Family Court of Philadelphia building

To The Legal:

Philadelphia Family Court and judicial districts across Pennsylvania conduct dependency proceedings in secret to protect juvenile court judges and lawyers from public scrutiny—plain and simple.

Right now, a former Philadelphia Family Court judge is under investigation for ethics violations. She stands accused by parents of taking their children from them without due process—in secret hearings.

She's not unique. Two decades ago, another Philadelphia Family Court judge just didn't bother showing up for work, so the lawyers made up their own rulings in cases. In 2009, a Luzerne County juvenile court judge was criminally convicted in a “kids for cash” scheme that sent youngsters who committed minor offenses like cursing to a private, for-profit reform school that had given the judge $2.2 million.

Such violations breed behind closed courtroom doors. Who knows what else is going on in clandestine hearings in Philadelphia or Bucks or Montgomery or Butler or Elk counties? Judges Margaret T. Murphy and Walter J. Olszewski, both responsible for the Family Court Division in Philadelphia, wrote a letter to this publication contending a bunch of wonderful things are happening there, like lots of adoptions and fewer dependency cases. Great. No one knows if any of that is true, however, because the judges insist on conducting Star Chamber court. In addition, the secrecy prevents the public from knowing if any of it is properly done. Were parents' rights violated in termination proceedings? Were well-connected Philadelphians more likely than blood relatives to receive dependent infants for adoption? The court deliberately shrouds the answers.

All court hearings in Pennsylvania are presumptively open. The Pennsylvania Constitution very clearly states, “All courts shall be open.” To close a hearing, a judge must determine that secrecy would serve a compelling governmental interest and that there is no less restrictive means to serve that interest. Those are very high standards, not likely to be easily met in every single Family Court case.

That's because hearings should be open. Judges erode public confidence in the entire judicial system by conducting secret hearings. Who knows what's going on in closeted proceedings and whether it's fair or consistent or even legal?

I covered Allegheny County's juvenile court and dependency system as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for a decade. When I started, the system was so closed that reporters were forbidden by an administrative order to even set foot in the juvenile courthouse. That's a public building, by the way, a building paid for by tax dollars, a building whose working occupants were paid by tax dollars. This argument helped persuade the administrative judge to cancel that court order. He's now a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice—Max Baer.

While I was writing about a high-profile Allegheny County dependency case in the mid-1990s, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law that opened some delinquency hearings. For five years, I followed the cases of the first group of Allegheny County juveniles who were treated as adults under this new law. As a result, the juvenile court judges in Allegheny County became accustomed to my presence in their courtrooms, and some allowed me to listen to dependency hearings.

Ultimately, every single juvenile court judge permitted me to monitor their dependency hearings, and I spent nearly every day for a year in their courtrooms, with the consent of the county's director of human services, the lawyers who represented parents and sometimes the lawyers who represented children.

Throwing open the doors of Allegheny County's juvenile court helped get the judges' crushingly high caseloads reduced, the court facility moved from a dungeon to a modern building, snacks served to children awaiting hearings, higher pay and lower workloads for caseworkers, increased public understanding of and sympathy for the complex child welfare system, and the assistance of major Pittsburgh-based foundations in resolving systemic problems.

Throwing open the doors of Allegheny County's juvenile court improved the system and the lives of children and families.

Sure, the Luzerne County kids-for-cash scheme was revealed even though the hearings were closed. But thousands of children suffered unnecessarily first. That judge would not have dared sentence a child to reform school for cursing if he had feared a reporter could walk in on that hearing at any moment.

Philadelphia Judges Murphy and Olszewski talked in their letter to the editor about a dearth of lawyers practicing in juvenile court. That situation could be resolved with proper exposure of the injustices it causes—and that can only happen in open hearings.