02-2-21234-1 | STATE DEPT OF REVENUE VS SELENA SMITH DBA
Case Number 02-2-21234-1
Court Thurston
File Date 08/21/2002
Case Type Tax Warrants
Case Status Completed/Re-Completed
Party
Plaintiff (Participant) STATE DEPT OF REVENUE
Defendant SMITH, SELENA U
Disposition Events
08/21/2002 Judgment
Judgment Type Tax Warrant
Monetary/Property Award
Creditors: STATE DEPT OF REVENUE
Debtors: SMITH, SELENA U
Signed Date: 01/01/1800
Filed Date: 08/21/2002
Effective Date: 08/21/2002
Current Judgment Status:
Status: Active
Status Date: 01/01/1800
Comment: Judgments this case: 1 2002-08-21 WUTR WARRANT FOR UNPAID TAXES-REVENUE JDB0001 SMITH, SELENA U 2,600.70. DBA ALL THAT JAZZ INT PER WARRANT 5.00
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. ~Neil Postman
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TACOMA, Wash. — The parents of missing West Valley City woman Susan Powell won a $98.5 million judgement in a courtroom here today, bringing a close to the latest chapter in a decade-long drama rising from Powell’s disappearance in 2009.
“All states will remember this,” Susan Powell’s father, Chuck Cox said. “Not that I expect [Washington state] will pay it. But the fact that the award was made tells them ‘you have to do something different’ … ‘you have to protect the safety of the children.’”
Cox and his wife, Judy Cox, sued Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services in 2013. The lawsuit centered on the circumstances leading up to the Feb. 5, 2012 killings of their grandsons, Charlie and Braden Powell, at the hands of their father, Josh Powell. He was at the time the sole suspect in his wife’s disappearance. However, Josh Powell was never arrested or charged with a crime related to what police believed was Susan Powell’s murder.
Josh Powell lost custody of his sons in September of 2011, on the same day deputies from the Pierce County (Washington) Sheriff’s Office arrested his father, Steve Powell on suspicion of voyeurism and possession of child pornography. Investigators discovered the elder Powell’s trove of home video recordings the month prior, while serving a search warrant at his home on the outskirts of Puyallup, Wash.
Josh Powell and his sons had been living with Steve Powell since January of 2010. That raised concerns for social workers, who believed Steve Powell’s home was an unsafe environment for the children. After a brief stay in a foster home, DSHS placed Charlie and Braden, then six and four years old respectively, with the parents of Susan Powell, their grandparents.
The placement rankled Josh Powell, who held highly antagonistic views toward his in-laws. He undertook legal efforts to regain custody of his sons almost immediately. In the months that followed, a DSHS investigator closed an investigation into Powell after finding no evidence that he had neglected or mistreated his sons. Pierce County Judge Kathryn Nelson subsequently approved moving supervised visits between Powell and the boys from a secure facility into a home Powell rented in the neighboring community of Graham.
In their lawsuit, the Coxes accused the social workers of ignoring their own policies and guidelines regarding domestic violence screening. Attorney Anne Bremner, one member of the Cox’s legal team, contended Josh Powell’s status as a suspect in the presumed murder of his wife made him an obvious risk.
“It should have been clear to these case workers that they needed to look at domestic violence because Josh was a suspect in the disappearance and potential homicide of his wife,” Bremner said.
Justice delayed by appeals and coronavirus
Just reaching the point of presenting that argument to a jury proved difficult.
The Coxes initially filed the suit in Pierce County Superior Court. It was subsequently moved into U.S. District Court, where a judge ruled the state agency and its staff were shielded from the claims by governmental immunity. The Coxes appealed that ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In January of 2019, the appellate court returned a split decision, finding the individual social workers were immune but the agency itself was not.
From there, the case returned to the District Court, which passed it back to Pierce County Superior Court.
In February of 2020, Judge Stanley Rumbaugh opened trial proceedings before a jury of 11 men and one woman. He initially blocked out five weeks for the trial. However, in mid-March, Washington shut down its courts in response to the burgeoning crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Anne Bremner worried the pandemic might derail the case permanently.
“I was very, very worried about that,” Bremner said. “But also that if we reconvened that we might have a second spike and then it might end in a mistrial.”
Courts reopen
By June, Covid-19 case counts were declining and courts across Washington were slowly reopening. Judge Rumbaugh notified the parties he intended to resume the trial. However, attorneys representing DSHS filed an emergency appeal to the Washington Supreme Court, seeking a further delay. The high court ultimately declined to hear that request, clearing the way for the trial to resume in mid July.
The jurors, who spent four months away from the courtroom, came back to serve. Chuck Cox said their willingness to return inspired him.
“To a person on the jury, they all said ‘no, we’ll wait, we want to come back and finish this,’” Cox said.
The decision
Closing arguments in the trial came on July 29, 2020. Then, on the morning of July 30, the jury began its deliberations. By the afternoon of July 31, word circulated they had reached a decision. Judge Rumbaugh called the parties together to announce the decision.
“Was the state of Washington negligent? Answer: yes,” Rumbaugh said, reading from the jury’s form. “Was such negligence a proximate cause of injury to the plaintiffs? Answer: yes.”
Next, Rumbaugh detailed the jury’s findings regarding damages.
Damages set
In opening arguments months earlier, attorney Ted Buck had asked the jury for a substantial financial penalty against the state. He had said that was the only way to force Washington to change course and prioritize the safety of children in protective custody.
The jurors appeared to take that to heart. They set damages for each child at $57.5 million, for a combined total of $115 million. They then deducted from that total the amount of roughly $16.5 million, attributing that share of financial responsibility to Josh Powell. As a result, the parents of Susan Powell stand to receive $98.5 million.
Chuck Cox said the staggering figure isn’t likely to come any time soon. He anticipates the state of Washington will appeal or challenge the jury’s result. But he says he plans to use any money he does receive advocating on behalf of domestic violence prevention.
“There’s not much else you can do with it because you can’t bring them back,” Cox said.
The Washington Attorney General’s Office referred questions about the outcome of the trial to the Washington Department of Children, Youth and Families. A spokesperson for that agency did not respond to a request for comment.
I cover criminal justice, entrepreneurship, and offbeat lawsuits.
In a landmark decision late last month, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled that victims of wrongful searches and seizures have the right to sue the responsible government officials. Just as critically, the court firmly rejected qualified immunity as a potential defense against those lawsuits. The court’s twin holdings will better ensure that government officials can actually be held accountable for their misconduct.
“Absent a damages remedy here, no mechanism exists to deter or prevent violations of important individual rights,” Justice Elissa Cadish wrote for the court. And “a right does not, as a practical matter, exist without any remedy for its enforcement.”
What became a pivotal ruling for civil rights started because Sonja Mack just wanted to see her boyfriend. Back in 2017, Mack traveled to High Desert State Prison to visit her partner, who was then behind bars. While waiting, Mack said she was approached by two correctional officers, who then conducted a “demeaning and humiliating” strip search of Mack. Even though officers didn’t find any drugs or contraband, the prison still banned Mack from seeing her boyfriend and revoked her visitation privileges.
Mack sued, arguing that being strip searched violated her rights under the Nevada Constitution. Mirroring language found in the Fourth Amendment, the Nevada Constitution safeguards “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable seizures and searches.”
Yet Nevada’s legislature, like more than 40 other states, never passed a civil rights act that expressly let individuals sue the government employees who infringed their constitutional rights. Only state lawmakers, the Nevada Department of Corrections argued, have the power to make government workers liable for civil rights violations.
Fortunately for Mack, the Nevada Supreme Court disagreed. “Constitutional rights must remain enforceable in the absence of some action by the legislature,” the court ruled, “or risk that constitutional rights become all but ‘a mere hope.’” When it comes to “self-executing” rights like the right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures, “the legislature lacks the authority to pass legislation that abridges or impairs those rights.” “Likewise,” Justice Cadish continued, “the availability of remedies that follow from violations of those rights does not depend on the legislature’s benevolence or foresight.”
In addition, the Nevada Supreme Court refused to import the legal doctrine of qualified immunity. Created by the U.S. Supreme Court four decades ago, qualified immunity shields all government workers from liability, unless they violated a “clearly established” right. Since that usually requires finding an almost identical case as precedent—a very high bar to clear—qualified immunity prevents victims from holding the perpetrators accountable.
To visit the prison, Mack caught a ride with an acquittance of hers, Tina Cates, who was also trying to see her boyfriend behind bars. Like Mack, Cates also said she was subjected to a humiliating strip search. And she too filed a civil rights lawsuit.
But unlike Mack, whose legal claims based on state constitutional rights can now move forward, Cates’ case involved federal claims and was ultimately blocked by qualified immunity. Even though the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that strip searching Cates was “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” the court still dismissed her case since “there was no case in this circuit where we had held that a prison visitor has a right to leave the prison rather than undergo a strip search.” Accordingly, Cates’ right to be free from strip searches was not yet “clearly established.”
Though the Nevada Supreme Court ruling is currently limited to searches and seizures, it’s already making an impact. Consider Stephen Lara. A veteran who served in the Marines for 16 years, Stephen had his entire life savings—over $87,000—confiscated by a Nevada state trooper. He was never charged with a crime.
Stephen didn’t back down. Just one day after the Institute for Justice filed a lawsuit, the government returned the cash it wrongfully seized. But the rest of his lawsuit was put on hold while the Nevada Supreme Court considered Mack’s case. Now with a resounding win for individual rights, Stephen’s case to hold the officers accountable can finally move forward.
“The wheels of justice for Stephen Lara can finally move forward after being on hold for more than a year,” said Institute for Justice Attorney Ben Field, who participated in oral argument for Mack v. Williams. “As we urged, the Nevada Supreme Court holds that ordinary people like Stephen can sue for damages when government officials go over the line and violate the most basic guarantees in the state constitution.”
A state’s most senior judge takes child welfare to task as she heads toward retirement
BY JOHN KELLY (John Kelly is senior editor for The Imprint.)
Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack
You don’t see a state’s most senior judge weigh in on with force on a standard proceeding in child welfare court every day. But that is exactly what Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack did, in part because she felt the issue at hand in the case had become all too standard: the termination of parental rights.
The mother in this case had her rights terminated by a trial court, a decision that was affirmed by the state Court of Appeals. A majority of McCormack’s colleagues on the Supreme Court saw it the same way and affirmed the termination. She saw a failure to consider the full scope of options to keep family connected, calling the termination “both tragic and frustratingly commonplace.”
From McCormack’s opinion:
A mom expressed a strong interest to remain a part of her daughter’s life. Her daughter expressed a similarly strong interest to see her mom. And yet the best our legal system has to offer them is a complete severing of their legal relationship, with no consideration of creative solutions that would benefit the whole family. I wish this case was an outlier. But in ten years reviewing records in termination cases, I have seen many just like this where our statutory process for protecting children has failed them.
The case, known as In re G.M. Dixson, involves the mother of a child identified as GMD. Her infant half-sister died in 2017 as a result of unsafe sleep practices. At the time GMD was living with her mother’s family friends from her church, an arrangement reached without the involvement of CPS so that mom could find housing, care for the new baby and get her education back on track.
When the infant died, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services became involved. The family friends became licensed foster parents so they could remain the caregivers for GMD.
Services like parenting classes and anger management were rendered, ultimately to the approval of caseworkers. People in the mother’s life attested to the fact that she had been regularly taking medication for her mental health challenges, was managing her own life well, and had a good relationship with her daughter. GMD also expressed a desire to see her mother, but wished to remain with the family friends and thought of them as parents.
Yet on May 2021, the trial court terminated the mother’s rights, citing ongoing mental health struggles and her use of a suspended license to arrive at the actual termination hearing. “… It would not be safe for the child to be returned … to the mother at this time or at a point in time in the reasonably foreseeable future.”
The overturning of terminations of parental rights by higher courts is fairly rare, and this was no exception. But McCormack, whose career as a jurist will soon come to an end, could not abide a finding that prevents the mother and GMD from any contact when there was no need to do that in the pursuit of permanency in this case. There were opportunities to reunify them, she argues, but never a time when termination was necessary for everyone’s safety.
“At no point during the termination hearings did anyone—the DHHS staff, the respondent-mother’s attorney, the lawyer-guardian ad litem, the judge—consider any other possible arrangement,” McCormack wrote. “Everyone focused solely on two choices: full custody or full termination.”
But McCormack did not limit her dissenting remarks to the injustices she perceived in this case. Over 12 pages, frequently citing the work of abolitionist organizations and writers such as the upEND Movement and Dorothy Roberts, the chief justice delivered a top-down critique of business as usual in the child welfare courts.
You can click here to read the entire dissenting opinion, but following are a few choice remarks from McCormack.
The idea of foster care removal as harm:
The harms of removal and sometimes also foster care can produce “worse long-term outcomes than if the child had remained at home.” But Michigan’s removal statutes do not require courts to balance these harms against the harm that might result from staying home.
On the general standard in federal law that reasonable efforts are made to prevent foster care, encourage reunification, and prevent the need for termination of parental rights:
The respondent-mother did not just have to attend parenting and relationship classes. She had to benefit from them. But what does that mean? Asking a parent to participate in services is a reasonable request. But terminating the parent-child relationship on the sole basis of a failure to benefit from such services—as determined subjectively by a single caseworker—is unreasonable.
Grounds for terminating a parent’s rights:
Some grounds for termination are backward-looking, asking whether the conditions that led to court involvement have been resolved. For instance, a court can order termination where “conditions that led to the adjudication continue to exist and there is no reasonable likelihood that the conditions will be rectified within a reasonable time …”
Other grounds for termination are more forward-looking, asking whether the parent has shown an ability to “provide proper care and custody” for the child or whether there is a likelihood the child will be “harmed if he or she is returned to the home of the parent.”
The problem with this statutory framework is that it forces on courts a binary choice: full custody or full termination. It discourages creativity by courts and advocates in considering alternative arrangements for a family.
The “best interests” standard used frequently by courts to weigh the right thing to do for a child:
… The best-interests standard is capacious, allowing for individual, subjective biases about parenting to drive decision-making. This isn’t a new observation, which makes it all the more frustrating. In 1977, then Justice Brennan noted that the “best interests” standard’s open-ended nature allowed “social workers of middle-class backgrounds, perhaps unconsciously, … to favor continued placement in foster care with a generally higher-status family” because of a “bias that treats the natural parents’ poverty and lifestyle as prejudicial to the best interests of the child.”
Racial disparities in the child welfare system:
… The legal framework governing child welfare cases is full of open-ended, hard-to-apply standards that invite subjectivity and bias. Minority families may experience “cultural misunderstandings” from courts and advocates who equate parenting practices different from their own as neglectful or wrong.
McCormack concludes with a list of solutions she sees as crucial to making the child welfare system, particularly the court’s involvement in it, more just and effective. Among them: legal representation for parents “from start to finish”; requiring courts to weigh “the harm of removal” in decisions, alongside “best interests”; and integrating limited guardianship arrangements as a means of reducing the use of terminations.
And the best strategy for reform, she writes, is to “reduce the need” for child welfare in the first place. “The more we move solutions upstream, the less we will need downstream interventions.”
McCormack concludes with a list of solutions she sees as crucial to making the child welfare system, particularly the court’s involvement in it, more just and effective. Among them: legal representation for parents “from start to finish”; requiring courts to weigh “the harm of removal” in decisions, alongside “best interests”; and integrating limited guardianship arrangements as a means of reducing the use of terminations.
And the best strategy for reform, she writes, is to “reduce the need” for child welfare in the first place. “The more we move solutions upstream, the less we will need downstream interventions.”
