Might Mississippi’s long-closed youth court system receive sunshine? ...Middle East

A judge considers what should happen with a child who’s been neglected or abused – without ever hearing from the child’s foster parent.

Kids and teens in court can’t bring their trusted relatives and friends for support. 

Biological parents of children in custody are told they could go to jail if they talk to anyone about their situation. 

And attorneys can’t access basic court filings to properly represent their clients.

These are some of the realities inside one of the most secretive systems in the state: Mississippi’s youth courts.

Created in 1979 to oversee both juvenile delinquency and child abuse and neglect cases, Mississippi’s youth court proceedings have long been closed to the public and the records deemed confidential.

A bill gaining traction this legislative session could change that.

Supporters of closed courtrooms say confidentiality protects children. The concern is that, if information spreads, children accused of crimes may be locked out of future opportunities and children who are victims of abuse or neglect may be retraumatized or face stigma and embarrassment. 

Those who favor transparency say that public visibility is more likely to result in accountability – righting institutional wrongs – and better outcomes for children. Judges would still have the discretion, as they have in other courts, to seal sensitive information or bar disruptive people from hearings. 

But, they say, removing the blanket confidentiality could lead to more open communication between families and their communities. This would help the court arrive at better solutions, such as identifying familiar people to care for a child until a judge decides on reunification.

Some folks who have gone through youth courts themselves say the secretive nature is one reason they had such a negative experience. When Zoey Tether was 14, for example, she was separated from the 5-year-old sister she had essentially parented. No one would answer her questions about where her sister was or how she was doing. Their older sister, who was 16 and spared from entering CPS, received even less intel, and at times didn’t even know in what town her siblings lived.

“I was very isolated during my stay in CPS,” Tether said. “It made it really hard to trust anything.”

Tether, who aged out of the system about a year ago, says she got lucky with her foster mom, who still supports her. She has little contact with her sister, who now lives in Florida with extended family. Tether is in college studying social work and political science with hopes of lobbying for positive child welfare changes. At just 20, she’s already identified part of the solution: open the courts.

“Change can’t happen in a closed system,” Tether told Mississippi Today. “If we want the court system to get better, you can’t fix that from directly inside of it.”

Senate Bill 2728, authored by Republican Sen. Brice Wiggins, a judiciary chairman from Pascagoula, is the latest piece of legislation in a string of youth court reforms considered in recent years. 

Among other changes, the bill aims to remove language in the law that prohibits the public from attending youth court hearings and requires an explicit judge’s order for the release of youth court records. 

“I have said this from day one that the blanket closure in these matters fosters distrust and fosters other negative consequences,” Wiggins said. “Every other court in the state of Mississippi is open, and I would submit that that is a hallmark of, honestly, our democracy.”

The Senate passed the bill mostly along partisan lines – most Democrats voting no – in February. The House replaced the bill with its own language, keeping the provisions related to openness, and passed it with almost no opposition in March. Now for the legislation to stay alive, a small conference of legislators from the Senate and House would need to hash out the details of a final bill that both chambers would pass.

“The issues we handle in youth court, I’m telling you, are too personal, especially when you’re dealing with abuse and neglect, for the public,” said Jeffery Harness, a family law attorney and Democratic representative from Fayette who expects to be included in the conference on the bill. “I’ve had to deal with horrible issues in youth court. And I don’t think that’s the proper venue for the public at all.”

Regarding supportive family members, Harness said, “They can still support them outside the courtroom.”

The youth court judges spread across Mississippi’s 82 counties represent one of the loudest lobbies when it comes to legislative changes to the system. But not all youth court judges are the same. Mississippi has a hybrid youth court, meaning some counties are served by permanent elected youth court judges housed inside county courthouses, while other areas have part-time judges – private attorneys appointed as “referees” to the cases – in chancery courts. This has led to wildly inconsistent outcomes for families from county to county.

Tether and others with youth court experiences recently spoke about confidentiality at a joint meeting held by two groups studying youth courts: the Court Improvement Program Statewide Multi-Disciplinary Task Force and the Mississippi Children, Youth and Families Collaboration Initiative. Judges were there.

Adrienne Williams spoke about how, as a foster parent, a judge barred her from courtroom discussions about her now-adoptive daughter, who is medically fragile due to brain damage caused in the early months of her life while under the care of her biological parents.

Initially, Williams said, the biological mother said she wanted the girl to stay with Williams. But over time, communication between the two fractured. Children in youth court are appointed a courtroom advocate called a guardian ad litem, or GAL, but Williams said a GAL never laid eyes on her daughter. 

Most frustratingly, Williams was never able to tell the judge about her daughter’s medical condition – or the countless weekly doctor’s appointments they attended – which would have provided crucial context in making a decision about what happened next.

“Because of this invoking and this confidentiality, it builds this hostility between the biological parent and the person caring for the child,” Williams said. “Because it’s almost like we’re separated, we’re not to talk to each other.”

Williams and her husband endured five years of this, sitting outside the courtroom doors, repeatedly learning little detail other than that the case had been continued.

“I’m truly sorry for that,” said Staci Bevill, a youth court judge in Lee County. “You should have never been treated that way. There are judges out there who would not do that.”

Bevill told Mississippi Today that blanket openness is worrisome especially in the age of social media.

“Our children and families’ futures shouldn’t be defined by their past mistakes or trauma, which are on full display in our courts,” Bevill said.

Certainly, the worst consequences of the secretive policy don’t occur in every courtroom. But the confidentiality clause does protect some judges from scrutiny, said attorney and parent defender Chad King.

“They don’t even know what’s happening in the county next to them,” King said of youth court judges. “Nobody knows what’s going on, and, by the time we hear about it, the damage has been done.”

Harness, who opposes opening the courtrooms, agreed that youth courts lack the structure of other trial courts – resulting in issues such as parties not being properly served. King said this is one reason why children can linger in state custody for so long. Confidentiality also means attorneys lack familiarity with the court, King said, creating a dearth of attorneys who want to practice in this arena and fewer appeals, meaning fewer checks and balances.

But Harness said training employees of the court would be a better solution than opening the courts. Bevill said those who have concerns about the decisions by youth court judges could file a complaint with the Mississippi Commission on Judicial Performance, an avenue she said few explore.

“Normally, youth court hearings are very informal. We do need to improve on due process issues,” Harness said. “The rules of evidence are not really being administered as they should.”

But the public would be exposed to “all kinds of evil stuff,” Harness warned, if youth court were opened.

“I might not win on that issue, but I’m going to stand firm on that,” Harness said.

While King and others have advocated for years for more youth court openness, the seismic proposal came quietly this session.

As part of a years-long effort to bring uniformity to the process, Wiggins’ initial bill contained sweeping changes – such as officially selecting the chancery as home of youth courts statewide. The judges were stunned. 

Bevill, who chairs the Council of Youth Court Judges, sent out a “kill bill” email urging her colleagues to speak against it. A swarm of youth court judges attended a February meeting of the Senate Judiciary A Committee, where the bill originated. The committee ended up passing a slightly watered down version of the bill, which would maintain a hybrid of county and chancery youth courts. But it still contained other striking changes, such as removing confidentiality. 

The judges stood and left the Capitol hearing room in unison, shaking their heads, after lawmakers advanced the bill. Their opposition had been so palpable, Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike Randolph sent a memo to all local judges days later, asking them to read the rules of judicial conduct.

“Judicial officers must remain impartial, especially on policy issues, and excessive lobbying would likely violate these rules and erode public confidence in the judiciary’s independence and fairness,” Randolph wrote in his Feb. 12 memo.

If the bill passes, the handling of cases by youth court judges won’t be the only thing thrust into the sunlight. The Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, which investigates abuse and neglect and makes recommendations to judges about custody, also plays a role in what happens behind closed youth court doors. 

But CPS’s director, Andrea Sanders, said she favors opening the courts. 

“There’s been a myth propagated that because this is about children and the very sensitive details of their lives that we must seal it, and close it, and we must suspend rules of procedure,” Sanders said at the task force meeting.

Instead, Sanders said it is precisely because these cases involve children that they should come with the protections and due process that the existing legal system “is very elegantly designed to give.”

“My plea to the state is: Let’s have transparency in the courtroom,” she added. “Let’s treat it like a court.”

Adelaide Anderson, who spent most of her teenage years in foster care and now works as an advocate for foster youth, only ever saw a judge in her case one time. 

She remembers the excitement of that court date, laying out her clothes ahead of time, anticipating answers about what her future would hold. After that, she bounced from home to home – at least a dozen placements, she estimates, in a matter of three years. Each move was a decision made without her involvement. “Friends thought I went missing,” Anderson said. 

Anderson eventually opted to get her GED and emancipated herself at 17. “No one told me you get benefits if you age out,” she said.

If courtrooms were more open, Christina Simmons Saucier said she would have felt less intimidated in the aftermath of the state taking her five children into custody nearly a decade ago. She said that from the very beginning, parents are not offered the option of inviting a supportive person, such as a therapist, into the conversation.

“So right then, the parent is silenced,” said Saucier, who spent about a year in the courts before she was reunited with her children. She now works as a peer support specialist with the state public defender’s office.

Nationally, states are moving towards more transparency, though 29 still practice generally closed youth courtrooms and 37 do not allow public access to youth court records. Florida has had open youth court proceedings for decades, and Georgia recently made the same move.

“The sky has not fallen,” said Jay Blitzman, a retired judge from Massachusetts who is advocating for open courtrooms in his state. “Some of the dire predictions about all the harm that will befall children have not come to pass.”

Blitzman also pointed out that states that are concerned about privacy could enact a provision to prohibit the publication of names of minors while still keeping the proceedings transparent. Also, courts that choose to open should not expect a flood of onlookers, Blitzman said.

“People aren’t just going, ‘Man I’m bored on a Tuesday, I might as well go watch a family be ripped apart,'” Tether said. “That’s not what’s going to happen.”

When the state determines a child in its custody cannot safely return to his or her biological parent, it is a youth court judge who will order the Termination of Parental Rights or TPR. 

This order, Blizman said, is the familial equivalent of the death penalty – permanently severing a parent from his or her child. With stakes this high, Blitzman argues, courts should be held to the highest evidentiary rigor, but that’s not always the case in youth court.

“More harm than good is done in the name of protecting children and the so-called best interest of the child,” Blitzman said.

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