Ade Fasanya's law office is two flights up a narrow staircase in a small Queens building on 89th Avenue. It is from this spot, amid folders stacked up on every horizontal surface, that Fasanya launches his daily assault on injustice in the child welfare system on behalf of indigent Queens parents who have been charged with child abuse and neglect.
Fasanya is one of about thirty attorneys who represent parents in Queens child welfare cases. Children in the city's family courts are represented by the Legal Aid Society's Juvenile Rights Division, which puts Legal Aid attorneys off-limits to impoverished adults. So the courts provide private attorneys to parents, drawing from a panel of lawyers who have signed on to serve.
In the last three months, judges in family courts throughout the city have found it nearly impossible to find lawyers willing to take new cases. That's because panel attorneys, a shrinking pool, have staged an informal work slowdown. Since late last year, Fasanya and others have declined new cases to protest the state's billing rates, which stand at $25 an hour for out-of-court work and $40 an hour for court appearances, with an $800 cap on each case. A n industry-wide survey of billing rates for associates across New York State shows the average to be between $180 and $260 an hour
The state has raised the billing rates just twice since the panels were created in 1965; the last time was in 1986. Court-appointed lawyers in New York now rank 49th in the country in pay, despite repeated pleas to the governor from the state's top judge, Judith Kaye, and other prominent members of the state judiciary..
Fasanya has come to his office for a lunch break between marathon sessions at Queens Family Court where on a typical day he argues eight or nine cases, running back and forth among courtrooms on three floors. Such is the caseload in the city's five family courts that attorneys for both children and adults routinely handle over a hundred open cases at a time and judges preside over fifty to sixty cases a day. Often Fasanya doesn't get to his office at all during the day -- and neither does anyone else. Like all of the attorneys on the appointed-counsel panels, Fasanya is unable to afford a secretary or a part-time paralegal assistant.
So he repairs to his office at night and on weekends to do the work Legal Aid attorneys and most solo practitioners turn over to assistants. His office is functional, containing a desk, a couple of chairs, boxes of files on the floor, a stuffed filing cabinet and, adorning the wall behind his desk, the legal robe and powdered wig he wore years ago -- mementos of his days as an attorney in Nigeria.
At least Fasanya has an office. Several panel attorneys gathered at a lunchtime strategy session in Queens in late February said they don't. Their base of operations is the Assigned Counsel room, Room 129D, in the Queens Family Courthouse, a 17' by 14' room sporting one desk and one phone.
Fasanya, a man with a fined-tuned sensitivity to unchecked government power, said he had to have at least the semblance of an office. "I do not want to interview clients under pressure in the courthouse, with court officers looking all over for you up and down the halls because a judge needs you in the courtroom."
Sitting at his desk on 89th Avenue, he said the reality of defending parents against the inevitable mistakes the city makes in identifying abusive and neglectful adults could be very grim.
"I have practiced under a dictatorship and I have seen people get a fairer shake," he said.
A case on Fasanya's docket earlier in the week seems to illustrate the point. His client, Karen Gibson, had lost custody of her four children on October 22nd, 1998, two days after her mother died. A caseworker to whom Gibson had turned during her mother's illness with the hopes of obtaining homemaking services, suspected that Gibson was using and selling drugs and initiated the removal of the children. As it turned out, the city never turned up evidence to support the charge. Still, agency officials found it difficult to return the children once the agency had taken them -- what if something went horribly wrong and the public learned that the children had been released from city custody? Instead, caseworkers drew up a list of tasks Gibson had to complete including "getting better insight into parenting by attending a parenting skills class" and attending therapy.
Now, two and a half years later, Gibson had completed all of the agency's tasks. She went to court hoping to begin the process of reunifying her family. But the city arrived with a petition to terminate her parental rights. This would irrevocably end all ties between Gibson and her children and trigger a search for adoptive families for them. When the judge hearing the case, Robert F. Clark, asked why, the city's attorney rose and explained, "The children have been in care for 28 months. The mother doesn't have appropriate housing."
A new federal law, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, requires the city to seek terminations of parental rights whenever children have been in foster care for 15 of 22 months. The law is creating a new kind of havoc in New York City cases because massive delays and repeated adjournments are common in the city's family courts.
Fasanya jumped in, furious: "Here we have my client complying with everything in the agency plan, the agency and the mother are working together, and someone in the agency is filing a petition to terminate her parental rights!"
Back in his office, Fasanya was still irate. "Do you know how rare it is to get a case dismissed in Family Court?"
One reason it may be so rare is that for attorneys like Fasanya, finding the time to prepare and file motions is painfully difficult. "Your time is so intense. There are days when I've been here as late as two in the morning. I come in on Sundays," he said.
Yet, panel attorneys must file many more motions than others if they are to do the most basic legal work. Legal Aid lawyers and the legal team at the Administration for Children's Services have social workers and investigators on staff to assist them in preparing cases, but parents' attorneys must file orders with the court requesting approval for every expenditure, including for investigators and social workers who might interview parents, relatives, witnesses.
And these things take time.
"You have to justify the need for an investigator or a social worker," Fasanya said. "You have to sit here and bang it out, tailor it to the specific request you're making."
A 1997 study of the city's family courts by the Vera Institute of Justice found that 90 percent of parents' attorneys did not file a single written motion.
Last February, the New York County Lawyers' Association filed a suit in State Supreme Court charging that the state's billing rates effectively deprive clients of their constitutional right to counsel.
On January 12th of this year, Governor George Pataki, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver announced an agreement to create a task force to study the compensation rates. But none of the panel lawyers in family court are holding their breath. Sitting in the cramped, barely-furnished room set aside for panel attorneys in the Manhattan Family Court, Sam Ackerman, an attorney who has been on the assigned-counsel panel for 28 years, said, "If you want to get nothing done appoint a committee. If you really want to get nothing done appoint a task force."
On March 12, the Mayor's Committee on the Judiciary rejected a second 10-year term for Brooklyn Family Court Judge Philip C. Segal. The second term was due to start April 1. The New York Law Journal, which reported the termination of Judge Segal's service, said the judge has a reputation for being bolder than most in challenging city officials in child abuse and neglect cases. Lawyers described Segal to the law journal as "exceptionally willing to press city officials to provide services to help reunite families."
A Brooklyn court-appointed attorney, Robert J. Greenfield, told the law journal that Segal was "'not afraid to toss a case'" if the elements of abuse or neglect are not proven."
Peggy J. Farber is freelance journalist specializing in children's issues. Her reporting on conditions of NYC children has appeared in City Limits Magazine as well as on National Public Radio.
Alene Taylor sat hunched over a large calendar in the corner of a cavernous office on West 29th Street, fretting over impending deadlines, like any professional journalist, and that is what, suddenly, she had become. For as long as she could remember, she loved to write, filling black and white notebooks with poems and stories when she was seven, submitting articles for consideration to Seventeen Magazine when she entered her teens. Now, at 16, Taylor was being given a chance at a magazine that has been a success for almost a decade, writing an article about working conditions inside foster care agencies. This was not the first story she had written about the brutalities of the foster care system, though it was the first that required reporting. For the others, she wrote about her own experiences. Taylor writes for Foster Care Youth United, a bimonthly magazine that contains some of the most honest writing about foster care anywhere -- and it is written entirely by adolescents.
New York City's foster care officials often complain that the city's journalists fail to give an accurate picture of the foster care system. But two publications - Foster Care Youth United, and a new book by New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein - give about as careful and candid a view of foster care as any reader could ask for.
Foster Care Youth United was begun in 1992 by Keith Hefner, the publisher of New Youth Connections, a newspaper written by and for New York City high school students. Hefner discovered that the writing process could do more than just give foster kids a voice, that it could actually help traumatized young adults overcome some of what they had endured - provided the editors guided the young writers to structure their stories to help readers in the audience. "That little bit of distance gives them a big space to look at things they wouldn't otherwise because they1re too painful," Hefner said.
Certainly, Taylor's life has given her plenty to write about. She has lived in foster families and in group homes. For a brief period, at 12, she lived at home where her mother's boyfriend went after her.
Eighteen months ago, she began writing for Foster Care Youth United with a piercing poem about the attack by her mother's boyfriend. Since then, she has written about teenagers hanging out on the corner near her group home, about sexual harassment. She has begun a novel. "There's a lot of things I want to say," Taylor said "Everything may be hard right now but later on it won't be that way."
Kendra Hurley, one of the magazine's editors, said she has seen teenagers like Taylor transformed by writing. "So often in foster care decisions are being made for you," Hurley said. "Just the knowledge that what they have been through is useful to someone else can be empowering."
Hurley recalled a young woman who had been sexually abused. "She had written a lot before she wrote about that," Hurley said. "Then she wrote a pretty straightforward story about it, and then she wrote about it again, and then it was something she was obsessed with as a writer. I think the whole impulse for writing for any writer is to try to make sense of what1s happened, especially if you've had lots of trauma."
There are between ten and twenty young writers at work on Foster Care Youth United at any given point during the publishing year. Each issue, distributed at group homes and through child welfare agencies, reaches about 15,000 adolescent readers.
Foster Care Youth United is not the only place to find truthful writing about foster care. This month, Nina Bernstein, a reporter for the New York Times, publishes The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care, a book about a court battle to fix New York's foster care system that lasted longer than the childhood of two generations of foster children.
Bernstein was a reporter at New York Newsday in 1990 when she decided to track down Shirley Wilder, the lead plaintiff in Wilder, a class action lawsuit that had promised in its early stages to improve the level of care given to children in city custody. Shirley was 13 when the suit was filed in 1973. By the time Bernstein found her, Shirley was a 33 year old crack addict infected with the AIDS virus, and the suit was still not entirely over. Shirley had lived through the worst the foster system had to offer. She had also, at 14, given birth to a son, Lamont, and placed him in foster care.
Learning of Lamont's existence, Bernstein set herself the task of finding him, of unearthing what had happened to him, and of writing about these two and the court battle fought in their name. The story of Shirley's and then Lamont1s journey through foster homes, psychiatric hospitals, juvenile lock-ups, homeless shelters, and the streets forms the backbone of Bernstein1s book. The sorrow that had defined Shirley1s girlhood, Bernstein soon discovered, was repeated in Lamont's boyhood, even as the battle advanced through the courts and the city bureaucracy. Like the writers of Foster Care Youth United, Bernstein struggled to make sense of what happened. "Children in the foster care system are about as powerless as people can be. They're children, they don't have their natural advocates, their parents, and they don't vote."
Peggy J. Farber is freelance journalist specializing in children's issues. Her reporting on conditions of NYC children has appeared in City Limits Magazine as well as on National Public Radio.
AIDS:
In his column in the New York Times, Bob Herbert reports that one in every fifty black American men is infected with HIV. "That's an astounding statistic," writes Herbert and then he puts forward several more. AIDS is the leading cause of death in black men between the ages of 25 and 44. While blacks make up just 13 percent of the US population, more than half of all new HIV infections occur among blacks. Blacks are ten times more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS and ten times more likely to die from it. Black women account for 64 percent of all new infections. Herbert faults a variety of factors for the spread of the disease in black communities including: information about the threat of AIDS not being disseminated widely or effectively enough, particularly among youngsters who feel they are invulnerable; poverty contributing to a lack of access to health care information, preventive services, and even treatment; widespread denial in the black community because of the stigma attached to AIDS, homosexuality and IV drug use. Politicians and clergy are beginning to speak out but Herbert suggests that, "nothing less than a mighty chorus is needed to cope with this overwhelming tragedy, a chorus comparable in its seriousness of purpose to the civil rights movement."
Another recent article reports on a survey that found high rates of unprotected sex and HIV transmission among young New York City men. In particular, a high proportion of young men are engaging in unprotected anal sex, a major risk factor for transmission of HIV. About 50 percent of black and Hispanic men and 39 percent of white men said they had anal sex and did not use condoms. Also alarming was the fact that 16 percent of the men surveyed were found to be HIV positive, while only 3 percent said they had previously tested positive for the disease, meaning they were recently infected. The survey was conducted by the New York City Department of Health and the New York Blood Center between March 1999 and July 2000.
HOMELESS:
Although homeless men and women suffer from physical and mental illness at higher rates than many others in the population, they do not receive necessary medical care and one in three homeless people surveyed reported being unable to get drug prescriptions filled. A study released by the Journal of American Medical Association found almost half of all homeless people had at least one major illness and three-quarters were suffering from either a mental problem or abuse of alcohol or drugs. The majority do not have medical insurance, and homeless veterans often do not take advantage of military insurance benefits. One percent of Americans find themselves homeless in the course of a year.
A 1969 sanitation law intended to discourage people from abandoning cars or car parts is being used to arrest homeless people because the wording contains a prohibition against leaving any box, barrel, bale of merchandise on a city street. Anyone sleeping in a box is in violation, according to a recent ruling by a federal judge upholding the policy.
Two pieces of good news arrived recently with an announcement by former US Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo and another by Mayor Giuliani of funds for new housing initiatives. Before leaving his job along with the Clinton administration (and prior to announcing his bid for governor) Andrew Cuomo visited the city bearing news of 84.7 million in federal funds for programs to house the homeless. Giuliani then announced a $600 million increase over four years in low cost housing. The Coalition for the Homeless has a chart that demonstrates the Mayor's housing budget only amounts to 47 percent of what was spent on housing eleven years ago, before his administration. And it is also true that his budget cuts about $700 million in other programs, mostly social service. Nevertheless, additional low-cost and subsidized housing is welcome news. According to a study last year by New York University, housing is critical to ending homelessness. Eighty percent of homeless families in the City that were provided with subsidized housing remained stable after five years and did not re-enter the shelter system, regardless of other problems. Only 18 percent had stability in the group that did not receive subsidized housing.
IMMIGRANTS
Forced to rely on emergency room care because the 1996 welfare reform laws deny them Medicaid preventive care, immigrants in the city are reportedly getting sicker. And continuing to enforce this policy will cost the state and federal government $132 million in emergency room treatments by the year 2005, according to a new study by the New York Immigration Coalition, "Welfare Reform and Health Care: The Wrong Prescription for Immigrants. "Ironically, this policy was established so that it would save the government money," Margie McHugh, executive director of the Coalition, told Newsday. In addition to that cost, approximately 6000 immigrants will be hospitalized for conditions that could have been prevented by access to regular coverage.
High school students with limited English are overlooked and underserved, according to a report by the Urban Institute released in January. Shortages of trained teachers, relevant curriculum, lack of individualized instruction all are contributing to extraordinarily high drop-out rates for immigrant teens. Mayor Giuliani's recent budget proposal may help in that it incorporates funding for weekend English classes for 38,600 students.
AGING
Founders of the gay rights movement, which began 52 years ago, are aging and mostly poor, according to an editorial by Dudley Clendinen in the Times last month. Harry Hay, the first to organize for gay rights back in 1948, is now 88 and ailing. Phyliss Lyon and Del Martin, founders of the first enduring organization for lesbians, are almost 80. Dr. Franklin Kameny, who first insisted that to be gay was not to be abnormal or mentally ill, who first petitioned for employment rights and legally championed for gay civil rights, is now 75. But for gay and lesbian elderly, according to Clendinen, "the twilight years can be especially daunting." Studies in New York and Los Angeles found 65 to 75 percent of elderly gay and lesbian residents live alone. When a partner dies, Social Security does not pass on survivor benefits, and many pension plans exclude same-sex partners. Attitudes also tend to be conservative in housing for the elderly, especially in subsidized low-income housing. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has recently focused attention on the needs of aging lesbians and gay men. There are several plans for gay retirement colonies under way, but at present, there is only one.
For-profit nursing home owners in the city are raking in millions in profits and exorbitant salaries, according to an article in the Daily News. The Clove Lakes Health Care and Rehabilitation Center in Staten Island reported $8.4 million in profits this year. Sheepshead Nursing Home in Brooklyn followed with $5.6 million, and Kings Harbor Multicare Center in the Bronx with $4 million. Nursing home executive salaries jumped, too, with five homes paying their owners $1 million or more. Many not-for-profits homes in the city run by religious organizations also reported surpluses. Critics such as the Nursing Home Community Coalition of New York, a patient advocate group, fear that profits are being gained at the expense of the residents. "The way to make a profit is to cut staff," Cynthia Rudder, director of the Coalition, told the Daily News. Last month the News reported staff shortages and neglect in city nursing homes with the state health department unable to handle all the patient abuse complaints or to adequately monitor the industry. Most nursing homes in New York are funded by Medicaid, presently at a cost of $5 billion, paid for by taxpayers.