Copyright 2005, San Jose Mercury-News

Court weighs public access to some juvenile proceedings

(San Jose Mercury-News 3/4/05) -- A San Mateo County judge weighing whether to open certain juvenile court proceedings to the public said Thursday she wasn't sure she had the authority to do so.

``Who am I to make laws?'' Supervising Juvenile Court Judge Marta Diaz rhetorically asked county lawyers at a hearing in her courtroom. ``I'm a judge!''

A state bill to open the proceedings to the public failed last year, but county leaders have asked Diaz to use the limited discretion the law affords her to open the hearings in San Mateo County. The hearings in question are dependency proceedings, which determine whether a child who has possibly been abused or neglected should stay with his or her parents.

The board of supervisors and the county manager asked Diaz to open the hearings in response to the well-publicized 2002 death of 8-month-old foster child Angelo Marinda. Angelo's father was convicted of killing him during an unsupervised visit that county social workers had approved. The death sparked numerous reforms within the county's child welfare system.

The county's lawyers argue that Diaz does have the authority to open such hearings and that doing so would improve the public's understanding of the juvenile court system, which often unfolds in secret, ostensibly to protect the privacy of children and families.

But court-appointed attorneys who routinely defend children and families at dependency hearings strongly oppose the change, which they believe could cause emotional harm to already traumatized children.

Several states have opened dependency hearings to the public, and if Diaz did the same, San Mateo would be the first county in California to do so.

On Thursday, attorneys for the county presented experts who had surveyed the success of open hearings in Arizona and Minnesota and had reported that no children had been harmed in the process.

When cross-examined by representatives of the court-appointed attorneys, the surveyors admitted that they had made no thorough definition of what constituted harm. One study had not even surveyed children or parents as part of its methodology.

At the end of the day, Diaz signaled her disappointment with the studies. ``I'm not very confident the right questions were asked,'' she said.

The California First Amendment Coalition, to which the Mercury News belongs, has filed a brief supporting opening the dependency hearings, pointing out that responsible media outlets go to great lengths in stories to protect the privacy of traumatized children and their families.

By Jessie Seyfer