{"id":31832,"date":"2019-09-05T17:25:16","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T22:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/?p=31832"},"modified":"2019-09-06T09:26:08","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T14:26:08","slug":"oklahoma-seeks-to-address-lawyer-shortage-for-abused-and-neglected-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/2019\/09\/05\/oklahoma-seeks-to-address-lawyer-shortage-for-abused-and-neglected-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Oklahoma seeks to address lawyer shortage for abused and neglected children"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_31833\"  class=\"wp-caption module image aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-large wp-image-31833\" src=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/David-Hall-1920x1173.jpg\" alt=\"David Hall in downtown Oklahoma City\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1173\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/David-Hall-1920x1173.jpg 1920w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/David-Hall-672x411.jpg 672w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/David-Hall-768x469.jpg 768w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/David-Hall-150x92.jpg 150w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/David-Hall-300x183.jpg 300w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/David-Hall-620x379.jpg 620w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/David-Hall-1768x1080.jpg 1768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Quinton Chandler \/ StateImpact Oklahoma<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Hall spent six months in group homes and inpatient facilities when he was eight.<\/p>\n<\/div><p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/676917858&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"150\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p><p>At eight-years-old David Hall was taken from his mother\u2019s house in Canadian County and placed into foster care. He had been abused most of his life and was struggling with PTSD.<\/p><p>Hall says he didn\u2019t talk about being abused, he assumed it was normal.<\/p><p>\u201cThat\u2019s not really something you talk about at school. When I was a kid, I talked about Scooby-Doo and things like that,\u201d Hall said.<\/p><p>Hall says he didn\u2019t feel like he had an advocate in the system. He wanted to go home, but instead he spent the next six months being shuffled through a series of group homes and psychiatric facilities.<\/p><p>\u201cThroughout all of these points, I had never once talked to an attorney,\u201d Hall said.<\/p><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oscn.net\/applications\/oscn\/DeliverDocument.asp?CiteID=455505\">State law requires children taken into state custody\u00a0<\/a>in cases of neglect and abuse be given their own attorneys to advocate for their needs and protect their rights in court. Parents have a right to a separate attorney.<\/p><p>But, access to this required legal representation isn\u2019t equal in every county and courtroom. It\u2019s often hard to pair children and parents with qualified attorneys. So the Oklahoma Supreme Court created a new task force to look for ways to improve the system.<\/p>\n<h3>Hall needed an advocate<\/h3><p>As it turns out, Hall did have an attorney, but he never met them. He says that\u2019s unacceptable.<\/p><p>Now, at 23, Hall believes his life could have changed for the better if he had met his attorney back then. He says he could have told the lawyer who was supposed to advocate for him that his mother needed help..<\/p><p>&#8220;People don\u2019t just wake up one day and want to do terrible horrible things to their children,&#8221; Hall said.<\/p><p>Today, he knows his mother was abused as a child too. He says she needed mental health services, and he needed to tell someone that.<\/p><p>\u201cA lot of people assume, \u2018Well they\u2019re too young to understand \u2026,\u2019 Hall said. &#8220;But I can tell you that I don\u2019t understand why my parent created stuff like \u201cson\u2019s day\u201d \u2026 but at the same time abused me pretty viciously.&#8221;<\/p><p>He believes an attorney could have led him to a mental health professional who would have been able to connect the dots.<\/p><p>However, no one asked him what he believed was needed to make his home a safe place to live, and his mother didn\u2019t get help.<\/p><p>Instead, Hall says he suffered abuse while he was in state care. Then, he was sent back home where he was abused again. Years later, he ended up in foster care a second time.<\/p>\n<h3>Disparity in representation<\/h3><p>Tsinena Thompson is the CEO of Oklahoma Lawyers for Children, a nonprofit that represents abused and neglected children in Oklahoma County. Thompson is also a member of the supreme court task force trying to improve standards for attorneys working child abuse and neglect cases.<\/p><p>\u201cThere\u2019s a great disparity in the availability of qualified attorneys to represent children and qualified attorneys to represent parents throughout the state,\u201d Thompson said.<\/p><p>She says many children have complained they never met their attorneys. She calls that inexcusable because state law requires lawyers to meet their under-aged clients before every court hearing.<\/p><p>Thompson says if an abused boy is sent into foster care, and he wants to be reunited with his mother, someone should fight for that.<\/p><p>\u201cYou need active well-trained qualified attorneys to get in there, get down in the weeds and do what needs to be done to protect children\u2019s rights and parents\u2019 rights,\u201d Thompson said.<\/p><p>But the system is flawed. Some courts, especially in rural counties, struggle to find lawyers who know how to represent abused children or their parents.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_31834\"  class=\"wp-caption module image aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-large wp-image-31834\" src=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/Tsinena-Thompson-1920x1280.jpg\" alt=\"Tsinena Thompson inside the Oklahoma Supreme Court.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/Tsinena-Thompson-1920x1280.jpg 1920w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/Tsinena-Thompson-672x448.jpg 672w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/Tsinena-Thompson-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/Tsinena-Thompson-150x100.jpg 150w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/Tsinena-Thompson-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/Tsinena-Thompson-620x413.jpg 620w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/files\/2019\/09\/Tsinena-Thompson-1620x1080.jpg 1620w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Quinton Chandler \/ StateImpact Oklahoma<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tsinena Thompson is the CEO of Oklahoma Lawyers for Children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h3>Why courts struggle to find lawyers?<\/h3><p>To improve the quality of representation, Thompson says the state has to attract more attorneys and they need standards for training. She says it\u2019s hard for courts to recruit attorneys for these cases.<\/p><p>\u201cThere are lawyers everywhere, but this particular area of the law is not glamorous,\u201d Thompson said.<\/p><p>Parents could be dealing with a drug addiction or mental illness. Children could be suffering anything from physical and sexual abuse to neglect. Lawyers also have to coordinate with the Department of Human Services \u2013 the agency responsible for kids in state custody.<\/p><p>\u201cYou\u2019re talking about parents, children, sibling sets, other family members that are involved in this that are very, very impacted by children being picked up, removed from their caregivers and going into a foster placement that may be in that county, maybe it\u2019s not,\u201d Thompson explained.<\/p><p>The cases are difficult. Some kids are represented by public defenders with extremely high caseloads, some are given attorneys with a low paying contract.<\/p><p>\u201cIt\u2019s tough for our rural judges to be able to find the new blood \u2013 if you will \u2013 to come in and say, \u2018OK I\u2019m going to be passionate about this, and here I am, and by the way I\u2019ll only take $25 a case or $25 a hearing,\u201d Thompson said.<\/p><p>All of these realities add up to a shortage of qualified attorneys. Thompson says the new task force is hoping to borrow solutions from other states that will fit Oklahoma.<\/p><p>The state knows they have a shortage of lawyers, but until the task force gets better data, they don\u2019t know how bad the problem is or exactly what the geographic disparities in legal representation are.<\/p>\n<h3>Hall wants better outcomes for kids<\/h3><p>\u201cUnfortunately, I\u2019ve never been able to say that I\u2019ve had a childhood that I\u2019m really happy with and proud of,\u201d Hall said.<\/p><p>Hall says more childhoods could be saved if the state finds more people to fight for families\u2019 needs.<\/p><p>The task force meets once a month and they\u2019re scheduled to turn in a final report in December 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Access to lawyers isn\u2019t equal for abused children and their parents in every county. So the Oklahoma Supreme Court created a new task force to look for ways to improve the system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":201,"featured_media":31833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"page-noFeature.php","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[1136,1139,1132,1138,1137],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31832"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/201"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31832"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31854,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31832\/revisions\/31854"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}