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Sunday, August 18, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Clark County Legal Services assisting young Southern Nevadans

Children's Attorney Project provides representation to those in foster care

When parents abuse or neglect a child, they are guaranteed legal representation on criminal charges. The victimized child, however, doesn't always receive legal representation when a court decides his or her future.

Clark County Legal Services is trying to remedy that imbalance.

The nonprofit group launched its Children's Attorney Project in 1999, providing legal services for children in foster care from birth to age 17. Such children have been removed from their families due to abuse or neglect and are wards of the state.

The project has about 200 active cases, involving about 400 children, estimates Steve Hiltz, a lawyer at Clark County Legal Services who works full time on the Children's Attorney Project. It has already closed about 150 more cases, involving about 300 children.

The active cases account for only about 30 percent of children currently in the foster care system in Clark County. But with a staff increase to four full-time attorneys last fall, plus the imminent hiring of a fifth staff attorney, the Children's Attorney Project hopes to be representing 40 percent of the children who are eligible for these services in the near future.

"I wish I could answer that," Hiltz says, when asked when the project expects to be able to handle all eligible children. "It's a matter of money. That's our goal."

Judges in Family Court make crucial life decisions for foster children, including whom they will live with, where they will go to school, whether they will stay in touch with parents or other relatives and when they will be adopted.

Traditionally, judges rely on input from state workers in the Nevada Division of Child and Family Services to make their decisions, Hiltz explains.

When the Children's Attorney Project assigns a lawyer, he or she tries to incorporate the child's preferences in important court decisions.

"You recognize the child as your client," Hiltz explains. "You take direction from the client (if) they are old enough and intelligent enough to understand" the issues.

"Our most difficult cases are about caseworkers making decisions" on behalf of the child, Hiltz says. "But the person who knows best is the child himself. They know where they feel safest, who's the nicest, who makes them feel important."

When the only measure of a parent's rehabilitation is paperwork, judges and caseworkers are apt to err in ways that benefit the parent over the child, Hiltz warns.

"When parents have drug or alcohol problems (that led to removing a child from the home), the kid is the one who lives it," he says. "If a parent has gotten some rehabilitation (counseling) and sporadically gotten negative urinalysis" -- proving at least a short-term absence of drugs in the system -- an outside party might infer that the parent has changed enough to regain custody.

But in some cases, Hiltz continues, "the kid's been visiting (the parent) on weekends, and knows things are not very different."

So if a lawyer can earn a child's trust, he may collect information that the paperwork lacks, resulting in a better outcome for the child.

Before 1999, the only court representation for foster children in Clark County came from the county's CASA program, which stands for Court Appointed Special Advocates. The program uses trained adult volunteers to present each child's interests to the court. But the volunteers aren't lawyers.

Hiltz asks, "If your life is going to be decided in court, don't you want to be represented by a person who knows how to function in a court of law -- who can advocate and win?"