JUVENILE COURT JOURNAL: CUSTODY TERMINATION CAN BE A BITTER PROCESS

One Of An Occasional Series

James A. Jackson sat passively as social workers described him as a former
forger and heroin addict who had abandoned his daughter.

He didn't flinch, outwardly at least, as they told a judge she should
terminate his custody of the girl, forever ending his parental rights to
raise her, to hug her, even to see her.

At the end of the hearing, when Jackson got his chance to speak, he pleaded
for his 3-year-old. "I would like the opportunity to raise my child and be
a good dad. I have moved on with my life. My background is shady. But I
have not had a dirty urine for years now. A little sunshine has come into
my life, and I want to keep it now."

Common Pleas Judge Cheryl Allen did not rule from the bench that day. She
prefers to mull difficult cases. Jackson would wait weeks, and during that
time, social workers continued to take the girl from her foster parents to
him for brief visits. After each, Jackson worried that it was the last time
he would ever see his child.

While Jackson waited to find out if he'd permanently lose custody of one
child, he grew ever closer to regaining custody of another. His attorney,
Catherine Volponi, believes there is a good chance Allen will return
Jackson's 11-year-old son Marcus to him in September.

While in termination limbo, Jackson couldn't believe a court could deem him
fit to raise his son, but not his daughter.

As Allegheny County has caught up on a decade-long backlog of terminations,
difficult cases like Jackson's have become more common. Until 1997, only
about 65 terminations were done annually. Since then, there hasn't been a
year with fewer than 300. The record was 544.

This has required Allegheny County's Juvenile Court judges to devote huge
blocks of time to these hearings, the tensest over which they preside
because termination of parental rights is considered the "death penalty" of
family court.

The backlog occurred during a time when Allegheny County's Office of
Children, Youth and Families frowned on foster families adopting. That
philosophy changed in the mid-1990s, after which the agency began seeking
the terminations that must be completed before adoptions can be done.

Many of the backlogged cases were easy to resolve: The children had been in
care for years; parents had given up hope of getting them back; some
couldn't even be found.

Within the past year or so, the half-dozen lawyers who file these pleas for
CYF have nearly caught up with the backlog. That means CYF is complying
with the the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act, which requires
agencies to seek termination of parental rights when a child has been in
foster care for 15 months.

But filing that early can often mean bitter termination contests with
parents who are still trying to get their children back and will show up to
protest.

Jackson's children were in foster care for longer than 15 months while
their mother was imprisoned by crack addiction and Jackson was incarcerated
at the State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill.

A month before his release to a halfway house in July of 2001, CYF asked
Allen to terminate Jackson's parental rights to both children.

A History Of Wrong Turns

Jackson grew up in East Liberty, the namesake of a criminal. Just about 35
years ago, Jackson, who is 56 now, had his own namesake son. He too grew up
to be a criminal.

Jackson's career goes back to his teen years and includes car thefts,
credit card fraud, forgery, shoplifting and drug violations. He's served
time in federal and state prisons, county jail and reform school.

For the most part, the crimes paid for his heroin addiction. "I am not
trying to pass myself off as a Goody Two-Shoes," he says, "But I never
committed a violent crime or abused a child."

Jackson says a girlfriend raised his first son, and he admits he wasn't
involved in the boy's life. But that was not true of his second son, Marcus.

When Marcus was born, Jackson and the boy's mother, Nona Fields, were
living in Wilkinsburg. But they soon split up. Jackson moved to Bridgeville
and went to culinary school.

Fields moved to Dallas when Marcus was 2. Jackson went there to get Marcus
for the next two summers. Then, when Marcus was 4, Fields sent the boy back
to Pittsburgh to live with his father.

Fields returned when Marcus was 6 and began living with Jackson and their
son. Jackson worked at a funeral home then and had plans to open his own
restaurant. He bought a house in South Fayette. Marcus played midget
football and little league. They got a dog. They had it all.

But then Fields started using crack cocaine, just as Jackson's work hours
were cut. The mortgage was due. The bills were piling up. Fields was
pregnant. "I was sinking," Jackson recalls, "so I went back to my old
profession, forgery." And he went back to his old drug habit, heroin.

Ultimately, he returned to an old haunt, jail. He missed his daughter's
birth. By the time he got out, the bank had foreclosed on the house. The
dog was dead. The children were in foster care.

But Jackson had stopped shooting heroin. He visited his son and daughter
regularly. He played finger games with his baby and nicknamed her Boo.

The visits ended after only 12 weeks, when Boo was 9 months old, because
Jackson violated his probation by forging checks again. That's when he went
to Camp Hill.

He saw her only once in the 18 months he was in prison. But he saw Marcus
regularly because Marcus' foster mother took him for visits.

A month before Jackson was to return home, CYF sent him notice that it
would seek termination of his parental rights.

Jackson was stunned. "That is a terrible thing, to go to jail for 18 months
and come back and they take your kids. Is that part of the sentence?"

It could be. If a child has been in foster care for 15 months and CYF
believes permanently taking custody from the birth parents would be best,
state law requires the agency to ask a judge to do it. The judge decides
whether the parents' behavior meets Pennsylvania's standards for termination.

Those include failure of a parent to perform his duties to the child for
six months and unrelenting failure of a parent to remedy conditions that
resulted in the child being placed in foster care in the first place. In
other words, if children enter foster care because because they'd lived in
the same foster home for a year before CYF separated them. "I let Marcus
play with her because she didn't really know me," Jackson recounts, "I was
playing with her, but I was real cautious."

Still, Rosenblum's report got Jackson half of what he wanted. After hearing
the psychologist's description of the strong bond between father and son,
Allen ordered CYF to work toward reunification of those two. She allowed
Boo to remain on the termination track.

Almost a year after CYF told Jackson it wanted to terminate his rights, the
case finally went before Allen. She heard testimony in hearings in May and
June.

A few weeks later, before she ruled on Boo, Allen conducted a review
hearing on Marcus, at which she made it clear she would consider returning
the boy to his father in September.

Shortly afterward, she signed the papers terminating Jackson's rights to
his daughter.

When Jackson found out last week, the pain choked him up. He felt he was
losing part of himself. And he protested the separation of the siblings,
noting, "Marcus loses his brotherly rights along with me."

Jackson still has his boxing gloves on though. He said he'd appeal.