Report: Parental rights hearings, losses decline 

Posted: 7:22 pm Wed, July 14, 2010
By Brendan Kearney and Rachel Pryzgoda
Daily Record Legal Affairs Writers

A heightened focus on mediation has reduced the number of hearings in termination of parental rights cases by nearly 30 percent in three years, according to the judge in charge of the juvenile division at Baltimore City Circuit Court.

From 2007 to 2009, the number of termination hearings fell from about 3,500 to about 2,500, Judge Edward R. K. Hargadon said.

“We’re focusing more,” Hargadon said. “We put in the steps to resolve them before going to trial.”

The judge discussed last year’s numbers at the monthly meeting of Baltimore’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council on Wednesday afternoon.

The number of cases in which parental rights were, in fact, terminated by the court decreased from 346 to 273 in the same period, Dale Hendrick, associate administrator of the juvenile division, said in an interview after the meeting.

The higher number in 2007 reflects a backlog that the court has since worked its way through, Hendrick said.

Also, in December 2007, the Court of Appeals decided a case that affects the findings judges must set forth when terminating parental rights. However, Hargadon said the decision, In re Adoption/Guardianship of Rashawn H., has not affected the number of hearings in such cases.

At the CJCC meeting, Hargadon also said the juvenile division will be adding two “home courts” in September, bringing the total to 10. Home courts allow families and children to appear before the same judge or juvenile court master throughout their trials.

Additionally, the court is taking steps to greatly decrease the time between arrest and arraignment in juvenile cases, Hargadon said.

Surrender stats

Wednesday afternoon’s meeting began with a PowerPoint presentation about the thousand open warrants cleared during the Fugitive Safe Surrender event held in West Baltimore a month ago.

After clicking through slides of color photographs and participation statistics, CJCC Executive Director Kimberly S. Barranco said the program “exemplified the purpose of the CJCC.” Baltimore City State’s Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy highlighted the “camaraderie” among law enforcement, and her counterpart, Baltimore City Public Defender Elizabeth L. Julian called Safe Surrender “almost a Kumbaya experience.”

But not everyone was content to declare victory and move on.

Julian wanted a breakdown of the 129 arrests — about 13 percent of everyone who showed up — that occurred over the four-day event. (This figure had not been included among more positive statistics in the U.S. Marshals post-event press release, and the police lieutenant colonel spearheading the program told The Daily Record that only four people were arrested on the first day.)

Barranco and Jessamy’s office were unable to provide an immediate answer, but they said many of the arrests were spurred by warrants from outside of Baltimore, were for felony offenses (outside the scope of the program), or were violation-of-probation warrants that circuit judges wanted to handle personally.

University of Maryland School of Law professor Douglas Colbert asked how his students might help clear the remaining 95-plus percent of the approximately 40,000 open warrants in the city.

“You’re not going to let us rest on our laurels for even a week?” Baltimore City Circuit Judge M. Brooke Murdock, chair of the CJCC, asked.

Assistant State’s Attorney Patricia Deros, who did much of the case preparation for the June 16-19 surrender program, said in addition to the 1,016 warrants cleared by the program, she had been able to dispose of another 3,000.

Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld also reported that homicides are down 12 percent, total violent crime down 6 percent, property crime down 5 percent, and arrests year-to-date down almost 8 percent.