Texas Lawyer magazine, April 10, 2008 edition, captured Justice Harriet O’Neill — who later had the audacity to write a dissenting opinion supporting CPS in the FLDS case — collaborating with lower courts and CPS on the case while promoting herself and her Kiddy Commission:
Polygamist Compound Removal Cases to Test State Civil Justice System
By John Council
. . .
Two years ago, the Texas Supreme Court created the Permanent Judicial Commission for Children, Youth & Families to improve how the judicial system treats abused and neglected children. Commission members [including O'Neill] will have their work cut out for them with the FLDS removal cases.
“Thank goodness we had a structure in place,” says Texas Supreme Court Justice Harriet O’Neill, chairwoman of the commission. The commission studies how to improve child protection in Texas and oversees funding to help courts [and childrens' attorneys?] better deal with abused and neglected children.
Last week, O’Neill sent commission staff member Carl Reynolds, executive director of the Office of Court Administration, to West Texas to help the Schleicher County district clerk’s office process the numerous court documents being filed related to the removal petitions. Rucker, vice chairman of the commission, also sent commission member John Specia, a former Bexar County state district judge, to West Texas to assess the county’s judicial needs. Specia did not return a telephone call seeking comment.
Judge Specia would later sit in judgment in some of those same FLDS cases.
While there are thousands of family lawyers in Texas, not all of them have ad litem experience. The Texas Family Code requires that lawyers have continuing legal education training before they represent children as ad litems in family court cases.
OK. So they need training. Are we to assume that the very Court and jurists who will sit in judgment on these AALs’ cases should also coordinate and pay for their training? How many times have we heard judges and justices say “I cannot comment on pending litigation”? If they shouldn’t be commenting on it, how is it acceptable for them to not only talk about it in the press but participate in running the entire show?
O’Neill says she is looking into obtaining federal grant money to fund training sessions for lawyers on how to handle the ad litem issues in the FLDS removal cases and is working with the University of Texas School of Law’s Children’s Rights Clinic to help provide the training. O’Neill expects that a video of the training sessions will be posted on the State Bar’s Web site. Jack Sampson, director of the clinic, says a three-hour training session was to be held in San Angelo on April 11, after Texas Lawyer’s presstime.
Removal cases “are in our courts in Texas every day. And our courts don’t have the resources we need,” O’Neill says. “And this [the FLDS removal cases] just emphasizes and highlights the importance of these courts and what they do.”
So, in addition to all of the other motives to make an example of the FLDS, here’s another: to raise funds for Harriet’s empire and emphasize and highlight the importance of courts that exist to separate children from parents. Ain’t that just delightful!
It also emphasizes how important, far-sighted and wonderful Harriet O’Neill is. Thank heaven we had Harriet O’Neill to rig that April 17-18 hearing!
