Page 362 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
after all, flower children. In fact, on Vietnam Moratorium Day in New York, many associates left work to participate in demonstrations; most of those who didn’t wore white armbands while they toiled in the library.) In that connection, after losing a divorce case in a CLO-gener- ated matter (New York had mandatory mediation for divorcing couples in those days, and my battered client had the nerve to reconcile with her husband), I had to represent a woman whose child was being taken away by Social Services, which believed her to be an alcoholic.
As the child was labeled a “PINS” by them in an odd singular-plural mismatch (PINS meant “a person in need of supervision”), the child was taken away. A portion of the woman’s welfare was therefore stopped because she could no longer claim the child as a dependent from the welfare agency’s point of view, and the child would not be returned, because the mother didn’t have enough money to care for it. The first step toward breaking the vicious Catch 22–like circle was to undo the PINS finding, a virtual impossibility. So the job was mine. I think that I lost primarily because the needs of the child were considered to be par- amount, and the courts routinely deferred to the “administrative expertise” of Social Services. It didn’t help that Mommy showed up for the hearing reeking of alcohol. The best that I could do was to get her some gum and try to have her sit as far from the judge as I could. This was a situation that Columbia Law School had not prepared me for. It was a good thing that my parents had sent me to camp.
Anyway, I should have won because the only evidence presented was a written report of a social worker that said that the child said that Mommy was an alcoholic. But, when I objected to the admission of the report, the judge dressed me down by telling me what I already knew: the applicable statute, presumably to protect children from having to testify, permitted the admission of written hearsay when it came to dec- larations of a child. Hearsay, I hastened to tell the judge, was not the basis for my objection. The report was inadmissible, said I, because a finding of alcoholism is something that only an expert can make, and there was no evidence to qualify the six-year-old as an expert. The judge, as you can guess, was incredibly impressed. So she promptly
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