Love, Joy, Feminism
A Review Series of Anonymous Tip, by Michael Farris
Remember that we left off as Bill Walinski, Gwen, and Stan entered the court room, leaving little Casey outside the room with her grandmother, June. Farris tells us that the hearing, in which social worker Donna Corliss and prosecutor Gail Willet sought to have Casey taken into foster care for a week for observation and evaluation, was presided over by Judge Philip Romer.
Judge Philip Romer had been appointed to the bench six years earlier when Democrat Booth Gardner was Governor. He was in his early fifties, balding, and slightly overweight.
We learn that Romer got the position partly because of his involvement in Democratic Party activities, but we also learn this:
Romer was genuinely a nice man. Afraid to take legal risks, he liked to play everything down the middle.
Farris tells us that Romer liked it when time came for his three-month rotation in juvenile court, and that he enjoyed the opportunity to be “nice but stern” with the juvenile offenders who made up two-thirds of the cases in juvenile court.
Now unfortunately, I am at a bit of a disadvantage in this section, because I don’t have the legal background to fully understand everything going on here. For instance, Farris tells us that the juvenile court only sees cases where parents are “accused of a civil form of child abuse or neglect,” and that the “hard-core abusers—those who molested their children, beat them severely, or worse” were instead tried “in the main courthouse in a full-blown criminal trial.” I don’t know enough about this area of law to know whether this is typical. I also am not entirely sure what point Farris is trying to make here (and he usually is trying to make a point)—would he argue that only parents who are charged criminally should risk losing custody of their children?
So rather than judge the legal ins and outs of this section, I’m going to simply try to outline what happens, quoting some parts by way of example.
After everyone makes introductions, Romer leads with this:
“Ms. Willet, I’ve read the complaint and sworn affidavits from your witnesses. I see no point in calling Ms. Corliss to testify unless either you or Mr. Walinski think it’s necessary.”
Walinski spoke first. “Your Honor, I do have a couple of questions I would like to ask Investigator Corliss.”
As we shall see, this is Bill Walinski’s first mistake.
After Romer has Donna sworn in, Bill begins to ask her questions. He starts with this:
“Ms. Corliss, let me get right to the point,” Walinski began. “What did you observe after you and your partner ripped the clothes off this terrified four-year-old girl?”
“Objection, Your Honor. The question is argumentative.”
“Sustained. Mr. Walinski,” Judge Romer said, “this is Juvenile Court. We try to be more informal here. Why don’t you just ask her what she saw?”
Walinski was only slightly embarrassed. “Okay, Ms. Corliss, what did you see after you strip-searched Casey Landis?”
There was no leadup, no followup, nothing. If Bill is going to take the terrified little girl tact, he needs to go all in—and he doesn’t, at all. As a result, it just feels weird—awkward. But don’t worry, it gets worse.
“There were bruises. Although they were fading, I would have judged them to be seven to ten days old.”
“And do you have a medical background to judge how old bruises are?”
“No, sir. But I have been trained as a Child Protective Services Investigator and we are given much training on the nature of bruises. I have had the sad duty to observe dozens of bruises on abused little children in the last six years.”
And that’s it—Bill lets that go. Bill knew Donna was a social worker. As such, he surely knows what training she has regarding bruises. If he believed that training sufficient, why did he ask her if she had the proper background to begin with? It just gave her the opportunity to flash her credentials! I spent four years of high school participating in a homeschool debate league, and even I knew better than to do something that damaging during cross examination!
On a related note, in the comments on an earlier post in this series, a reader who is a social worker mentioned that in her experience, common procedure is for social workers to have a child with suspicious bruises seen by a doctor right away, because they (the social workers) are not qualified to make the ultimate judgement call. I don’t know if this is just the case in this one reader’s state or county or if it is more universal than that, but this does suggest that Bill might have had the grounds to challenge Donna’s credentials and the way she conducted the investigation vis-a-vis the bruises. But he doesn’t. Instead, he effectively concedes the point and moves on.
“Could you please describe the bruises for me?”
“They were fading, kind of green and discolored a bit. They didn’t look like they had been terribly severe when they were fresh, but I believe that any bruising caused by a parental spanking is child abuse.”
Hold it! What Donna “believes” is child abuse is irrelevant. What matters here is what the law says is child abuse. Which is of course what Bill immediately points out—oh wait, no, he doesn’t. Bill lets that go too.
“Where were they located?”
“On her buttocks.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“On the lower half of the buttocks, with a prominence of greater bruising on the left-hand side.”
“Are you sure you are not mixing this up with some other case?”
“I am absolutely certain of what I have told you.”
Bill, Bill, Bill. I mean good lord, man, You basically just called up your opposition and asked them to lay out their case in more detail, without actually contesting any of it or pushing back in anything more than a token way. Badly done, Bill, badly done.
And of course, because Farris is a tell-don’t-show kind of guy, we get this:
Her lies were all the more convincing to the judge because Gwen’s own lawyer had given Corliss a chance to invent some new details. Corliss lied with conviction and humane concern emoting from her voice.
There’s some back and forth where the judge offers Willet the chance to ask Donna additional questions, and she declines, suggesting with with no small amount of snark that she’s more than happy with the job Bill has done already. Romer asks Bill if he has any further witnesses, and Bill calls Gwen to testify.
Bill has Gwen talk about her job as a nurse, and asks whether nurses are trained to recognize bruises. Gwen says they are. Bill then asks Gwen whether there were any bruises on Casey that day, and Gwen says she knew for certain there weren’t, because she’d given Casey a bath that morning and “checked her again after this woman and her partner had finished terrifying my little girl.”
Speaking of which, where is Rita, anyway? Is it customary to have only one investigator testify in a case like this, when two were involved? Perhaps so—I suppose it could get time consuming otherwise. It just feels odd that we’ve heard neither hide nor hair of Rita since the strip-search. Is Rita even in on the whole lying-about-the-bruises thing?
Anyway, once Bill has finished with Gwen—and I have to say, I found Gwen’s testimony entirely unconvincing, because of course the accused parent is going to say there were no bruises—Gail takes over questioning her. Gail asks Gwen about her spanking practices.
“Mrs. Landis, you spank you child with a wooden spoon, don’t you?”
“Sometimes.”
“How often is sometimes?”
“Once or twice a week.”
“And how many strokes do you administer each time when you strike her with this implement?”
“It’s just a wooden spoon. And I barely tap her.”
“It’s just a wooden spoon”?! Really? Ugh!
“Just answer my question. How many strokes do you usually administer?”
“Usually just one. Sometimes two swats. If Casey has done something very bad, I will give her three little swats.”
Casey is four. As a general rule, four-year-olds are not capable of doing something “very bad,” especially sweet angelic four-year-olds like Casey who clean their rooms by themselves and then bask in parental praise.
“When was the last time you had spanked Casey wiht this wooden implement prior to the date in question?”
“About three or four days earlier.”
“Three or four days?”
“Yes.”
“And how many times did you strike your child on that occasion.”
“Just once and it was light.”
“What had Casey done to deserve this spanking?”
“Objection,” Walinski said, jumping to his feet and nearly upsetting his chair. “It is legal to reasonably spank one’s children in the State of Washington—even in Seattle.”
That Seattle bit is a dig at Gail, who just moved to Spokane from Seattle. Are we really going to keep doing this?
But regardless, the entire point of Gail asking what Casey had done is to ascertain whether or not the spanking in question is “reasonable”—is Bill really that oblivious? Hitting a child with a wooden spoon for direct disobedience would I believe be considered “reasonable” discipline. Hitting a child with a wooden spoon for, say, bed-wetting, would probably not be considered “reasonable” discipline. So yes, the circumstances within which Gwen spanks Casey actually are relevant.
The judge allows the question to go forward, and Gwen tells Gail that Casey had refused to pick up her crayons and coloring book even though Gwen told her to do it twice. “I use spanking only when it appears to me that she is choosing to deliberately disobey. It’s the same way my parents raised me and I think I turned out okay.”
Seriously, not that line. Sigh.
I’m honestly not entirely sure what Gain gained here. Gail is supposed to be a good prosecutor, sharp, driven, and ambitions—we’ll get to that more later—and her questioning of Gwen doesn’t appear to me to have done anything for her.
And then there’s this weird informal bit:
“Mr. Walinski, do you have any more witnesses?”
“No, Your Honor. Unless you want to hear from Mr. Mansfield.”
“Mr. Mansfiled, I assume that you would testify that your daughter is a good parent and you have never observed bruises on Casey. Is that about right?”
“Yes, that’s true, Judge.”
“Well, in the interest of time, let’s just let that stand as Mr. Mansfield’s testimony.”
I’d love to have my lawyer readers weigh in on this. Would this actually happen?
So now we have what amounts to closing arguments. Gail puts her case like this:
“Your Honor, we have a classic case of the word of an officer of the State, Donna Corliss, against the word of the accused mother. Corliss says there were bruises on this little girl. Her mother, of course, denies it. The affidavit from the pediatrician is simply not particularly helpful. The doctor states that he examined the girl five days after the CPS worker had conducted her examination. This is more than enough time for the bruises to have completely healed from the blows which produced them.”
Okay, so, first, Gwen did take Casey to the doctor as Bill advised, even though Farris didn’t mention the actual visit at all. But second, Farris can’t even keep his own timeline straight! Gwen was served with papers about the hearing the previous Thursday, and visited Bill in his law office that afternoon at 3:30. It was only then that Gwen was advised to take Casey to the doctor, so the earliest she could have done so would have been Friday. When did the strip search happen? The previous Thursday. In other words, the doctor would have examined Casey at least eight days after the CPS examination, not five days.
If Farris can’t keep his own timeline straight, this could all get very tangly very quickly.
As she makes her case to Romer, Gail adds this:
“Keep in mind, Your Honor, that we are not asking for permanent custody in this hearing. Just a Shelter Care Order to place this child in an environment we know is safe for seven days. During that time we can have Casey examined by an independent pediatrician, a psychologist, and I think it would be appropriate to have a psychological and parenting assessment done of Mrs. Landis as well. Ms. Corliss’s affidavit details some very strange and uncooperative behavior on Mrs. Landis’s part.”
So, Walinski gets up and gives the worst rebuttal I have ever read:
“Well, Your Honor, Ms. Willet correctly framed the key issue: This is a case of the CPS worker’s word against the word of Gwen Landis. Gwen’s a registered nurse and she should know bruises. She has testified that there were no bruises. The pediatrician testified there were no bruises. I recognize that it was several days later, but if the bruises were as severe as CPS makes them out to be, there should be something visible for the doctor to see.”
Worst. Rebuttal. Ever.
“We have to remember, Your Honor, that the state carries the burden of proof here. And I don’t think they have done an adequate job of that when the whole case is just one person’s word against another. They should have more. Some other kind of corroborating evidence. This just hasn’t been enough.”
Shouldn’t he be talking about what the law says rather than just making assertions?
Gail reminds the judge that this is not about permanent custody, and agrees that if it were, more evidence would be needed. But as she points out, it’s not, it’s just for seven days. “And in case of doubt, I try to resolve things in favor of the children,” she says.
Judge Romer notices that Gwen is starting to cry, and says this:
“Mrs. Landis, you are probably a good parent. And in all likelihood, this seven-day experience will prove to exonerate you in the end. I’m just trying to think of what’s best for Casey.”
I think Farris is using this novel to argue that once a family gets caught in the system, it becomes impossible for them to prove their innocence. After all, we, the readers, know that Donna chose the foster family, doctor, and psychologist specifically to ensure that Gwen will be found unfit—we, the readers, know that they’ll inevitably find something to pin on Gwen. And we know that institutions can sometimes work this way—but they do not always work this way. The ideal should be to have accountability and checks and balances to ensure against abuse. Farris’s solution seems to be not so much accountability as placing all of the cards in the parents’ hands.
Romer tells Gwen to take Casey home, pack her things, and bring her to the CPS office by 2:00 that afternoon. He tells everyone present that there will be a followup hearing one week later, at 10:00.
The judge left the courtroom and Gwen collapsed in sobs in her father’s arms.
And that’s it—hearing is over, and so is today’s installment. It got longer than I wanted it to be, but I really wanted to cover the entire hearing. Next week we’ll see Gwen break the news to Casey and—well—let’s just say that things get really interesting with Bill Walinski.
As a quick followup note, I’m honestly not sure whether Bill is as incapable as he came across in this hearing, or whether he was throwing the hearing on purpose. Well actually, we do know Bill decided losing the hearing would be in his best interests, as a more protracted case would give him more chances to make sexual advances toward Gwen. I guess I’m just wondering whether Walinski had the ability to win the hearing in the first place, given how Farris is portraying him.
Let that be a lesson to you: Don’t pick your lawyers on the golf course.
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