On or about August 18, 2009, Faith Allen freely and voluntarily executed a consent to adoption with respect to Masha, pursuant to 23 Pa.C.S.A. § 2711. Because Faith Allen did not revoke this consent to adoption within the statutorily allowed 30-day revocation period, it became irrevocable subject to narrow exceptions. The Orphan's Court with jurisdiction over the matter has now terminated Faith Allen's legal rights as a parent to Masha Allen.
The simple fact is that it is virtually impossible to adopt a foster child across state lines in the United States.
In the most recent year for which we have data, states reported that only 71 children in the entire country were adopted from foster care across state lines by non-relatives.
Why is interstate adoption so rare? The primary reason is that we do not have a national adoption system. Instead, we have 50 different child welfare systems, each with its own process for adoption eligibility, recruitment, approval, and training.
Even worse, our current system has created profound disincentives for states to facilitate and support adoptions across state lines.
It is a national scandal that 25,000 children age out of foster care each year while willing adoptive parents are ignored because they are in the wrong state or even the wrong county. It shouldn't be harder for a New Jersey family to adopt a child from Manhattan than Moscow. We must change the incentives in our adoption system so that everyone wins when a hurt child finds a forever family.
New York's oldest registered sex offender is scheduled to move by week's end out of a Buffalo halfway house for released inmates and into a place of his own, after completing his latest term in state prison for molesting little girls.
The judge who sentenced him said at the time that she expected him to die behind bars.
But 10 years after his last arrest, as Sypnier prepared to shed the closely monitored lifestyle of the halfway house, its director warned that the spry and active Sypnier has not changed from the manipulator who used his grandfatherly charm to snare and rape victims as young as 4.
"Whether he's 100 or 101 or 105, the same person that was committing these crimes 10, 25, 30 years ago still exists today and has an unrepentant heart," said the Rev. Terry King, director of Grace House, which has twice taken Sypnier in from prison. "He is someone that we as parents, as members of the community, any community, really need to fear."
Six months after marking his 100th birthday in the Groveland Correctional Facility - becoming the first New York inmate to reach the milestone while incarcerated - the retired telephone company worker now says he wants to get to know the youngest members of a family that has disowned him.
Being grandfatherly was how the 5-foot-5, 150-pound Sypnier found his victims, authorities say. After his most recent arrest at age 90 on charges of raping and sodomizing a 4-year-old girl and her 7-year-old sister, his neighbors in the suburb of Tonawanda recalled what appeared to be a kindly Sypnier offering rides to adults, handing out money to children so they could buy candy, and baby-sitting.
The victimized sisters called him "Grandpa," their mother said at the time, adding that it "was a total shock" when police showed her sexually explicit pictures of her girls found in Sypnier's apartment.
Sypnier's convictions date to 1987, when he was given three years' probation for sex abuse. He spent a year in prison for sexually abusing a minor in 1994. His neighbors in Tonawanda never knew of Sypnier's background because he was convicted before the adoption of laws requiring sex offenders to register with police.
But Sypnier says he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice, despite twice pleading guilty in the case involving the sisters.
"Those children crawled into bed with me because they were frightened, but there was never any sexual hanky-panky," Sypnier told the Buffalo News.
Sypnier initially pleaded guilty in 2000 to two counts of rape, 15 counts of sodomy and endangering the welfare of a child for molesting the Tonawanda girls, as well as three in Buffalo. An appeals court threw out the conviction in 2002 after Sypnier claimed he was confused at the time, leading to another plea the following year to a lesser charge.
In sentencing Sypnier to as many as 10 years in prison, state Supreme Court Justice Penny Wolfgang told him she expected he would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
"The sheer notion of him wandering the streets unattended or unsupervised is a scary proposition," King said.
17 year old John challenges his 15 year old girlfriend Karen to masterbate for him on her webcam. Karen takes off her clothes and simulates masturbation in front of the webcam. John and his friend Sam record the episode on a laptop computer. The following day Sam asks his buddy Tony if he wants to see the video. Tony does and Sam emails it to him. Later that same day Karen's mom Debbie discovers a still image from the webcam masturbation on Karen's cell phone.
From today's Christian Science Monitor:
Federal prosecutors and New York lawyer James Marsh are persuading courts to order anyone caught with illicit images to pay financial restitution to child victims.
Federal prosecutors are embracing an aggressive approach to fight the spread of child pornography on the Internet, urging judges across the country to order full restitution to identified child victims in cases where the defendant possessed the images but played no role in their creation.
Generally, restitution is awarded in cases where a defendant's direct actions caused the injuries suffered by the victim. In a child pornography case, the person most responsible for injuring the child is the pedophile who abused the child, recorded images of the abuse, and then traded or sold those images to others.
But child-victim advocates say that is not the only harm. Those who download child pornography help set the stage for future abuse by fostering an active market for such images.
This novel - and controversial - strategy is the brainchild of New York lawyer James Marsh. He represents a 20-year-old woman who was raped and sexually abused at age 8 or 9 by an uncle who recorded the abuse and sent the images to a pedophile who requested them. The resulting still photographs have been actively traded on the Internet since 1998.
Read this entire article by Warren Richey in the Christian Science Monitor.
On Sept. 10, 2007, Pearl High School cheerleading coach Tommie Hill required each member of the cheerleading squad to reveal the passwords to their Facebook accounts, according to the suit.
Many of the students immediately deleted their accounts using their mobile phones, said Jackson's attorney Rita Nahlik Silin. Jackson did not delete her account.
The suit alleges Hill later logged onto Jackson's Facebook account and disseminated content — including private messages with another Pearl High School student — to other teachers, cheerleading coaches, and the principal and superintendent.
According to the suit, the officials "reprimanded, punished, and humiliated" Jackson for an exchange of profanity-laced messages between Jackson and the cheerleading captain in which Jackson asked the student to "stop harassing" several of the cheerleaders.
"I would have been completely fine with the school officials looking at my public [profile on] Facebook, but I think they went too far with getting my password and looking at my personal messages between me and my peers," Jackson, 16, said in a message. "They were conversations between me and my friends so I shouldn't have gotten in trouble for them."
As a result of her private Facebook content, Jackson was not allowed to attend cheerleading practices, participate in football games or partake in school events for which she had already paid participation fees, according to the suit.
In an effort to improve security at LMS, the Overton County School Board approved the installation of video surveillance equipment throughout the school building. The school board engaged the education technology firm, Edutech, Inc., to install cameras and monitoring equipment. The board ordered the Director of Schools, William Needham, to oversee the project. Needham delegated his authority for the installation of the monitoring equipment to the LMS Principal, Melinda Beatty, who delegated her authority to the Assistant Principal, Robert Jolley. None of the defendants promulgated any guidelines, written or otherwise, determining the number, location, or operation of the surveillance cameras.
After several meetings, Assistant Principal Jolley and an Edutech representative decided to install the cameras throughout the school in areas facing the exterior doors, in hallways leading to exterior doors, and in the boys' and girls' locker rooms. The cameras were installed and were operational by July 2002.
The images captured by the cameras were transmitted to a computer terminal in Jolley's office where they were displayed and were stored on the computer's hard drive. Jolley testified that, in September 2002, he discovered that the locker room cameras were videotaping areas in which students routinely dressed for athletic activities. He said that he immediately notified Principal Beatty of the situation and suggested that the placement of the cameras be changed. But, the cameras were not removed nor were their locations changed for the remainder of the fall semester.
In addition to Jolley receiving the images on his computer, they were also accessible via remote internet connection. Any person with access to the software username, password, and Internet Protocol (IP) address could access the stored images. Neither Jolley nor anyone else had ever changed the system password or username from its default setting. The record indicates that the system was accessed ninety-eight different times between July 12, 2002, and January 10, 2003, including through internet service providers located in Rock Hill, South Carolina; Clarksville, Tennessee; and Gainsboro, Tennessee.
During a girls' basketball game at LMS on January 9, 2003, visiting team members from Allons Elementary School noticed the camera in the girls' locker room and brought this to the attention of their coach, Kathy Carr. Carr questioned Principal Beatty, who assured Carr that the camera was not activated. In fact, the camera was activated and had recorded images of the Allons team members in their undergarments when they changed their clothes. After the game, Carr reported the camera incident to the Allons school principal, who contacted Defendant Needham later that evening. Needham immediately accessed the security system from his home and viewed the recorded images. The following morning, January 10, Needham, Beatty, and two other officials viewed the images in Needham's office by remote access. Needham later stated that in his opinion, the videotapes of the 10 to 14 year old girls contained “nothing more than images of a few bras and panties.” School employees removed the locker room cameras later that day.
Some personal liberties are so fundamental to human dignity as to need no specific explication in our Constitution in order to ensure their protection against government invasion. Surreptitiously videotaping the plaintiffs in various states of undress is plainly among them. Stated differently, and more specifically, a person of ordinary common sense, to say nothing of professional school administrators, would know without need for specific instruction from a federal court, that teenagers have an inherent personal dignity, a sense of decency and self-respect, and a sensitivity about their bodily privacy that are at the core of their personal liberty and that are grossly offended by their being surreptitiously videotaped while changing their clothes in a school locker room. These notions of personal privacy are “clearly established” in that they inhere in all of us, particularly middle school teenagers, and are inherent in the privacy component of the Fourth Amendment's proscription against unreasonable searches. But even if that were not self-evident, the cases we have discussed, supra, would lead a reasonable school administrator to conclude that the students' constitutionally protected privacy right not to be surreptitiously videotaped while changing their clothes is judicially clearly established.
The search necessarily exposed Savana's breasts and pelvic area to some degree, and both subjective and reasonable societal expectations of personal privacy support the treatment of such a search as categorically distinct, requiring distinct elements of justification on the part of school authorities for going beyond a search of outer clothing and belongings. Savana’s subjective expectation of privacy is inherent in her account of it as embarrassing, frightening, and humiliating. The reasonableness of her expectation is indicated by the common reaction of other young people similarly searched, whose adolescent vulnerability intensifies the exposure’s patent intrusiveness. Its indignity does not outlaw the search, but it does implicate the rule that “the search [be] ‘reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place.’” T.L.O., supra, at 341.
Here, the content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion. Because the assistant principal knew that the pills were common pain relievers, he must have known of their nature and limited threat and had no reason to suspect that large amounts were being passed around or that individual students had great quantities. Nor could he have suspected that Savana was hiding common painkillers in her underwear. When suspected facts must support the categorically extreme intrusiveness of a search down to an adolescent’s body, petitioners’ general belief that students hide contraband in their clothing falls short; a reasonable search that extensive calls for suspicion that it will succeed. Nondangerous school contraband does not conjure up the specter of stashes in intimate places, and there is no evidence of such behavior at the school;
A first detailed look at the youngest foster children on mental-health drugs offers a disturbing glimpse into the state's failure to heed a 2005 law -- and its own policies.
Florida child-welfare administrators are largely ignoring a host of rules put in place to protect children from potentially dangerous -- and sometimes unnecessary -- drugs, according to a detailed state review of the records for more than 100 young foster children who are being given powerful psychiatric medications.
Caseworkers under contract with the state Department of Children & Families are failing to comply with almost every benchmark governing the use of psychotropic medication among foster children, according to the DCF report, obtained Tuesday by The Miami Herald.
Recent revelations come only four years after state lawmakers passed legislation to curb the use of mental-health drugs among children in state care. The law requires, among other things, informed consent from a parent or judge, second-party review of doctors' prescriptions for the youngest children, and annual reports to the state Senate.
Among the most troubling findings, child advocates say, is the state's almost complete failure to seek a second opinion from a psychiatrist under contract with DCF before administering mental-health drugs to the youngest children in state care -- younger than age 6.
Judge Sotomayor's ruling in this recently decided child pornography case might be an issue in her upcoming confirmation hearing. The defendant, Jon David Falso (shown at right), is also the first target in our firm's effort to seek civil damages for victims of child pornography utilizing Masha's Law, the legislation we helped create in 2006. A civil trial is scheduled for February 2010. The defendent's attorney in our case vows a fight to the Supreme Court possibly giving a newly confirmed Justice Sotomayor another chance to consider the case of confessed and convicted child pornographer Jon David Falso.
In this climate of increased enforcement, it is imperative that firms doing business in foreign markets, both currently and in the future, become familiar with the FCPA. Both the anti-bribery and books-and-records provisions present significant issues for any company doing business abroad.
In general terms, the FCPA's anti-bribery provisions prohibit companies and individuals from making payments -- or offering or promising to pay money or anything of value -- to any foreign official with the purpose of inducing the recipient to misuse his official position by directing business to or maintaining business with the payor. The anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA apply to . . . any citizen, national or resident of the United States; any entity organized under the laws of any state or U.S. territory; U.S. persons who commit acts of bribery outside of the U.S.; . . . and U.S. and foreign agents of any of these persons or entities.
To create FCPA liability, the purpose of the payment or promise in question must have been to induce a foreign official to misuse his position. Significantly, however, the FCPA does not require the payment to actually succeed in its purpose. Companies and individuals that violate the FCPA's anti-bribery provisions are subject to impositions of fines and orders for forfeiture of assets derived from the corrupt activity.
In addition to fines and asset forfeitures, an individual convicted for violation of the anti-bribery provisions may be sentenced to prison term of up to five years.
Although it is clear that the FCPA prohibits bribing foreign officials or their representatives, some less obvious activities may constitute violations of the FCPA as well. Any company doing business abroad should be aware of the following examples of possible violations of the FCPA, particularly in view of the recent increase in enforcement:
- Excessive gift giving or entertaining foreign officials or their representatives.
- Allowing foreign officials or their staff to use company facilities for any purpose other than to demonstrate, promote or explain the services that the company provides.
- Employing a consultant or agent that has connections to a foreign government or agency, for the purpose of influencing that government's or agency's decisions.
- Passing money through an agent or consultant to a foreign official to obtain business or secure an advantage, including consulting or management contracts, or securing certain action on legislation, regulations, or other government activity.
Calling the death of Gabriel Myers a ''suicide'' lets his killers off the hook.
The 7-year-old was propelled by a vast conspiracy of abuse and neglect and malpractice. The boy only finished the job on April 15, when he locked himself in the bathroom of his Margate foster home and coiled a shower hose around his neck.
. . . .
The drugs, which come with a long and sobering list of possible side effects in children, have been doled out to troublesome kids to make them more manageable. Eli Lilly was fined $1.4 billion -- that's billion with a B -- in March for nefariously marketing the unauthorized use of Zyprexa for children, despite the known risks. A big chunk of those kids, like Gabriel, were foster kids, whose lives by definition were inflicted with the kind of trauma apt to cause unruly behavior.
. . . .
Foster kids were essentially guinea pigs in a vast, public-financed drug experiment.
. . . .
Absent a parent, a judge must give the OK for psychotropics. But the courts and case workers from the Department of Children & Families are all too overwhelmed by caseloads and beset by budget cuts to spend time contesting a doctor's judgment.
''No one was looking out for Gabriel.''
What Gabriel got, instead of real help, were powerful adult drugs laden with dangerous side effects. His cause of death was listed as suicide. It was just another misdiagnosis.
