As part of my outreach - my effort to help CPS victims find this site - I’ve joined a number of social media sites using either my own name, or the name of FightCPS.

I hope you’ll help me in supporting these efforts.

Do you have a MySpace profile? Fight CPS At MySpace wants you as a friend.	This is a blog promotion site. I’d very much appreciate your votes in getting FightCPS listed on the front page there so more people can find out about our issues with Child Protective Services false allegations.
Technorati is a site for finding blog postings that are on a topic you want to read about. If everyone who came here registered at Technorati and added this site to their favorites list, this blog might reach the top-100 list, and become an issue many thousands of Americans would notice.	Is anyone else here using Twitter? If so, feel free to follow me there: Linda at Twitter. This is my personal Twitter account and you’ll see I’m interested in numerous topics, not just fighting CPS - but that’s something I’m always willing to write about. If you want to get to know me better and find out where my head is REALLY at, this is the place.
Check out the Fight CPS Squidoo Lens for information about the history and goals of Fight CPS. You can make a Squidoo Lens web page to tell people about your CPS case and information. It is very easy to sign up and create a page, plus you may earn some money by doing it.	Fight CPS is on Hover Spot

Brenda Sullivan has been sentenced to twenty years in prison for caging a seventeen-year-old adopted child.

I became aware of this when I saw the headline, ” Mom who caged teen son gets 20 years behind bars”.

I thought - ‘What kind of mom would do that?’ - and knew that this person was most likely NOT the real mother. I suspected it was a foster parent or adopter. And I was right.

It irritates me when the news agencies use headlines that indicate a foster parent or adopter was a real mother or father. But I often know by looking at the headlines when the abusers are actually child collectors who took children out of the child welfare system - to get adoption subsidy payments.

This woman also had 13-year-old twin boys. They said they had also been in cages.

Some “mom”.

Newsflash: Foster parents and adopters do not have the genetic affinity for the children they claim to parent. Some may do an adequate job, but there’s no true love like the love of a real parent for his or her natural children.

Source: Mom who caged teen son gets 20 years behind bars, an AP article published at CNN.Com.

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

This is something I wrote and posted long ago; it has been linked on the right-side column for several years. I’m bringing it to the blog section of the site now because I’ve been getting a lot of comments and emails saying “Please someone, do something to help me!” I think these people need this message. Plus, I want to bring all those old articles into the blog, so expect to see a lot of old material crop up here in the coming months. - ljm
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The caseworkers almost always go to court working against you. At court the judge can and often does rule in favor of the families and against the social meddlers.

Be dignified around caseworkers - do not lose your temper. Do not let them see you in fear. Do not bother trying to kiss up to the caseworker. Do not try to give them more evidence of how good you are. Your evidence is to be shared with your lawyer and presented in court to the judge or juvenile court referee. If you give evidence to a caseworker you’ll find out everything you say can be twisted and used against you. This is a LEGAL case. Caseworkers are not nice friendly do-gooders trying to help you.

Caseworkers are your adversaries, though they are very deceptive and pretend to be your friend so they can get more evidence against you. What they do is practice sick deception for family destruction. They spend their days preparing a case against YOU.

To win in juvenile court and get a judge to rule in your favor, you must be able to present “a preponderance of the evidence”. That’s the standard of proof needed in juvenile court. To come up with a preponderance of the evidence, you must give the court more documentation & evidence than the other side.

Listen, very few of us are ever gifted with a good lawyer. We won (those of us who did) through our own hard work. We gathered the evidence. We documented things in writing and on tape. We typed up our own legal documents. We learned how to do it because we had to, for the wellbeing of our children trapped in the inhumane child “welfare” system.

If you feel you can’t type your own legal documents, then find a typist or paralegal to do it for you at a lot less than an attorney charges.

You can give your compiled legal documents and evidence to your attorney for review. Be sure to do it a few weeks before court so there’s time for the attorney to look it over and file it at the county clerk’s office for you. If the attorney won’t talk to you send the documents via certified mail along with a letter demanding his time and response on the documents so you’ll be prepared for court. You deserve fair representation - be sure your attorney knows you’re aware of the law.

If it’s too late for that - prepare legal documents anyway. The judge may accept them in court. Be sure you have plenty of copies for the judge, your attorney, the child’s attorney and the CPS attorney. You may have to ask for a continuance while your attorney deals with your compiled legal documents and evidence.

Use online resources, and help from friends, but mainly - it’s up to YOU.

PREPARE for court.
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See these sample documents: The FightCPS Legal Document Library

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

In Germany a baby was offered on eBay by his parents. The ad was up only about two hours, and the mother, 23, insists it was a joke.

Child welfare agents there have confiscated the child, and law enforcement agents are investigating the couple for child trafficking.

Question: Do you think the child welfare agents overreacted? Should this baby have been detained?

Source: Baby offered on eBay now in state custody posted by Leslie Katz on the CNN News Blog.

(You can also leave your comments there at the CNN news blog.)

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

Is anyone else here using Twitter?

If so, feel free to follow me there: Linda at Twitter.

You can leave your Twitter URLs in the comment section to this message.

I noticed recently that someone said her comments weren’t posted. I don’t know why that was, but I know sometimes comments are caught in my spam-trap, particularly if they have links in them.

In the last two days, this site collected over six hundred spam comments. Right now I’m going through 14 pages of spam comments in my spam-trap, looking for comments that might have been left by actual visitors to this site. After rescuing them, I’ll delete the spam. This is not a pleasant task, particularly because I’m on dial up and there’s a long wait to get each lengthy page loaded into my browser. Also having to look at all that spammy writing is not how I’d like to spend my evening.

I rarely will delete a comment. If it isn’t something that looks like it could have legal liability to me, I usually won’t delete. So missing comments - I cannot tell you why they didn’t get posted. I don’t intentionally delete links from particular people for any reason, though I’ve been tempted by comments like those recently left by a self-righteous “all-knowing” (or so she seems to think) social worker. I leave it to YOU, the website visitors with the painful CPS experiences, to set her straight…. hopefully as kindly as possible. Remember, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Back to my daily or almost-daily spam deleting responsibilities.

Lynn Paddock, 47, and her husband, Johnny, adopted six children from foster care. For people who adopt so many, I use the term “child collectors”. Now Johnny has divorced Lynn and she is on trial for suffocating four-year-old Sean.

Lynn Paddock is accused of suffocating Sean by wrapping him in blankets so tightly that he couldn’t breathe. She allegedly did this to keep him from wandering around in the hallways. She is also accused of using tape to bind another adopted child. She may stand trial for first-degree murder and child abuse at the same time.

Sean’s grandparents are suing the Paddocks and the social services agencies who placed him with her. Although my source article didn’t state it, I wonder if this is one of those cases where the social services agency refused to place the child with his grandparents. He was originally placed with an aunt and uncle, but was taken from them and sent to foster care. The article states, “The case has revealed flaws in the state’s child welfare system.”

Source: Adoptive mother to stand trial in son’s suffocation - AP article published in The Fayetteville Observer on May 19, 2008.

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

A former foster child has written a memoir about her years living in abusive foster homes. My God Box has a Christian slant while exposing the damage done to children in foster homes. I discovered the book this morning by reading an editorial about it, Former Foster Child & Advocate Focuses on System Flaws in Foster Care. The editor who wrote that article seemed to totally understand our concerns about how foster care can be worse than a challenging family life.

The author of My God Box, Margaret Iuculano, was in foster care for five years. During that time she lived in fifteen different foster homes. In an interview on Tampa Bay News she said, “The foster families that I encountered, they were not positive experiences….Unfortunately for me, my foster experiences. were almost or more abusive than the environment I was removed from.” You can see this interview on the media page of her website: Margaret Iuculano.

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

A wheelchair-bound mother in Montana won a special needs trust of $50,000 from the state. Her child will receive $100,000, and her attorney fees and costs will be paid. The lawyer gets $180,000. The Health and Human “Services” agency, also known as Children and Family “Services” (CFS) gets mud on its face and a debt to pay.

Geri Glass filed suit against the state of Montana because CFS social workers violated her rights and then retaliated against her when she complained.

Very important to those of you fighting false child abuse and neglect charges, it should be noted that when Geri Glass’ case was reported on in the media, the CFS agency dropped its investigation. They were apparently more worried about their own reputation than about possible problems with Glass’ child.

Source: State settles with disabled mother by Matt Gouras of the Associated Press, published May 10, 2008 in the Helena Independent Record.

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.