This is from activists who are planning a CPS/DPSS class action lawsuit against Riverside County and the State of California for kidnapping children without cause:

We are organizing a class action lawsuit against the State of California, and all parties involved in unlawfully detaining and holding our children against our will, and without cause. We have documented the deep, embedded corruption in the “social services” agencies in California, specifically in Riverside County, conspiring with hospitals, schools, pediatricians and the court system to take possession of our children, without cause. We have already filed three lawsuits, and are looking for other families who have also been annihilated by this Evil. For information about the class action lawsuit, email us with your facts and contact information to build a strong case against these Devils. IF YOU FEEL YOU HAVE BEEN WRONGLY TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF BY CPS, EMAIL US AT fightcpscalifornia -at- gmail.com.

These are the reasons you should be part of this lawsuit:

· CPS manufactures multiple nonexistent/fictitious abuse case scenarios to offset true statistical abuse case information.

· CPS concurrently processes these children from foster care to Adoption, in order to obtain perverse monetary incentives in the form of bonuses.

· CPS provides a market to neighboring agencies and the courts (Judges, psychologists, visitation monitors, court mandated behavioral class instructors, court appointed legal counsel, etc…), in order for them to financially benefit from the foster care/adoption system they themselves perpetuate.

· CPS victimizes innocent families, and draws them into a corrupt system to utilize their children as pawns for this corrupt child commerce.

· CPS is utilized by family court officials and attorneys as an adverse tool to extricate children from one parent to the other, with reference to “parental alienation syndrome,” where in truth, the CPS caseworkers are the ones initiating the alienation of these children from their own birth parents. Caseworkers are never allowed to testify in court under the cloak of “CPS Authority” due to possible misuse or conflict of interest related to right to privacy laws (Very convenient)

· CPS utilizes unlawful & coercive measures to persuade vulnerable parents to submit to statements of nonexistent abuse and false “Case Plans,” forcing desperate parents to “plea bargain” to a CPS fabricated crime, for the return of their children from foster care.

· CPS fabricates false allegations and most of their “investigations” to purposely mislead or misdirect a case.

· CPS intentionally fails to Criminally prosecute Parents accused of child abuse, since in the majority of cases, no initial crime has been committed. However, CPS continues to claim a crime has been committed, as THEY abuse/neglect our children.

· CPS knowingly abandons children into the foster care system, conscious that some individuals in these homes physically and/or sexually abuse those in their “protective” custody. CPS ignores crimes committed in foster care through failure to investigate.

· CPS fails to question these individuals for their abusive conduct, whereby, if it were a birth parent or not a foster care parent, these individuals would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in criminal court.

· CPS misrepresents themselves in positive personas by omitting, altering, and falsifying documents, so as to mislead the public and or government of their true actions as listed above. Thereby publicly grandstanding,displaying an inaccurate social martyrdom for the well being of children.

The Police should determine if children need protection from their own parents, since child abuse is a Criminal offense.

We dearly know, from our own personal case, the trauma and distress this thwarted government agency imposes (with no consequence) upon innocent families. In January 2008 the law office of Robert Powell won its appeal to the California 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The case set a precedent by finding that CPS social workers are NOT entitled to absolute immunity for investigator conduct - particularly when they fabricate evidence, misrepresent evidence, and withhold exculpatory evidence. IF YOU FEEL THAT ANY OF THIS APPLIES TO YOUR FAMILY, email us at fightcpscalifornia -at- gmail.com. You can make a difference. Now is the time for action.

Note: This is intended for California residents only. Victims in other states can organize their own class action lawsuits.

Announcement From Washington Extended Families:

A national class action lawsuit will commence after September 10th should the adoption incentive be renewed (S 3038). All damaged persons can participate to include extended family, parents and former foster/adopt children. You do not have to be a party to any case to participate. There will be a request for damages. Interested parties should have a vested interest in the children removed and be able to prove a substantial relationship.

Also of extreme interest, is obtaining names/phone/location of CPS workers who are falsifying or have falsified documents in court and who have lied in a court setting. They can sue for government entrapment. The goal is to have case workers sue in all 50 states.

Send the case worker a note that states the following:

Dear ,

It has been brought to my attention that you may have falsified documents with dependency actions. If you have not acted dishonestly in the past and are now pressured by the state to remove and adopt out children in an unethical manner, you are entitled to damages.

It is of paramount concern to our nation that these actions be stopped. If you are interested at any time of participating in a class action lawsuit in your state, please write to washingtonstateextendedfamilies@live.com.

Sincerely,
Jan D. Smith

August 21, 2008

Attention: Distinguished Members of Congress

Notice of legal intent with regards to S 3038

The People herewith declare that the renewal of the Adoption Incentives S 3038 called The Improved Adoption Incentives and Guardianship Support Act does violate the law under the Sherman Anti-trust Act. In addition, funds distributed to the states entrap state workers causing illegal acts not normally performed by said individuals prior to hire.

The People through discovery have found:

1. The imbalance of funding is creating corruption

2. Pathology has filtered through all manner of government and related agencies

3. Judicial decisions violate the public trust

4. Laws are created and passed that give parens patriae unlimited power not provided by the Constitution

5. The paradigm shift that accompanied a monopoly/monopsony strategy of funding extracted from dwindling Social Security is devastating families across America

6. Children’s lives are at stake and are being killed 6-1 over parents per 100, 000

7. That the states are not following guidelines placing with relatives but are screening them out using different criteria with foster families

8. That pockets of tyranny are going unchecked without recourse

9. Congress is not responsive to The People

10. That The People also have compelling interest as an implied term

The People are declaring a public health crisis as a result of these findings and also:

In addition, The People find the Parens Patriae to be more than a doctrine but a specialized position created by the government for the government that violates Article 1 Sec 9, 10: No title of nobility or honour shall be granted by the United States. The title extends to the courts, Children’s Administration and public education violating Amendment 14 depriving persons of life, liberty and property without due process. The position applies as a collective.

The People are ordering a cease and desist of the renewal of S 3038. Should action continue to commence, a nationwide class action lawsuit opposing Parens Patriae and the theft of Social Security to provide the continuing tyranny will be executed.

Signed,
Jan D. Smith
Registered Lobbyist
Washington State Extended Families
washingtonstateextendedfamilies@live.com

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
…

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.
…

See these sample documents: The FightCPS Legal Document Library

…
Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

If you don’t agree with how a CPS caseworker handles your case and can’t get a helpful response from that person’s supervisor, you might get results by filing for a state administrative hearing.

Why file for an administrative hearing?

1. Regulations

Is your CPS caseworker following the state regulations for child protective services caseworkers? Have YOU read those regulations?

If you haven’t read the CPS regulations for your state, start there. See your local county law librarian if you need help finding the regulations. Make a note of every regulation that is being violated in your case. Start a list of issues that could be brought up during an administrative hearing that will decide whether your CPS case is being handled right.

2. Court Orders

Have you been to court? If so, you probably have a court order signed by a judge. Do you know what it says? Everything on that list of things you must do to regain custody of your child NEEDS to be done. That’s the service plan and in order to get your kids back, you MUST do everything in your power to complete the plan before the next court hearing.

There are two things CPS caseworkers might do to mess that up for you.

(a) They may take their time about making referrals for you to get their “services”. For example, your court order may say you must complete counseling. But your CPS caseworker won’t even tell you the name of a counselor you must see. Sometimes caseworkers delay service referrals then go back to court saying you haven’t had enough of their services. Even though they are to blame for you not getting the referrals, the judge will probably agree with them.

(b) Another thing they might do is to refer you to services that aren’t court ordered. For example, you might have a CPS caseworker forcing drug tests on you when they are not a part of the court-ordered service plan.

3. The Children

Do you have a court order that allows freer visitation than your CPS caseworker will permit? Review your court order to see exactly what it says. For example, a court order might not require visitation to be supervised, but the CPS caseworker insists that it should be. In this scenario the CPS caseworker is violating the court order.

Are you worried about injuries on your children in foster care, but find that the CPS caseworkers aren’t willing to move them to a safer environment?

If you feel your CPS caseworker is violating regulations, or trying to delay court ordered services, or referring you to services that are not court ordered, or in any way violating the court order in regards to visitation or any other issue, you may have just cause for filing for an administrative hearing.

How to file

EVERY UNITED STATES AGENCY HAS AN ADMINISTRATIVE HEARING PROCESS FOR AGGRIEVED CLIENTS. THIS INCLUDES CPS AGENCIES. If you run into bureaucrats that say there’s no internal review process like this, they’re wrong, and you’re talking to the wrong person.

Don’t bother asking your CPS caseworker about whether or not you can file for a hearing. Many CPS caseworkers may not know about administrative hearings. Maybe they’ve never had a client file for one. In any case, you don’t need to consult your adversary to file for an administrative hearing. (Also called a state hearing.)

You can use the telephone to contact the hearings department of your state department of human services to file a request for a hearing.

Another thing you can do is go to the front desk of the welfare office. Ask them for a hearing request form, and use it to file for a CPS administrative hearing. Welfare departments are part of social services, and they are used to getting hearing requests.

Be sure to keep a photocopy of your hearing request form.

What this does for you

When you request an administrative hearing, an employee of the state department of human services known as an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) will review your case. This means that injustices being done to you and your children on the county level will become known to the state department of human services, and all employee decisions will have to be reviewed.

This is likely to frighten and upset your social services caseworker and the caseworker’s supervisor. Is that what you want? Think that over; maybe you do and maybe you don’t.

The CPS caseworker will be called into a hearings room to meet with you and the ALJ. Most likely social services legal staff will have a position paper ready to give to you and the ALJ representing their side of the controversy. They might even have their lawyer there.

BE PREPARED with your own set of legal documents representing and proving your side of the case.

When you go to an administrative hearing you can appoint someone else to represent you. That other person could be an activist, an advocate, a lawyer, or anyone you feel is most competent. Or you can represent yourself.

Look through your state’s social services administrative hearing laws or regulations. You have a right to request that these laws or regulations be sent to you in preparation for your hearing. Or, go to your local county law library for help finding them.

Will your hearing help you?

Most hearings I’ve attended either to represent myself or another person involved with CPS did not have what I would consider a most positive outcome. Many of our requests were denied, but some were granted. Whether denied or granted, these issues were brought to the attention of the state and the CPS caseworkers had to have their actions reviewed.

I believe that many requests weren’t granted because the ALJ didn’t want to agree in a way that would give us grounds to sue the state. This is an INTERNAL agency hearing and you can expect some CYA (cover your a$$) type decisions.

Usually after the hearings, circumstances in the cases changed. This may have been because our hearing requests notified the CPS caseworkers that we were going to fight for our rights, not lay down and get walked on.

Before you file for an administrative hearing, think about whether or not this could have an adverse effect on your case. You don’t want to file just because you’re angry with the system. If you have a genuine issue with the way your CPS case is handled, and the local social services personnel won’t change their erroneous course of action, then the state administrative hearing might be a way to force action and state oversight of a CPS case.

One thing your hearing isn’t likely to do is to force your CPS caseworker to give your child back to you right away. This is not the same as going to a juvenile courtroom and getting a judge there to agree to have your child sent home. The state administrative hearing is only a review to see if a CPS caseworker is going by social services rules to handle your case fairly. Administrative Law Judges can and do force CPS caseworkers to handle cases differently.

If for any reason your requests are not granted, do not be disappointed, but forge ahead by doing everything on your court-ordered service plan and by preparing a home to bring your children back to.

The state administrative hearing does not affect your juvenile court hearing, which is where a judge can decide to send your children home. The state administrative hearing is an internal state review of an agency’s work whereas the juvenile courtroom is an external review hearing presided over by county judges.

…
Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

Recently I introduced two site features: one, a place for people to post referrals to good CPS-fighting attorneys, and the other, a place for people to make a request for an attorney. Both posts have had good responses, yet I know without a doubt that most of the people asking for legal help will not find it by posting on this website. I’m sorry to say that, but it is true. There are few attorneys who are so hard-up for work to do that they’ll come here to pick and choose clients who are probably broke and looking for someone to work pro-bono (for free).

Get over the idea that you might find a good pro-bono attorney. It rarely happens. In the seven-plus years since I started this site I’ve seen it happen only once. An attorney represented a very high-profile case in Oregon AFTER the couple became so desperate they kidnapped their own children from state custody. That attorney lost the case and the couple has been imprisoned ever since.

The alternative to finding the dream-attorney is to take that court-appointed freebie do-nothing attorney the county provides, and make that person WORK for YOU.

The main problem with these court-appointed attorneys is that they are paid by the county; that same county that is your adversary in juvenile court. So how motivated can they be to go against the county and help you?

Turn the tables. Take charge of your case.

A way to control how your attorney handles your case is to decide, yourself, how you want it handled. Then sit down and write your attorney a comprehensive letter detailing exactly what you want to have done with your case.

A keyword to remember is proactive. YOU take the lead. Rather than REacting to what others are doing to you, start thinking ahead to what your next move should be. Keep your attorney informed with a series of letters.

Remind this person, your attorney, that you are the client and you need and demand request the attention your case deserves. If your attorney doesn’t do the things you request, that person is setting himself/herself up for a legal malpractice lawsuit. But if you don’t set forth your requests in writing, there’s no proof you asked for anything in particular to be done.

Let’s face it. These court-appointed attorneys are known for what they don’t do. They often meet a client at the door on the way into the courtroom. They look through the case file as if it were the first time they’ve seen it, trying to orient themselves to what’s going on. Of course there’s no time for them to do any type of adequate defense of the case. They don’t know you, your children, or your situation. They don’t know the truth and don’t know who’s lying. And it seems they just don’t care.

My apologies to all court-appointed attorneys who don’t fit this description, but I’m sure you know that these are the facts about many if not most court-appointed attorneys in juvenile law cases.

You have to do something to get a dead-beat court-appointed attorney’s attention. Writing letters is the way to go. It puts them on notice that (1) you have some legal knowledge, (2) you want your children back, (3) you want a better quality of representation than they are giving to most clients.

If I were to write a letter to an attorney in a new CPS case, it might go something like this:

You have been appointed to represent me as an attorney in the county juvenile court. Be on my side; I need your help. I am fighting for the release of my three children from state custody. I am innocent of any wrongdoing. The caseworker made assumptions about me that are false. My children need to be at home with me, for their well-being - mentally, emotionally, and physically.

While you are my attorney, please keep in mind that you are working for me, not for the county that pays you. As my attorney I expect you to give me the best legal representation available. I therefore request face-to-face meetings with you at least once monthly to make sure you are actively working on my case, and not letting it slide between the cracks.

I understand that many court-appointed attorneys tend to simply guide parents through the juvenile court system, advising them to plead guilty to charges to make things easier for everyone else in the courtroom. This is not the kind of representation I’m requesting. I’m asking you to be actively involved in proving my innocence.

I’m hereby asking that you take my case to trial and make the caseworker prove all charges. Since they are false charges, I think it would be in my best interest, and the best interest of my children, if I were to fight to prove my innocence with a full trial. Do not under any circumstances ask me to plead guilty to false charges against me.

As you know, parents involved in CPS cases have to complete a ’service plan’ yet many do so and still do not get their children returned. I would like to avoid doing any kind of ’services’ and request that you refuse all services, and/or force the caseworkers to prove the need for any services requested. I do not want to be in the position of many parents in these cases forced to have psychological evaluations when there is no evidence of mental illness, or forced to do drug testing when there’s no evidence of drug abuse. Please honor my request, protect my best interests, and see that my time is not wasted by unnecessary court-ordered ’services’. Of course they would also be a waste of taxpayer money. Do everything you can to resist these services in my case. As you are my attorney I’m trusting you to fight these issues individually and fiercely.

I expect you to be 100% aware of what is happening with my case at all times, and to inform me immediately of any changes.

I expect you to obtain and share with me a complete copy of the case file including all case narratives.

I expect you to help me compile substantial evidence to prove my innocence in this case by preponderance of the evidence.

I expect you to produce legal paperwork including a complete response to all caseworker reports, declarations supporting my side of the case, and other documents as needed, and to present those documents to the judge or juvenile court referee who hears our case.

I expect you to do everything you can to prevent my name from being included on the central index, blacklisting people from working with children. I am innocent and my name should not be included on that list.

Please respond to my requests in writing within ten days; I will need your written response for my records in this case.

Sincerely,

Name of Client

…

NOTE: Some of these suggestions are for people with NEW cases; if your case has gone beyond the initial phases your needs will be different. Don’t just copy what I wrote; put these ideas into your own words. TYPE your letters. MAKE COPIES FOR YOUR RECORDS and keep them in a safe place.

…

Comments? I would like to get other ideas from the people reading this on what could be included in letters to attorneys. What do you want from your attorney? Let’s brainstorm this and come up with some great ideas that people who come here in the future will be able to benefit from. Are there any phrases all letters should contain? Anything you think we shouldn’t ask the attorney?