Department of Children & Families v. E.D.-O., 223 N.J. 166 (2015). Child abuse and neglect cases are often heartbreaking. Branding a parent as abusive and neglectful is a hard step to take, but is sometimes necessary to protect the child. Such cases make their way to the Supreme Court only in relatively unusual circumstances, as was true in Division of Youth & Family Servs. v. A.L., 213 N.J. 1 (2013), discussed here.
Today’s decision by Judge Cuff for a unanimous Court involved a mother who left her sleeping nineteen-month old child unattended in a motor vehicle for no more than ten minutes while the mother went to buy party supplies. As recounted here, the Appellate Division affirmed an agency determination of abuse and neglect by the mother. The Supreme Court granted review and reversed.
Judge Cuff’s comprehensive opinion covered a lot of ground, including a detailed statutory interpretation analysis of the mother’s contention that “whether her conduct exposed the child to an imminent risk of harm should be measured at the time of fact-finding,” a position that the Court rejected. But the essence of the Court’s ruling was that the agency had erred in the procedures under which it handled this case.
Judge Cuff emphasized that abuse and neglect cases are “fact-sensitive and must be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. The antithesis of a case-by-case review is an agency determination that certain conduct poses an imminent risk of physical, emotional, or mental harm to a child without regard to the circumstances at the time of the conduct.” Yet, in this and other cases discussed in today’s opinion, the agency showed a “proclivity … to apply a categorical rule that any parent or caretaker, who leaves a young child unattended for any length of time, particularly in a motor vehicle, has failed to exercise a minimum degree of care that places the child in imminent danger of impairing that child’s physical, emotional, or mental well-being.”
The Court disapproved of this “categorical approach to this subset of cases.” Instead, Judge Cuff said, the agency should have referred the matter to the Office of Administrative Law as a contested case. That would have allowed the mother to “advance all the circumstances surrounding the event,” and potentially show that even if what she did was negligent, it was not grossly negligent, as is required for a finding of abuse and neglect. The Court also criticized the agency’s procedures and the time that they took. Judge Cuff observed that the child was nineteen months old at the time of the incident, and four years old when the Director of the agency issued her decision that the Appellate Division then affirmed. The child would be nearly eight years old when the matter is remanded for a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge. The time that all this took was “troubling” to the Court.
This case generated much attention in the media and among the public when the Appellate Division upheld the finding that the mother was guilty of abuse and neglect. Though the Supreme Court’s analysis of the procedures was not improper, at one level, the Court’s disposition avoided the necessity of ruling on the merits of this case and exposing the Court to condemnation no matter which way it came down. Meanwhile, the case goes on, and the child may be in double digits in age by the time it is resolved.