls Next Door

Vanity Fair has a great story about child sex trafficking and prostitution in All-American Hartford, Connecticut. Here's an edited excerpt of this excellent piece: There are more young American girls entering the commercial sex industry—an estimated 300,000 at this moment—and their ages have been dropping drastically. “The average starting age for prostitution is now 13,” says Rachel Lloyd, executive director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (gems), a Harlem-based organization that rescues young women from “the life.” The explanations offered for these downwardly expanding demographics are various, ...

Child Welfare Response to Child Trafficking

Human trafficking is arguably one of the most disturbing human rights abuses of our time. The United States Department of Justice has estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign men, women, and children are trafficked into the United States each year. While estimates indicate that thousands of child trafficking victims exist in the United States, very few have been identified and recovered. Between 2001 and 2009, only 212 foreign minors were successfully recognized by U.S. authorities as victims of trafficking. Human trafficking is a relatively new issue and emerging area of knowledge for most social service, legal, and law enforcement profess...

Supreme Court Tosses Child Welfare Fourth Amendment Case

Nearly a decade ago, a state child protective services worker and a county deputy sheriff interviewed then 9-year-old S.G. at her Oregon elementary school about allegations that her father had sexually abused her. They did not have a warrant or parental consent to conduct the interview. S.G. eventually stated that she had been abused. Her father stood trial for that abuse, but the jury failed to reach a verdict and the charges were later dismissed. S.G.’s mother subsequently sued on S.G.’s behalf for damages under 42 U.S.C. §1983, alleging that the in-school interview breached the Fourth Amendment ’s proscription on unreasonable ...

S
1
…
20
21
22
…
57
s