Philadelphia Family Court building. (Photo: P.J. D'Annunzio)

This year has seen the emergence of several shocking accounts from lawyers and litigants about their experiences in Philadelphia's family court and child welfare system, revealing a troubling trend of institutional secrecy and a lack of oversight.

In April, The Legal reported that sophomore Philadelphia Family Court Judge Lyris F. Younge  had an extensive history of violating the due process rights of parents who appeared before her—often in cases where parents were at risk of losing their children.

At the time, it was discovered that Younge was the most appealed and overturned judge in family court. The trend continued throughout the year.

In her first upended decision, Younge was called out by a state Superior Court panel for locking a sick mother out of the courtroom after she had left the dependency hearings to vomit. Younge ruled in favor of the city's Department of Human Services arguments against the mother.

“I'm not allowing her to come back in,” Younge said at the March 16, 2016, hearing just days after joining the bench. “So that testimony is out the window because she walked out without permission of the court. Even if she was sick she should have had the courtesy to let me know that. So her disdain for the court has been so noted.”

That move drew a warning from Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Shogan.

“Although the trial court might well have believed that [the Department of Human Services] presented overwhelming evidence against [the] mother, the trial court violated mother's constitutional guarantee to due process when it precluded her from the opportunity to be heard,” Shogan wrote in an opinion.

As time passed, Younge was admonished for wrongly jailing a grandmother and holding a child in foster care to force a confession of alleged abuse from her parents, and was pulled from a case in which she allegedly held a lawyer in contempt without giving him the opportunity to defend himself.

Her behavior sparked protests, and she was later removed from the Family Court bench and reassigned to conduct civil hearings. She has been the subject of a state Judicial Conduct Board ethics probe since May.

Abuse Claims Emerge From City Foster Care System

Younge also presided over the case of Virginia McKale, who shared the story of her grandson's abuse in foster care.

In McKale's case, her grandchildren were separated after being removed from their mother. Despite McKale's protests that she could house them both in her seven-bedroom home,  Younge denied that request because McKale lives across state lines.

McKale alleged that one of her grandsons was later sexually assaulted by another child in a foster home. The Legal reported that McKale's story was one of many accounts of abuse in Philadelphia foster homes and that it was a symptom of a systemic problem that centered on inadequate services provided by Community Umbrella Agencies, or CUAs, which are private entities that DHS contracts with to provide caseworkers in addition to vetting potential foster homes.

CUAs have been sued numerous times over the years for failure to properly vet foster parents who went on to abuse children. Several of those cases have produced multimillion-dollar results.

In November, McKale was silenced by Philadelphia Judge Joseph Fernandes for publicly discussing her grandson's story. The gag order also changed her unsupervised visits with her grandchildren to supervised visits.

In December, Philadelphia City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart confirmed that her office is considering initiating a performance audit of DHS.

Chief among Rhynhart's concerns is how DHS removes children from their parents' homes for poverty-based reasons.

“DHS is a big area of the city's budget and is charged with caring for the children in our city,” Rhynhart said. “The reporting that's been done on the issues about kids who have been taken from their parents unfairly and also some of the abuse children have suffered could be cause for concern and it's something my office is looking into.”

A final decision on whether the Controller's Office will pursue such an audit is to be made in early 2019.