TALLAHASSEE --
Under fierce criticism for withholding information on child
deaths, the Department of Children & Families on Friday asked a
judge for approval to release new details on 177 children who have died
since November.
Ruling from the bench, Leon County Circuit Court
Judge Karen Gievers granted the agency’s request to release information
to the Miami Herald from incident reports received by the agency that
the department had previously redacted.
But DCF Deputy General
Counsel John Jackson said the agency will continue to withhold similar
information in the future. He said the agency had erroneously turned
over hundreds of documents to the Herald in the past year and it was now
seeking the court’s permission to release the redacted information to
help improve public confidence in the agency.
“This is not only a matter of satisfying media interests. It is an
acknowledgment by the department that getting this information out
there will ultimately improve the process and improve the department,”
Jackson told the court during the 20-minute hearing.
The Herald’s
year-long investigation of Florida’s child welfare system led to the
Innocents Lost series, which chronicled the deaths of 477 children over
the past six years from abuse and neglect whose families had been known
to DCF.
The Herald reported last week that after the series was
published, DCF changed its policy and heavily redacted information
provided in incident reports that it had previously released — including
details of the child’s death and the family’s prior history with DCF.
To illustrate, the Herald published side-by-side snapshots of the same
report, one just released and showing nearly every word censored; the
other, from last year, with modest redactions.
“The article
raised questions about the department’s handling of the incident reports
and created a concern that the department was not being forthcoming
with information on these children or on these children’s families,”
Jackson said.
The article also sparked immediate criticism from
legislators, who were in the midst of rewriting the state’s child
welfare laws to overhaul the way DCF handles and investigates child
deaths.
Jackson said the news reports “dinged the agency,” and
interim DCF Secretary Mike Carroll, who is in his second week on the
job, has since announced he is looking at “revamping the entire death
review process.”
“All this put together, we think, that it is
[imperative] that we have the trust of the public that we can do this
and we can do it right,” Jackson said. “We can do what the Legislature
intends and we can do right by Florida’s kids. And so we do not want
hanging over our head the fact that there is information that we are
holding back because it brings suspicion over the department that we are
not being transparent.”
The department asked the court to release
of 277 pages, relating to 110 of the 177 cases sought by the Herald, to
help the department show that it is willing to “fix problems, ” improve
public awareness and restore public confidence in its ability to
protect children, Jackson said.
Unlike death review reports,
which provide details on the conclusions of the agency’s investigations
into the deaths, the incident reports are part of the investigative
record used to help the agency determine whether a death occurred from
abuse or neglect, Jackson said. The incident reports often include
information about the mental health and sexual abuse of siblings and
parents, which the agency believes should remain confidential.
“Some
of them [incident reports] did have more information released than we
believe we should have released at the time,” Jackson told the court.
He
said the agency continues to exclude from the public anything regarding
the mental health or sexual abuse of siblings and specific information
about parents when they were children.
“We’re asking more permission, not approval,” Jackson told Gievers.
Gievers said she reviewed all the documents, had read the Innocents Lost series, and immediately ordered the documents released.
“I
did not see anything in my review that should not be released,” she
said, suggesting the agency immediately provide the Herald with the
documents. At first Jackson said he did not have a duplicate, but later
he provided one.
According to a preliminary Herald review of the
previously redacted records, the agency initially excluded information
that revealed that several of the families whose children died in the
past six months had a prior case record with DCF.
The Innocents
Lost series found that the department repeatedly ignored warning signs
that parents of at-risk children were incapable of keeping their
children safe, prompting the Legislature to increase staff and training
of abuse investigators, crack down on so-called “safety plans,” —
written promises by parents to discontinue behavior that endangers their
kids — and strengthen oversight of the agency.
“The parents have
two prior reports as alleged perpetrators,’’ wrote one report on a
child who died in December. It referred to domestic abuse incidents in
2013 and 2010 involving the children and noted that the 2010 “case was
closed with no services offered.”
Gievers made it clear that she
was not ruling on whether the information the department continues to
shield is appropriate, but was only deciding whether what it was
proposing to release violated state confidentiality laws.
After
the hearing, Jackson said his agency is attempting to balance the
public’s right to know and the privacy rights of children and families.
“The
scrutiny on the department and the individuals at the department — we
can take that in exchange for us being able to do our job better,” he
said. “At the same time, we need to protect the rights of our clients.”
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/05/09/4108729/dcf-under-fire-gets-ok-to-release.html#storylink=cpy
