NPO Blog Archive

When children of divorce or separation are being abused in a mother’s home and the children are taken by the state, they should be placed with their father ASAP, barring a finding of unfitness. One of the problems with the child welfare system is that this is often not the case.

In Choosing Foster Parents over Fathers (San Diego Union-Tribune, 7/11/07), family law attorney Jeff Leving and I discussed research from the Urban Institute which shows that the child welfare system usually denies fit, loving fathers the opportunity to raise their own children.

In the Gary Smith Jr. case discussed below, Smith’s ex-wife left their three kids in the care of her boyfriend while deployed overseas. The boyfriend beat one of the boys to death, yet the system still dragged its feet in granting the father custody of the surviving two children. Leving, who represented Smith in the case, told the Chicago Tribune that child-welfare officials should have moved the surviving children quickly to his client, explaining, “It’s sad that he had to hire me and go through these maneuvers to safeguard his other children.”

The article is below–congratulations to Leving for his good work in reuniting this father and his children. A news video about the case can be seen here. Smith and Leving are pictured above.

Slain boy’s father awarded custody of his 2 other kids
Iraq veteran divorces child’s mother, whose boyfriend is suspect
By Michael Higgins
Chicago Tribune, September 7, 2007

The father of a 4-year-old Calumet City boy who was beaten to death in May was granted permanent custody of his two other children under a divorce settlement approved Thursday.

Gary Smith Jr. was serving in the Army in Iraq when he learned that his son Cameron had been killed.

Unbeknownst to him, Smith said, his then-wife, Lavada Smith, had placed the couple’s children in the care of her boyfriend, who was later charged with the 4-year-old’s murder.

On Thursday, Cook County Circuit Judge Karen Shields approved the settlement, which allows Smith to take Cameron’s siblings, ages 7 and 8, to live with him in Georgia.

“I wanted my kids to be safe,” Smith said after the hearing. “I want them to be able to go to school without thinking about bad things that happened here.”

Lavada Smith is allowed visitation under the settlement. She could not be reached for comment after the hearing.

Shields praised the couple Thursday for reaching a compromise that she said put their children’s interests first. “I think you’re probably doing the best you can with a really bad situation,” Shields said.

Speaking after the hearing, Gary Smith said he still considers his former wife to be a good mother. But he said she made a terrible mistake when she was deployed to Iraq herself and left their children with Donell Parker of Calumet City.

Parker has pleaded not guilty in the boy’s death.

Gary Smith’s attorney, Jeffery Leving, said after the hearing Thursday that child-welfare officials should have moved the surviving children quickly to his client. “It’s sad that he had to hire me and go through these maneuvers to safeguard his other children,” Leving said.

Cameron was discovered lifeless in his bed. Calumet City police said the boy endured two days of being punched in the head, stomach, chest and back. He was beaten with a belt as well, police said.

“Nobody who knows me well can ever say I wasn’t a father to these kids.”–former NFL Star Bennie Blades

“They couldn’t be any closer”–the mother of one of Blades’ children, describing the boy’s relationship with Bennie Blades, his father

How can a man pay $1.3 million after-tax dollars in child support and then be arrested for being a “deadbeat dad”? It happened to former NFL star Bennie Blades in 2005.

Blades was working as a substitute teacher in Broward County, Florida when he was arrested. His football career was cut short by a painful injury, and even his NFL retirement pension was taken from him for child support. Blades was by all accounts a dedicated father, who was even publicly praised by his exes after his arrest.

Blades certainly made mistakes. However, the child support system and family law system often milks high-earners with transitory incomes, such as professional athletes and entertainers, leaving them with little after their careers are over. During Blades career he was apparently paying half his after-tax income in child support.

As Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg explains in his column below, Blades has a strong relationship with his children. His mistreatment at the hands of Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox is outrageous, and symbolizes much of what’s wrong with the child support system.

In the eyes of the state, Bennie Blades is a deadbeat dad
Detroit Free Press, 4/29/05

DETROIT _ On Feb. 17, at the behest of the State of Michigan, police arrested a substitute teacher at Piper High School in Sunrise, Fla.

The substitute teacher spent a week in Broward County Jail in Florida. Then he was shipped off to Michigan _ almost two weeks on a bus, stopping only to eat fast food or bologna sandwiches at jails along the way.

He was not allowed to bathe or brush his teeth. As the bus transported accused criminals throughout the Eastern states, he was forced to sit all day and night, which was extremely painful because the substitute teacher has chipped vertebrae in his neck, an injury he suffered when he played safety in the NFL.

“I’m like, `This is very humiliating,'” recalled Bennie Blades, a Detroit Lions star from 1988-96. “You had to eat with your hands shackled basically down to your lap.”

When he arrived in Michigan on March 8 _ 19 days after his arrest _ Blades was still wearing the same Old Navy blue jeans, printed blue shirt and white Pumas he was wearing when he was arrested.

Now Blades, who has been released on bail, faces two charges. The first is felony non-support for his daughter Ashley, who lives with her mother, Yolande Healey, in Southfield, Mich. At one point, Blades owed nearly $400,000 in child support for Ashley. She is one of his six children with six women.

The other charge is for failing to appear at a Jan. 7 court hearing in the case.

Mix those ingredients together: Former NFL star. Nine million dollars in career earnings. Six kids with six women. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in child support.

And a state attorney general who has made deadbeat dads a top priority.

And one mother who wants Blades to pay up.

And three other mothers who say he doesn’t have the money.

Oh, and don’t forget those six kids. Please don’t forget them.

They all had something at stake that February day when the cops showed up at Piper High. And as Bennie Blades was whisked out of the school parking lot, he didn’t bother asking what he should do with his car, a 1994 Honda Accord with more than 135,000 miles on it.

“We just left it there,” Blades said with a laugh. “I don’t think anybody is going to steal that.”

When Blades was first arrested for this case, in November 2003, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox received a rousing standing ovation from himself.

“Once again let me send this message: Deadbeats that shirk their parental responsibilities risk incarceration,” Cox said in a press release. “Whether that parent works in construction or played safety for the Detroit Lions, failure to pay child support will have consequences.”

It is easy to paint Blades as a villain.

That is, if you’re looking for villains.

But what if you are more worried about Bianca Blades, Bennie’s 11-year-old daughter, who sees her dad regularly?

Read the full article here.

Background: Charlotte Hardwick’s Dear Judge (Kid’s Letters to the Judge) is a fascinating collection of letters which children caught in divorces have written to family law judges.

In the letter below, a young girl blames herself for her parents’ divorce.

Dear Judge,I think my mom and dad are fighting because of me. Could you put me in a new family so my mom and dad can be happy again?Sandy S.

Background: The California Judicial Council’s Domestic Violence Practice and Procedures Task Force recently invited comments on its Draft Guidelines and Recommended Practices for Improving the Administration of Justice in Domestic Violence Cases. There’s a big problem with the Draft Guidelines–they don’t deal with the false allegations issue.

In late June I urged my readers to write to the Task Force and urge them to consider the massive problem false allegations represent in their report. Several hundred of you wrote letters. I have asked for and received permission from several of those who wrote the Task Force to include their letters in my blog. All letters are published anonymously. To learn more, see my original call to action Act Now: Major New Report on Domestic Violence, Family Law, Restraining Orders Doesn’t Even Mention False Allegations! or click here.

From “Don,” a reader:

“Dear Task Force:

Five years ago, I was dating a woman. At the time we had been seeing each other for a couple of years. She had turned 38, and I noticed a big change in her but wasn’t really interested in talking with her about it. She had stopped taking birth control pills, became pregnant, and had our child. She immediately began a full blown attempt to destroy me, and stated that I would never see our child.

“A series of Family Court dates began to follow where one false allegation followed another. At this time, I think I have been to court 24 or 25 times. I was able to demonstrate to the court each time that the allegations were in fact, not legitimate. At the hearing before last, Judge Angela Jewell stated to the mother that she was concerned about the lack of support of the mother for our daughter’s relationship with me.

“Later, the allegations turned into those of a sexual nature, and now I’m facing a trial, with the only evidence being a statement my daughter made, to a therapist, hired by the mother.

“If the family court system would have one time punished the other party for false allegations, maybe my business, my finances, my family, my life would not have suffered this kind of damage.

“Any law without punishment for false allegations would be incomplete. Of course, even if the legislation was passed, the Family Court system would probably ignore the laws of the State, and continue to do what they wanted to anyway.

Don”

The National Organization for Women (NOW) has filed a lawsuit in federal court against fatherhood programs in Alaska, Idaho and Oregon. The objective of these programs is to provide career counseling to fathers in three tough categories: incarcerated, military and fathers with disabled children.

NOW has objected because women are excluded from these programs “solely because they are women.”

There is an old saying that you should be careful what you wish for, since you might get it. I think NOW should think twice about trying to win this lawsuit. If they win, wouldn’t that endanger the innumerable government-funded programs that benefit only women?

More to the point, how many proofs do we need that NOW and similar organizations oppose fathers’ involvement with their children and will use any excuse to attack programs that encourage such involvement? And here I thought they believed in gender equality–silly me.

The researchers concluded, “The vast majority of participants from divorced families desired more father involvement than they had received. As a result, it appears that divorce leaves many children with unmet desires for paternal involvement–desires that remain salient for many years after the divorce is finalized. This pattern of results is consistent with what Warshak (2003) has called ‘the collective voice of children’ and has argued that this should be used more extensively when making custody and access decisions within the family court system.”

This is now the seventh or eight study showing that children of divorce want more time with their fathers (or non-custodial parents). There are no studies showing the opposite, to the best of my knowledge.

The bar associations continue to oppose shared parenting in most states. I suppose they can be excused–after all, their members have absolutely zero knowledge or training in child development. So maybe they should be a little more humble, and stick to contract law or bankruptcies, instead of telling us what is best for our children.

The self-appointed children’s advocates, such as the Children’s Trust Fund in Boston, also oppose shared parenting. They have less of an excuse than the lawyers. After all, these twenty-something social workers have taken two semesters of child development. This apparently qualifies them to rule our lives.

The research was carried out by Gordon E. Finley, Ph.D. of Florida International University, and Seth J. Schwartz, Ph.D. of Florida State University. They surveyed 484 university students whose parents had divorced. Their research is published in the October, 2007 issue of Family Court Review.

This story details the hard lives and heroism of two women who remained loyal to their husbands for three decades as the men were incarcerated for crimes the FBI knew they didn’t commit. Both women raised their children, and kept up theirs and their children’s relationships with their husbands as best they could.

Recently, their husbands and their families were awarded $102 million for the FBI’s withholding of evidence of the men’s innocence.

These two women, Marie Salvati and Olympia Limone, are heroines. Olympia is pictured with her husband.

Hard lives for wives of men wrongly imprisoned: Ruling that frees spouses ends 30-year wait for Mass. women
The Associated Press, 8/16/07

BOSTON – For three decades, Marie Salvati and Olympia Limone essentially lived as widows, struggling to make ends meet as they raised four children on their own. Their husbands grew old behind bars after being convicted of a murder the FBI knew they did not commit.

Now the women hope a judge’s ruling awarding them and two other families nearly $102 million marks the end of their struggle in a long story of love, devotion and survival.

For many years, the two women would see each other about once a month, across the visiting room of a state prison. Their conversations were rarely more than a wave hello or a “how’s the family?” but they didn’t need words to understand each other’s lives.

In the days after the verdict, the two women and their husbands spoke to The Associated Press about living apart for so long, and the bonds that kept them together.

Never any doubt
For Marie Salvati, there was never a moment of doubt, even after her husband, Joe, was charged with murder, convicted and sentenced.

“He told me, ‘Marie, I want you to know I had nothing to do with this,’ and you know, from that moment on, I knew I was in this with him for his life sentence,” she said.

“I used to tell him, ‘You take care of yourself in there and I’ll take care of the family on the outside’,” she said.

And for 30 years, that’s what she did.

Every week, she traveled up to two hours each way to visit her husband in prison. She and the kids endured humiliating pat-downs and searches. The visits, she said, were to buoy her husband’s spirits and to preserve the bond between a father and his children.

It was hardly the life they had planned.