Hey! Dont Always Blame da Lawyers!

[Beavah 205]

Yah, highcountry and BW in da parent thread say:

 

"or are we going to bow to the pressure of lawyers and special interests and regulate everything to the point it becomes too much of a hassle to do or it is no longer fun to go on? "

 

and

 

"How far should lawyers get to regulate things? That is up to your courts and the state and federal governements not the BSA."

 

 

Now, much as I appreciate a good lawyer joke, I just have to say... it ain't da lawyers who are tryin' to regulate everything, and it certainly ain't da lawyers who are pushin' extreme interpretations of da meaning of the "sphere" of Scoutin' .

 

And those legislative types, they may have J.D.'s but most of 'em never practiced an honest day of law in their lives. Don't blame lawyers for da politicians!

 

How 'bout it, folks... just a wee bit of respect for da poor attorneys...

 

Beavah

 

[CalicoPenn 729]

Maybe when Lawyers start telling idiots that stand on the top rung of a ladder then fall off and break a bone that they are idiots, instead of blaming ladder manufacturers for not clearly stating that the top rung of a ladder is not for standing on, Lawyers will get more respect.

 

Maybe when Lawyers tell potential clients that, "No, it is NOT your neighbors fault that your allergies are acting up just because he doesn't remove the dandelions from his yard - now go away and stop being so stupid", Lawyers will get more respect.

 

Maybe if Lawyers drag Lawyers who sue dry cleaners for millions because the dry cleaners lost a pair of pants into the woods to beat him bloody and stupid for bringing such disrespect to the profession, Lawyers will get more respect.

 

Until that time, to borrow a phrase: "Lawyer, heal thyself".

 

Calico

[Trevorum 24]

I think the one thing that galls most layfolk is that lawyers apparently have this odd sense of ethics that is counterintuitive to most normal folks' idea of justice. As I understand it, the first obligation of an attorney is to his client and not to truth or to justice. A defense lawyer will pull every trick in the book to get his client to walk free, even if he knows for a fact that the scum is guilty. And at the same time, in pursuit of a "win", a prosecutor will ignore evidence that shows a defendant to be innocent.

 

That said, I am sure there are probably lots of fine people out there who have passed the bar.

[Gold Winger 9]

"That said, I am sure there are probably lots of fine people out there who have passed the bar"

 

There are six.

 

I know a lawyer who took out an injunction or cease and desist or something like that against his sister because he didn't like the way she was handling a will of a late family member. His explanation was that it would have been "uncomfortable" to bring it up in person.

[Bob White 20]

"just a wee bit of respect for da poor attorneys"

 

Where on earth did you manage to find a poor lawyer?

[Oak Tree 15]

As with most exercises in mocking other sets of people, it's much easier to do so when you don't have direct personal contact alongside of them.

 

We have several lawyers who are fathers of kids in our units, and they are great people. They are helpful just like the rest of the fathers, and they provide lots of free legal advice when asked. They've generally been better donors than the average.

 

Sure, we all hear the stories about the unethical lawyers - but that sure doesn't apply to the ones I know.

[Gold Winger 9]

"We have several lawyers who are fathers of kids in our units, and they are great people. "

 

That's what people used to say about the drug dealer who lived across the street.

[CalicoPenn 729]

Yeah, unfortunately for most lawyers, they're always going to face what I call "The Shark Problem". There are about 350 species of sharks. Most don't pose a danger to people. Yet because of a few species of sharks, such as white, tiger, bull, hammerhead, mako, and maybe about 7 or 8 more, that have proven to be dangerous to man, ALL sharks get the reputation of being dangerous.

 

Such is the stereotype of sharks, and such is the stereotype of lawyers.

 

Calico

[Horizon 97]

Everyone hates the lawyers until they need one.

 

Our troop treasurer is an attorney who handles business contracts. Great guy, and we could not survive without him. I will echo the prior post about how a few bad apples make for a bad reputation for the field. There are plenty of poor attorneys - Assistant DAs who are lucking to make $40k in major metro areas, for example. Those guys are making real enemies while working to put away the bad guys. There are also those attorneys who take cases for nothing to help people (on my wall at home is some Native American art that was the sum total of payment a client made to a deceased attorney friend of mine. He took the case for free to protect her from the state of Alaska).

 

Let us go one further. My brother is one of those scum sucking evil criminal defense attorneys, specializing in DUI and drugs. I asked him how he does it.

1) In our country, you are innocent until proven guilty.

2) Everyone, no matter who they are, deserves representation.

3) The police have made enough mistakes in their world that just trusting them makes no sense.

4) If you do not like it, change the law. He only operates under the laws of the State of Colorado.

5) Blackstone: Better that 10 guilty go free than one innocent goes to prison.

6) His firm sends a sizable donation to MADD every year - they make his business possible.

 

Other things to remember - the media only reports when the case is filed, rarely do they report on when the case is lost. We (and I include myself in this) are influenced by the newspaper/internet initial burst of outrage, and we are rarely treated to follow-up on the final closing of the case.

[acco40 95]

Okay, I'll blame "the system" & the lawyers.

 

If you watch much television, you've probably heard of a product called Mike's Hard Lemonade.

 

And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television.

 

The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park (Detroit Tiger's baseball stadium) vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte's ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.

 

Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic.

 

Ratte is a tenured professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan, which means that, on a given day, he's more likely to be excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey than watching "Dancing with the Stars" -- or even the History Channel, for that matter.

 

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn't even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

 

"I'd never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it," Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. "And it's certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old."

 

But it wasn't until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo's hand.

 

"You know this is an alcoholic beverage?" the guard asked the professor.

 

"You've got to be kidding," Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

 

Mistake or child neglect?

An hour later, Ratte was being interviewed by a Detroit police officer at Children's Hospital, where a physician at the Comerica Park clinic had dispatched Leo -- by ambulance! -- after a cursory exam.

 

Leo betrayed no symptoms of inebriation. But the physician and a police officer from the Comerica substation suggested the ER visit after the boy admitted he was feeling a little nauseated.

 

The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo's blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol.

 

"Completely normal appearing," the resident wrote in his report, "... he is cleared to go home."

 

But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

 

And if you think nothing so ludicrous could happen to your family, maybe you should pay a little less attention to who's getting booted from "Dancing with the Stars" and a little more to how the state agency responsible for protecting Michigan's children is going about its work.

 

Doing their duty

Almost everyone Chris Ratte met the night they took Leo away conceded the state was probably overreacting.

 

The sympathetic cop who interviewed Ratte and his son at the hospital said she was convinced what happened had been an accident, but that her supervisor was insisting the matter be referred to Child Protective Services.

 

And Ratte thought the two child protection workers who came to take Leo away seemed more annoyed with the police than with him. "This is so unnecessary," one told Ratte before driving away with his son.

 

But there was really nothing any of them could do, they all said. They were just adhering to protocol, following orders.

 

And so what had begun as an outing to the ballpark ended with Leo crying himself to sleep in front of a television inside the Child Protective Services building, and Ratte and his wife standing on the sidewalk outside, wondering when they'd see their little boy again.

 

A vain rescue mission

Child Protective Services is the unit of the Michigan Department of Human Services responsible for intervening when someone suspects a child is being abused, neglected or endangered. Its powers include the authority to remove children from their homes and transfer them to foster parents who answer only to the state.

 

By law, CPS officials are forbidden to discuss the particulars of any investigation.

 

But Mike Patterson, Child and Family Services director for the Wayne County district that includes Comerica Park, said that in general his agency's discretion is limited once police obtain a court order to remove a child from the parental home -- usually authorized, as in Leo's case, by a juvenile court referee responding to a police officer's recommendation.

 

"Once the court has authorized a child's removal," Patterson told me, "we cannot return the child to the parental custody" until the court has OK'd it.

 

But that doesn't explain why CPS refused to release Leo to the custody of two aunts -- one a social worker and licensed foster parent -- who drove all night from New England to take custody of their nephew.

 

Chris Ratte's sisters, Catherine Miller and Felicity Ratte, left Massachusetts at 10:30 the night of the fateful lemonade purchase after the police officer who'd reluctantly requested a removal order told Ratte the state would likely jump at the chance to place Leo with responsible relatives. But when the two women arrived at the CPS office early Sunday, a caseworker explained they would not be allowed to see Leo until they had secured a hotel room.

 

The sisters quickly complied. But by the time they returned to CPS around 10:30 a.m., their nephew had been taken to an undisclosed foster home, where he would remain until a preliminary court hearing the following afternoon.

 

By that Monday, April 7, when Ratte and his wife returned for a meeting with Latricia Jones, the CPS caseworker assigned to their case, no one in the family had been able to talk to Leo for a day and a half.

 

More investigation needed

At a hearing later that day, Jones recommended that Leo remain in foster care until she had completed her investigation, a process she estimated would take several days. It was only after the assistant attorney general who represented CPS admitted that the state was not interested in pursuing the case aggressively that juvenile referee Leslie Graves agreed to release Leo to his mother -- on the condition that Ratte himself relocate to a hotel.

 

Finally, at a second hearing three days later, Graves dismissed the complaint and permitted Ratte to move home.

 

Don Duquette, a U-M law professor who directs the university's Child Advocacy Law Clinic, represented Ratte and his wife. He notes sardonically that the most remarkable thing about the couple's case may be the relative speed with which they were reunited with Leo.

 

Duquette says the emergency removal powers of CPS, though "well-intentioned" are "out of control and partly responsible for the large numbers of kids in the foster care system," which is almost universally acknowledged to be badly overburdened.

 

Ratte and his wife have filed a formal complaint with the CPS ombudsman's office.

 

"I have apologized to Leo from the bottom of my heart for the silly mistake that got him into this mess," Ratte wrote in the complaint. "But I have also told him that what happened afterward was an even bigger error, and I would like to be able to say to him that institutions, like people, can learn from their mistakes."

 

BRIAN DICKERSON Detroit Free Press

[Gold Winger 9]

The first mistake was buying ANYTHING at a major league ball park.

[scoutldr 732]

My first red flag would have been when they said "that will be $7 please". "For a LEMONADE????"

[Beavah 205]

Holy Smoke!

 

Yah, hmmm.... dat's quite a tale, acco! What a nightmare!

 

You'll all notice, though, that the only attorney involved in the whole thing was representing the parents.

 

Da problem with these things, IMO, is not necessarily the law. We need the law to be able to protect real kids at risk (well, at least some law. Michigan's seems like it might be a bit overbroad, eh?) The problem is foolish application of the law, and perhaps even capricious application ("I'm gonna mess with this uppity University Professor").

 

The people who make bad decisions like this should be fired. That's how yeh really fix these problems. Who wants people with such phenomenally poor judgment in a police uniform or makin' other (equally poor) decisions about the welfare of children? But I bet nobody in Michigan is talkin' about that, eh? They're all talkin' about the "system" or the "law" as though inanimate objects or words on paper are to blame. Never about personal accountability.

 

Ah well. Keeps da attorneys employed (though in this case it looks like the parents were represented pro bono by da "shark", eh?)

 

Beavah

 

[Lisabob 13]

Beavah writes: "The people who make bad decisions like this should be fired" and "Who wants people with such phenomenally poor judgment in a police uniform or makin' other (equally poor) decisions about the welfare of children? But I bet nobody in Michigan is talkin' about that, eh?"

 

Agreed. Let me just add that the CPS in Michigan is notorious for poor performance. It has consistently been rated among the worst in the nation and been implicated in numerous scandals in the last few years. As ridiculous as this particular case is (and you better believe it is getting talked about here in MI!), at least no child was abused or killed due in part to CPS idiocy and negligence in this instance. Sadly that is more than can be said in some other recent cases in this state.

 

If we'd like to find some folks to blame, I suggest we start by looking at our state legislature. Two problems: 1) they've cut funding for all kinds of social programs and services beyond the bone in the last several years, resulting in under-staffed service agencies, lack of money for adequate training, and limited or no oversight; and 2) term limit laws in MI mean our (mainly lawyer) legislature is ALWAYS full of inexperienced people who aren't in gov't long enough to see or deal with the consequences of their own legislative actions. I'd say the two are linked, in fact. It is ever-popular and easy to be the one who supports yet another round of tax cuts, especially when you know SOMEONE ELSE will be left holding the bag in terms of reduced services, 'cause you'll be term-limited out of office by then!

 

Grr...

 

 

[packsaddle 753]

As I have noted other times, those legislators represent the people. That connotation goes both ways.