Monday, January 26, 2009

Proposed Law to Increase Transparency

A proposed new law in the state legislature is aimed at increasing the transparency of the juvenile courts in cases related to Child Protective Services. The law, the Christopher McIntyre law, will make the court documents for any CPS case involving a fatality or near fatality publicly accessible.

This issue first came to light in 2007, when the bodies of Ariana and Tyler Payne were discovered by investigators in a storage facility. Both children and their parents had been investigated by CPS, but their efforts failed to prevent the deaths of the two children. The question remained, did CPS do everything they could to prevent the deaths?

The answer would be located in the CPS records and the court documents, but both were kept secret until last year.

State Senator Jonathan Paton proposes this new bill to change that, and force the files open so that the public can see the real stories.

Full Article and Source:
New law opens CPS cases to public

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's about time! All they have to do to protect the parties is remove their names, until there is an adjudication.

Anonymous said...

Yep, it's about time. Open the files and let the sun shine in!