"Nobody Gets Their Kids Back " (Major Update, October 14; critical clarification, May 15, 2011)

(See updates below.)

 The "Petition for Abuse/Neglect" filed on behalf of Cheyenne Irish by New Hampshire's Division of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) alleges that the baby, who was born on October 6, was "neglected" by her mother on that very day in the hospital where the infant was born.

What this means is that Stephanie Taylor's act of "neglect" was to give birth to her child, and that the only way she could have avoided that charge was to have Cheyenne killed in utero. Because Stephanie had neglected this supposed duty, the DCYF kidnapped Cheyenne a little more than 16 hours following her birth. 

Barring a near-miraculous outcome, Cheyenne's parents will never get their daughter back. So testifies New Hampshire resident Dorothy Knightly. Between August 31, 2005 and February 3, 2006, Dorothy (who prefers to be called Dot) saw three of her grandchildren abducted by the DCYF on the basis of spurious child abuse and neglect allegations. 

Dot's grandson Austin (who is now ten years old), was so traumatized by the kidnapping that he attempted suicide. As a result he was institutionalized and "medicated" with dangerous psychotropic drugs. Two of Dot's grandchildren have been adopted, and the DCYF won't permit any contact with the grandparents. Ally was placed with her father.

All of this began on August 31, 2005, when Dot's daughter Candy gave birth to a daughter named Isabella. At some point in the pregnancy Candy developed a condition called placenta previa. Although this usually requires that the child be delivered via C-section, Candy was put on a morphine drip and Isabella was delivered normally. Predictably, this meant that a urine test found morphine in Isabella's bloodstream -- a circumstance easily explained as a result of the circumstances of her birth, but was maliciously depicted as evidence that Candy had "abused" her baby through pre-natal drug use.

Isabella.

Believing that this matter would be quickly and easily cleared up, Dot and her husband applied for temporary custody of Isabella in their home. They eagerly and cheerfully cooperated with the DCYF out of  the common but tragically mistaken belief that agencies of that kind are operated by people who actually care about children, governed by laws, and burdened with scruples.

"We let those people into our home," Knightly lamented to Pro Libertate. "We opened the door and greeted them with smiles. We offered them coffee and treated them well. We trusted them. We assured our daughter, `don't worry -- they're not going to take your baby.' We assumed that we had rights, that the law meant something, and that the people in the DCYF would have to obey the rules. We'll never make that mistake again, and we hope other people won't either."

Two weeks after Isabella was born, a false child abuse report was filed with the DCYF alleging that Austin and his sister Ally had been molested by their father, who was married to Dot's other daughter, Holly.When they were notified of the accusation, Dot and Holly immediately took the children to the Southern New Hampshire Medical Center to be examined for evidence of molestation. A comprehensive screening revealed no evidence of abuse of any kind.

Nonetheless, during a preliminary hearing regarding custody of Isabella on September 26, 2005, DCYF official Kate McClure unflinchingly committed perjury by claiming that the medically debunked molestation charge had been "confirmed," adorning that lie with a critical decorative detail: The purported act has supposedly taken place in the grandparents' home.


Once that charge had been made by the DCYF, the fate of Dot's grandchildren was settled, in everything but the details.

A DCYF document entitled "Notice to Accused Parent" explains the ground rules that govern New Hampshire's "family law" court system: "All Court hearings and records of abuse and neglect cases are confidential. The hearings are not open to the public and only people involved in the case, or invited by the parties and approved by the Court, will be admitted to the Court hearings." In practice this means that DCYF banishes from such hearings anybody who can speak effectively on behalf of the accused.
  
A "preliminary hearing" can result in the DCYF being awarded "protective supervision or legal custody" over a child, "which would give DCYF the right to temporarily remove your child[ren] from parental care and custody and determine where and with whom your child[ren] will live," explains the document.
 
At no point in the process is it necessary to prove that abuse occurred. Even at an "adjudicatory hearing" -- the equivalent of a criminal trial -- the standard is a "preponderance of evidence," rather than a requirement to demonstrate guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." But the threshold for a judicial decision to award custody of a child to the DCYF is merely the presentation of "evidence."

In substantive terms, an anonymous, unsubstantiated accusation of abuse qualifies as "evidence." In the same fashion, "temporary," as defined in New Hampshire child abuse cases, is a synonym for "indefinite." Once a judge has granted custody or protective supervision to the DCYF, the matter is placed beyond judicial remedy, and the child's fate will be determined by the child-snatcher bureaucracy. 

After Candy was charged with "neglecting" Isabella by receiving a morphine drip during a difficult delivery, the grandparents were forbidden to present evidence at either the preliminary or the adjudicatory hearing. On October 3, 2005, the DCYF seized Isabella, who at the time was a little more than one month old. She was never seen again by her grandparents.Candy was allowed brief, sporadic visits until March of 2006.

One particularly provocative aspect of this case involves Candy's refusal to apply for DCYF-administered welfare benefits. On September 2, 2005 -- less than a month after Isabella was born -- DCYF employee Melissa Deane tried to persuade Candy to apply for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Candy refused to do so, pointing out that she and Isabella would be living with the grandparents and wouldn't need welfare aid -- or the invasive government supervision that would come with it.


On September 28 -- two days after the preliminary hearing upheld the neglect charge against Candy -- Ms. Deane signed the application and filed it herself. A few days later, DCYF kidnapped Isabella from the hospital, eventually arranging for her adoption to another family. 


Dot Knightly points out that as long as Isabella remained with Candy, the DCYF would not be able to obtain federal welfare funding in her name. That problem was "solved" by filing an application over the objections of Isabella's mother, and then stealing her child.

  
The DCYF then turned its predatory attention to Dot's other daughter, Holly, and her two children, Austin and Ally. 


On January 19, 2006, Holly went to the hospital following a friend's suicide attempt. While there she was arrested for "belligerent behavior" by a police officer who believed that she was intoxicated. Although she was on various prescription medications (she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder), a test confirmed that there was no alcohol in her system at the time of her arrest. Regardless of that fact, Holly was charged with "child endangerment."


The arresting officer, Patrolman Josue I. Santia, delivered Holly's children Austin and Ally to Dot's home. Santia noted in his report that he and his partner "felt comfortable leaving the children in [the grandparents'] custody." On the following morning the grandparents were awarded temporary supervisory care over the children while the child endangerment charge was examined. That charge was eventually dropped, but DCYF wasn't willing to end its pursuit of Holly's kids.


Darren Hood Tucker, an attorney employed by DCYF, went "judge shopping" and "found another Judge willing to modify the court order" granting temporary custody to the grandparents, Dot Knightly recounted to Pro Libertate. Tucker was able to suborn a judge into ruling that it was inappropriate for Austin and Ally to have contact with Dot's daughter Candy -- whose only "offense" had been to give birth to a child who was later abducted by the DCYF. 


"They sent four police officers to our home and took those children away at gunpoint," Dot recalls. "Poor Austin was literally dragged down the street kicking and screaming as the neighbors looked on." Shortly after the siblings were placed in a foster home in Merrimack, Austin -- who had no previous record of behavioral problems -- tried to hang himself. 

News of the suicide attempt sent Holly rushing to the hospital, where she was intercepted by DCYF caseworker Anna Salvatore. The caseworker "threatened my daughter Holly by stating that if Holly didn't sign Austin's admission to Anna Philbrook Psychiatric Hospital ... the Judge would sign a court order terminating Holly's parental rights," Dot Knightly relates. 


Just days earlier, Austin had been a bright-eyed, friendly, cheerful little boy.
Austin's disposition and physical appearance changed dramatically after he was seized by armed strangers and forced to take mind-altering drugs.


During the four months that DCYF caseworker Anna Salvatore was on maternity leave (remember that detail; I'll return to it momentarily), Dot, her husband, and Austin's mother were able to have one brief phone call with Austin and his attending physician at the Psychiatric Hospital. The doctor told Dot that "after Austin spoke to his family his whole demeanor changed ... and he was not the same violent little boy as when he was admitted." When DCYF Supervisor Tracy Gubbins learned of that phone call, she issued instructions that there would be no further contact between Austin and his grandparents or his mother. 

Austin with his Grandpa.

The only reason Dot was able to talk to her grandson was because the newly single caseworker was on maternity leave. Dot believes that Anna Salvatore -- who is now known as Anna Edlund -- may have become pregnant as a result of an affair.


"Holly and her husband had been having problems, but after this whole mess began they actually moved into a new apartment and seemed to be starting over," Dot told Pro Libertate. "The caseworker, or `home-wrecker,' Anna Salvatore found out about this and had them separated again within a week. Then Salvatore started to visit Holly's husband on nights and weekends, with or without the children, which eventually ruined her own marriage. And then she ended up divorced and pregnant -- after tearing my daughter's family apart." 

The record should reflect that Ms. Edlund strenuously and categorically denies this aspect of Dot's account.

After Austin was placed in a "pre-adoptive" home, Dot -- with the help of the new caseworker -- was able to arrange a few brief, supervised visits with Austin. During one of them, the traumatized little boy quietly informed his grandmother:  "They told me that Holly's not my mother anymore."

"Honey, Holly is still your mother and will always be your mother," Dot replied -- thereby triggering the DCYF's retaliation reflex.

"From that time, all further visits were canceled," she recalled to Pro Libertate.

Not even this could be considered the crowning act of cruelty inflicted on this long-suffering family by New Hampshire's child "protection" racket.

By 2008, Dot -- who still hoped that she would be permitted to care for her grandchildren -- had completed her coursework to be a state-certified foster parent, but was refused a license. She was told by DCYF official Lorraine Bartlett that she would never be permitted to care for Austin out of fear that she would take him off the toxic psychotropic drugs he was forced to take. 


Through a steady series of dilatory and obstructionist maneuvers, the DCYF made it impossible for Dot to qualify as a foster parent for her grandchildren. When it was decided that Austin would be adopted by another couple, Dot and her husband were instructed by Bartlett to write a good-bye letter to their grandson in order to bring "closure" to the atrocity. This gesture reminds me a bit of the way that firing squads employed by Ethiopian despot Mengistu Haile Mariam would force families of the victims to pay for the ammunition used to murder their loved ones.


Dot insisted that she would continue her legal efforts to get Austin back.


"Nobody gets their kids back in New Hampshire," replied the DCYF official. "The government gives us the power to decide how these cases turn out. Everyone who fights us loses."

(Note: This is a slightly edited version of the original essay; some details have been changed in the interests of clarity.)

UPDATE --

According to a source on the ground in New Hampshire who is very close to the principals in the story, Cheyenne Irish was not sexually abused. She was rushed to be examined by a specialist dealing with victims of child sexual abuse; that specialist reportedly concluded that no abuse had occurred.

In interviews today, Jonathan Irish's father has made it abundantly clear that he considers his son to be a disturbed and potentially dangerous individual. That view is reportedly shared by other people long acquainted with Mr. Irish. Assuming -- for now -- that  there is merit to that characterization, we're still left with this question: If the father is the problem, why was the mother charged with neglect for the act of having the baby?

UPDATE, October 14: Sometimes, They Do Get Their Kids Back...

... if the parents in question can create a nation-wide controversy over the kidnapping. Reports the New Hampshire Union- Leader:

"Johnathan Irish and Stephanie Taylor emerged from a closed family court hearing Thursday afternoon with smiles on their faces and indicated they may be getting back their daughter Cheyenne, whom state officials took from them hours after her birth last week."

A local TV report unequivocally states that Cheyenne has already been returned to her parents:

Interestingly, Johnathan Irish's mother was on hand in what appears to be a supporting role. This contrasts sharply with the attitude of Mr. Irish's biological father, who has conspicuously approved of the DCYF's action in abducting Cheyenne.

Point of editorial privilege....

This report relies heavily on a significant quantity of documents not available on-line. I intend to archive them and make them available as soon as possible. 








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The Kidnapping of Cheyenne Irish (Third Update, 10/11)

The Regime's youngest political prisoner.

"Happy birthday. You're property of the State."

This is the message that was given to Cheyenne Irish, the newborn daughter of New Hampshire residents Jonathan Irish and Stephanie Taylor, who was literally stolen from her parents hours after her birth on October 6. 


While there are reportedly some "very serious" criminal allegations involved in this matter, the focal point of the case should be this: Among the reasons cited by New Hampshire's child "protection" directorate as supposed justification for the seizure of Cheyenne was the fact that "Mr. Irish associated with a militia known as the, [sic] `Oath Keepers,' and had purchased several different types of weapons including a rifle, handgun and taser."

"Whether or not the charges against Mr. Irish are true, this action is entirely unconstitutional and represents a very dangerous precedent," Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, a practicing defense attorney, pointed out to Pro Libertate.  "Using this man's political views and alleged affiliations to define parental suitability in any way is entirely illegitimate, and a direct threat to the rights of parents who are political activists of any kind." 


This is hardly the first time law enforcement officials and social workers have cited "political extremism" to justify severe and extra-constitutional sanctions against people who have not been convicted of an actual crime.


Just a few months ago, police in Salem County, Massachusetts arrested an innocent man named Gregory Girard on palpably fraudulent criminal charges because his wife -- acting as a dutiful collectivist drone -- reported that he had developed "extremist" political views. 

Those unsanctioned opinions, coupled with legal firearms purchases, led to Girard's arrest and detention as a "danger to the community" -- but he was never formally charged or prosecuted. He was simply taken into Soviet-style administrative detention while the local members of Lavrenti Beria's fraternity -- that is, the county prosecutor and judge -- tried to devise a criminal charge to justify his imprisonment. 

Political Prisoner Gregory Girard

After Girard spent four months in jail without a criminal charge,  his case was eventually "dismissed without a finding." He was designated a "ward of the court," compelled to undergo routine psychiatric evaluation and treatment, and notified that he could be arrested and subjected to indefinite detention at any time such action was deemed suitable by his persecutors.


This was done to Girard because he was classified to be what law enforcement organs in the Soviet Union called a "socially dangerous person." This same calculus appears to have been used to justify the government kidnapping of Cheyenne Irish -- a much graver crime, given that it involved not merely the seizure of a man's means of self-defense, but of his newborn child.



Cheyenne "wasn't even 16 hours old when they came in and stole her from us," reports her father Jonathan. The head of security at Concord Hospital "had a nurse come in while Cheyenne was sleeping [who] lied to us that they just wanted to take her to the nursery to see the doctor to be discharged. Even though I said NO to have the doctor come in the room they took her anyway.... I followed [them] out to the nursery because I didn't want my daughter out of my sight, as we were walking out I saw several gentlemen wearing suits with detective badges and my gut just started wrenching."


"They rushed her into the nursery and locked her in," Jonathan continues. "[W]hile I was talking to one of the other nurses the head of security comes up behind me, grabs my arm and starts walking me down the hall saying `you need to keep an open mind, you need to just hear them out' and he just kept repeating himself ignoring my questions as to who `they' were."

Cheyenne, shortly before her abduction.

How typical of an agent of government aggression to be accusing the victim of "intolerance" even as the crime is in progress. This little touch is a variation on the police tactic of bellowing "Stop resisting!" to a helpless victim at the bottom of a thugswarm.


"When he got me in Stephanie's hospital room and sat me down on the couch the police department and DCYF [Division of Children, Youth and Family services -- that is, the child-snatcher apparat] showed up. Three uniformed patrol officers and 3-4 detectives with 2 DCYF social workers walked in the room.... [One] of the patrolmen asked if he could pat me down. I said NO, not giving my consent.... The officer grabbed my wrist, bent it behind my back and stood me up and proceeded to pat me down anyway."


After seizing a pocketknife and cigarette lighter and asking if Jonathan had "any other weapons" -- officer safety uber alles, you know -- the childnappers "gave us a fabricated affidavit ... telling us they were taking custody of our newborn daughter."


Jonathan was then informed that he would be shadowed, Stasi-style, by a "security officer." When contacted by Pro Libertate at approximately 3:45 MST on October 8, Mr. Irish was being forced to leave the Concord Hospital parking lot pursuant to a "notice" he had been sent by the local police.


"I received a phone call a while ago telling me to go to a website" -- that is, a Facebook page -- "where a group of people had taken it on themselves to organize a protest and rally," Irish recounted to Pro Libertate. "I was then sent a document by the Concord Police that said I wouldn't be allowed to go inside the hospital, or even be in the parking lot, unless it involved a medical emergency, otherwise it would be considered `criminal trespass.'"


***

***


Irish refers to Cheyenne's mother, Stephanie Taylor, as his fiancee. The affidavit mentions that the couple had been under DCYF scrutiny "for approximately 21 months ... in a case involving two children of Stephanie Taylor; neglect petitions were filed on January 7, 2009 and a Termination of Parental Rights trial was recently concluded as to these two children...."


For reasons not specified in the document, Irish was "ordered to attend Ending the Violence with Scott Hampton; however, to date, has not completed this program." (Remember this point; we'll return to it anon.) The police complain that they have "responded to multiple calls" involving Irish and firearms, which resulted in "a pending charge for possession of a concealed weapon without a permit." It was in the context of that trivial paperwork matter that the affidavit mentioned Irish's "association" with the Oath Keepers, which was misrepresented in the affidavit as a "militia."


The Oath Keepers is an organization of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who have pledged not to carry out patently unconstitutional orders. The group's founder, Stewart Rhodes, emphasizes that it encourages lawful, peaceful non-cooperation, rather than armed insurrection, as a way of interposing against the all-encompassing criminal assault by the Regime against individual rights. 


Had an Oath Keeper been present at Concord Hospital on October 6, he would have refused to be party to the criminal abduction of Cheyenne Irish.



The "association" referred to in that document consists of occasional involvement by Irish and his fiancee in an on-line discussion group involving the Oath Keepers. Mentioning this tenuous connection served the immediate interests of the child abduction bureaucracy, since it created a caricature of the father as a potentially dangerous "extremist." But it also serves the long-term interest of the Homeland Security bureaucracy by using Jonathan Irish as an indispensable defendant in a potentially precedent-setting case.


"I know practically nothing about Jonathan Irish," Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers told Pro Libertate. "Whatever we learn about his problems, the real question is this: Why was such prominent mention made of his political beliefs and supposed affiliations?" 

If Mr. Irish is a legitimate criminal suspect -- as opposed to a troubled parent who is considered a political criminal -- why wasn't he taken into custody? Why was  he left relatively free, while his newborn daughter was wrenched from her mother and father through deliberate deception and the threat of lethal force?


The Oath Keepers have been targeted by the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an immensely profitable leftist "watchdog" group run by the degenerate fraud named Morris Dees. Through an illicit relationship with law enforcement agencies, both federal and local, the SPLC has become deeply involved in an effort to indoctrinate police (as well as educators and social workers) regarding the ubiquitous menace of "anti-government extremism." Rhodes points out that the SPLC, a nominally private group that is unaccountable to the public, is a member of the "Homeland Security Advisory Council" (HSAC) which published a report on domestic "radicalization" and "extremism" last Spring.

A work in progress, the HSAC describes itself as striving to prevent  "violent crime that is motivated by extreme ideological beliefs" through "threat mitigation" and "community policing." That last term of art came into vogue during the early part of Bill Clinton's first term: Washington began to lavish funding on states and municipalities for the purpose of integrating the police with the social services bureaucracy, the better to create a seamless web from which no family could escape.


Before she presided over the Holocaust at Mt. Carmel as the federal Attorney General, Janet Reno was a forceful advocate of "community policing" in order to draw recalcitrant parents into the suffocating embrace of the omniprovident Nanny State.

"Community policing"; below, more of the same.

"They sit behind doors and they glare out at officialdom in whatever its form -- a building inspector, a Housing and Urban Development manager, a police officer -- and they don't believe that person," complained Reno in a 1993 speech to the Police Foundation. "They won't come out. They won't bring their child to the clinic ... because they are suspicious and unbelieving that government really cares."


That speech, incidentally, was given on April 9, 1993 -- just ten days before the government Reno served so eagerly displayed its "caring" nature by immolating the children of the Branch Davidian community. 

Reno, according to a Los Angeles Times summary, urged that local governments assemble teams of "community-friendly, highly respected police officers, social workers, public health nurses, [and] community organizers" to pry open the doors of people burdened with a healthy mistrust of the congealed mass of corruption called government. 


The group that carried out the abduction of Cheyenne Irish is a perfect example of a  Reno-style "community policing" strike force in action. 


Among the reasons cited for seizing Cheyenne was Scott Irish's refusal to attend a seminar taught by Dr. Scott Hampton, Director of an organization called Ending The Violence. Hampton and his organization offer "training and consultation ... to child protective workers, probation and parole officers, judges, attorneys, medical professionals, clergy, teachers, and law enforcement" as well as offering "expert witness testimony in both civil and criminal cases." Hampton has conducted hundreds of workshops and seminars throughout North America and Europe, and is past President of the National Supervised Visitation Network.


Most importantly, he is an unabashed proponent of totalitarian attitude reconstruction, the sort of social engineer C.S. Lewis referred to as an "official straightener." Although he eagerly cites the work of "tolerance" peddlers such as Morris Dees, Hampton believes that tolerance is inadequate. Unlike those who believe that only God has jurisdiction over the inner life of human beings, Hampton -- like others who would use the power of the State to tear windows into men's souls -- maintains that the government literally must reprogram the inner life of people who hold "bigoted" beliefs.


"Tolerance does not require that you give up your hatred. It just tells you how to act when you hate. Not good enough," sniffs Hampton in his new book Tolerant Oppression. "It is time that we teach people how not to hate." What this requires, of course, is court-ordered reconstruction of individual attitudes using whatever leverage may be necessary -- apparently up to and including child abduction.


The kidnapping of Cheyenne Irish on her birthday bears more than a passing resemblance to a November 2008 incident in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The newborn daughter of Cirila Baltazar Cruz, who was born at Pascagoula's Singing River Hospital, was abducted through deception and coercion by hospital officials and social workers. The child was placed in the custody of two attorneys who practiced "family law" before the same judge who approved the hasty transfer of custody.


Like Jonathan Irish, Baltazar Cruz was deemed an unsuitable parent on the basis of unproven allegations. An employee at a local Chinese restaurant, she had reportedly come to the United States as an illegal immigrant, and was accused of "trading sex for housing." Her immigration status would not justify the seizure of her child, and the prostitution charge was never investigated. Nevertheless, it took more than a year and a half for Baltazar Cruz -- working with a self-described "public interest law firm" -- to regain custody of her stolen child.


A federal lawsuit filed against the hospital and others responsible for this atrocity correctly condemns the "unconstitutional actions" of those who abducted Baltazar Cruz's child. Their unconscionable acts inflicted severe emotional and physical harm on the bereaved mother, alienated the newborn from parental affection, and "substantially interfered with [their] constitutionally protected right to family integrity," the lawsuit observes.


Exactly the same case can be made on behalf of Jonathan Irish, Stephanie Taylor, and their daughter Cheyenne. It's not likely, however, that the legal activist group that defended the parental rights of Cirila Baltazar Cruz -- the Southern Poverty Law Center -- will volunteer its services on behalf of Cheyenne and her parents, given that organization's distant but substantive role in the crime that was committed against them.

Update --

File this one under "The default setting is overkill":

"FBI bomb-sniffing dogs were at Concord Hospital on Friday after demonstrations gathered to protest a newborn being removed from her mother's care by the state. The hospital said there was no threat made, but it was taking precautions in part to reassure staff and patients.... The FBI left the hospital without finding anything threatening...."

No overt or tacit threat was made, yet the Feds were called in to treat this as a potential terrorist situation. That's SPLC-style "political profiling" at work.

Note the cringing euphemism employed here to describe what provoked the protest: The child was "removed from her mother's care by the state," the most delicate description I can imagine of kidnapping a newborn from her mother at gunpoint.

The domestic situation behind all of this is a mess. As noted above, Mr. Irish and his still-married "fiancee" have some baggage. The State insists that he's an abuser and she's a victim; they both stoutly deny the charges, and he's not being treated like a criminal suspect. Furthermore, their landlord maintains that Mr. Irish is "a very honorable person who loves his country. And I've watched the state and the police systematically hammer him."

As with the mass seizure of children from the FLDS polygamist enclave a couple of years ago, this case seems like a perfect illustration of H.L. Mencken's maxim that "the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."


Second Update --

This video was shot shortly before Jonathan Irish and his fiancee were evicted from the parking lot at Concord Hospital (which was just a few minutes before I contacted him on Friday, October 8):

Third update --

Looking into some additional details in the Cheyenne Irish case, I'm struck by the fact that the overt act of "neglect" supposedly committed by her mother, Stephanie Taylor, was giving birth to the child.

This would mean the only way she could have avoided being charged with "neglect" at this point would have been to abort the baby.

 

Granted, there is a backstory here -- a very confusing and troubling one. As noted above, Mr. Irish and his still-married "fiance" have plenty of problems, some of which are, to some extent, of their own creation. We're still left to deal with the fact that the State claims the authority to seize a child who is a victim of "neglect" by virtue of being born -- and that those responsible for that act defended it, in part, by referring to the political views of the child's biological father.

 

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The Child Snatchers Win (Updated)

According to police in Austin, Texas, Billy Dan Carroll spent the better part of the past three decades assaulting and raping dozens of victims -- from girls as young as two years of age to adult women whom he lured to his home and then drugged into unconsciousness.
His alleged acts ("alleged" because Mr. Carroll has yet to be convicted of a crime) are reportedly documented on videotapes kept in his possession.

Austin police Sgt. Brian Lloyd, a 22-year veteran child abuse investigator, has rarely seen the like of Mr. Carroll, who he describes as “the worst of the worst…. Several of these children were abused multiple times.” One six-year-old girl was allegedly raped twenty-three times.

Carroll made a handsome living operating a court recording [in fact, it was a court reporting service, not a court "recording" service; I regret the error -- WNG] business before he was inspired to volunteer for compassionate community service: In 2004, he became a court-appointed special advocate (CASA) for abused children. This means that he worked -- albeit as a volunteer -- for the same Texas Department of Family and Protective Services that recently abducted 460 children at gunpoint from their parents at the FLDS Church's YFZ Ranch.


It also means that Carroll was given access to many children -- some of them, perhaps, from abusive homes, others from homes and parents that were not abusive by any reasonable standard, but nonetheless were deemed unsatisfactory by the omniscient custodians of the State's children at the Texas DFPS.


In fact, it was through his work as a CASA on behalf of the Texas child "protection" bureaucracy that Carroll became acquainted with the 8-year-old girl whom he most recently molested, according to a criminal indictment. Understandably, other parents who suspect that Carroll may have taken indecent liberties with their children have been "flooding" the CASA organization with phone calls.


Credit must be given to the Austin Police Department for the professional fashion in which they have built their case against Mr. Carroll. His home -- which was never referred to as a "compound," incidentally -- was the subject of a search warrant that was issued on the basis of solid evidence, rather than an anonymous phone call from an obviously demented woman. Specific evidence was sought, found, and secured. Carroll was brought before a judge in a timely fashion and indicted on specific charges and given steep ($2 million) but reasonable bail.


This was done, incidentally, without sending in SWAT operators in paramilitary drag and deploying an APC and sniper teams. Nor was the entire neighborhood in which Carroll lived cordoned off and treated as one huge crime scene, with the neighbors being looked on as co-conspirators with Carroll on the basis of propinquity.


The search warrants and all photographic evidence against Mr. Carroll have been sealed, which is entirely appropriate: It wouldn't be wise to taint the jury pool against the suspect by publicizing salacious (and speculative) details or circulating lurid photographs.


Laura Wolf, executive director of the CASA program, made a point of telling the media that the suspect's application and background check are protected from public scrutiny by a confidentiality agreement. So until and unless those documents are subpoenaed and presented in court, we have no way of knowing whether CASA and the agency it answers to ignored any evidence that Carroll had been a practicing pederast for decades when they agreed to let him have access to vulnerable children.


Ms. Wolf, it should be remembered, played a conspicuous role in the seizure of more than 460 young people -- children, for the most part, but a handful of adult mothers who were deliberately mis-identified by CPS as "pregnant minors" -- from the FLDS community. I don't recall reading her protests over the due process irregularities that led to this mass kidnapping. Nor can I seem to turn up any publicly expressed misgivings from Ms. Wolf over the widespread selective publicity given by CPS to various documents seized from the FLDS -- including confidential church rosters and lurid photographs of FLDS leader Warren Jeffs that were introduced as a cynical PR gesture in a custody hearing to which those pictures were not germane.



Ms. Wolf helped scatter the FLDS children from one end of Texas to another, secreting them into a foster care and child welfare program riven with corruption and rife with abuse. To her credit, one of her public comments about the FLDS matter makes incontestable sense: "This particular story has gotten a lot of attention and piques a lot of interest. But there are children all over the state who are experiencing abuse and neglect every day."


Indeed. Many of them are being abused in that same child welfare system. In fact, one of them was probably being molested by Mr. Carroll as that sound-bite dribbled down Ms. Wolf's chin.


Carroll isn't the only opportunistic sexual predator recently uncovered in the Texas child welfare system.


Roughly a year ago, a 13-year veteran Child Protective Services caseworker named Frederick Shavers was arrested and charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15-year-old girl whom he was supervising. According to police in Grand Prairie, there was "a mountain of evidence" that Shavers began a sexual "relationship" with the young girl -- an unwed teenage mother -- when she was thirteen years of age.


Shavers was 37 years old and married with two children at the time of his arrest. This means he was 35, and his inamorata was 13, when they began their affair. Gee golly Ned, it seems to me that Mr. Shavers was doing exactly what the agency that employed him said was happening at the YFZ Ranch. The significant difference here, of course, is that CPS didn't bother to prove any of the things it professed to "know" about the FLDS community -- and Shavers was forced to resign in April before being arrested last June.


Furthermore, it appears that this was not the first time that Shavers had been accused of sexual misconduct and other improprieties. According to the Dallas News, Shavers "has been the subject of several prior CPS inquiries" regarding his conduct.


In 1994, a 12-year-old girl "accused Mr. Shavers of kissing her during horseplay at a pool in Greenville." Seven years later, he ended up in a fight with a 20-year-old man whom he had taken into his home as a minor in CPS custody. Just the week prior to his resignation from CPS in April 2007, Shavers was accused of coaching a child "about how to testify in a family court in Hunt County." The purpose of that coaching, explains the News, "was to make it seem like he was doing his job more thoroughly" than he had, according to the child's mother.


Remember, Shavers at the time of his 2007 resignation had been with CPS for thirteen years; that meant that the first allegation of sexual misbehavior came immediately after he was hired by the agency. And his work record ended with allegations of suborning perjury from a child witness.


Shavers supervised an estimated 600 children during his career as a caseworker. His case records are under police scrutiny on the assumption that other children were abused in various ways by the former child-saver.


But CPS, of course, did nothing wrong in keeping Shavers on the payroll for over a decade. Agency spokeswoman Marissa Gonzalez insisted that CPS "handled Mr. Shavers appropriately during his career," observes the News: "I think each of those incidents was handled appropriately."


Let us be clear about an important distinction: There are no due process considerations regarding a job on the public payroll. It's not necessary to prove an allegation beyond reasonable doubt in order to terminate the employment of a bureaucrat accused of a sexual offense against a child (although the allegation should be kept confidential pending any criminal proceedings). Had CPS been genuinely interested in child safety it would have excised Frederick Shavers from their roster in 1994.


But Shavers was given the benefit of every doubt. The same was quite possibly true of Billy Dan Carroll. The innocent FLDS parents, of course, enjoyed no such deference.


Mother and child reunion -- for now: Freed from the criminal clutches of the Texas CPS, a boy ecstatically hugs his mother. Unfortunately, the CPS still has that child in its crosshairs.


And now, despite the fact that the Texas Supreme Court has made it clear that the entire abuse case against the FLDS community is a legal travesty, those long-suffering parents are still subject to an ongoing criminal probe -- as well as a species of home imprisonment under the arbitrary and plenary authority of the same agency that sheltered at least one known child molester and -- given the Carroll case -- quite possibly many more.

Barbara Walther, the criminally inept judge who issued both of the defective search warrants for the YFZ Ranch and the order separating the FLDS parents from their children, was the recipient of a brutal "bench slap"* from the Texas Supreme Court. That court ruled that the "removal of the children was not warranted" by the available evidence, and that Walther had "abused" her discretion by issuing the order to remove them.


Now, of course, Walther couldn't simply acknowledge her errors and do her best to undo them by repealing her order. She had to do something to maintain the pretense that her opinions about this case are somehow more respectable than those of any other self-important harridan.


So, in an act of consummate petulance, she refused to rescind her order last Friday. To the astonishment of all present, Walthers stalked out of the courtroom without concluding business, leaving counsel and spectators alike to gag on the stench of her toxic arrogance and spite.
















"C'mon, boys -- we've got families to destroy!" Protected by an armed phalanx, Judge Barbara Walther strides with purposeful malice toward the courtroom.


This was most likely done as a way of making the FLDS parents that much more pliant when Walthers (a veteran of the totalitarian family court system) presented them with her terms on Monday. According to the New York Times, Walther's order "imposed a lengthy list of caveats pending the conclusion of the investigation, including surprise home visits by caseworkers, possible psychiatric evaluation of the children and a ban on travel outside Texas."


Two things must be kept in mind.


First, the CPS is known to harbor child molesters among its caseworkers and legal volunteers. Walther's order compels these innocent parents to associate with a tainted population that could include child sex offenders.


Second, those parents -- once again -- are innocent before the law. They have been convicted of nothing, indicted for nothing -- indeed, they haven't been charged with any offense. Yet they are now imprisoned at their ranch by judicial degree, subject to the invasion of their property at the whim of a manifestly corrupt, incompetent, and hostile government bureaucracy, and forbidden the freedom to travel that is the indefeasible right of every American citizen.


The CPS is still engaged in a criminal enterprise, and Walther is their fully enlisted accomplice. That agency will not relent until someone in the FLDS community is railroaded into court as an abuser, thereby permitting the child-snatchers to try, once again, to prosecute the entire community under the novel doctrine of collective criminal guilt devised especially for this case.


Perhaps the only way that the CPS could be more cynical and devious would be to assign caseworkers known to be child abusers to supervise FLDS families -- and then demand the prosecution of the parents for associating with known abusers.


Update: Toss The Wench Off The Bench!

It may be entirely symbolic, of course, but a petition is being circulated calling for Judge Walther's impeachment.
__

*I owe that expression -- along with a fair piece of what we've learned about this case and the illustration at the top of this essay -- to the exceptionally fine writer who produces the Grits for Breakfast blog.



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Don't let the sun go down without doing something to piss of the keepers of The List!

"Heroes In Error", Again (Media Update)

"We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."

Iraqi con-man Ahmed Chalabi (seen at right standing next to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with former Iraqi Viceroy Jerry Bremer looking over Rumsfeld's shoulder); Chalabi was the chief source of pre-war disinformation regarding Saddam's supposed WMD arsenal, replying to a question posed by the London Daily Telegraph in February 2004 about his role in misleading the public.


In her element: Media-favored FLDS critic Flora Jessop, a one-time polygamist "child bride," appears on the Fox "News" program "On the Record."

"I would like to hug her [Rozita Swinton]. She accomplished getting 416 children out of a very abusive situation. But I'd also like to slap her because she went about it the wrong way." --

Flora Jessop, former member of the FLDS Church-turned-anti-polygamy crusader, speaking with reference to the disturbed 33-year-old woman whose false child abuse report triggered the raid in Eldorado.



"I would like to point out that the system absolutely worked in this case," insisted Phoenix-based anti-polygamy activist Flora Jessop during the April 18 edition of "On the Record." "When -- as hotlines get calls from children purporting to be abused, just as I do, it's not my responsibility and my job to decide whether those calls are legitimate."


Which is to say that the system "worked," in Miss Jessop's view, because it brought about what she considered to be a desirable result -- the armed invasion of the YFZ Ranch, and the seizure of children from their parents by force -- irrespective of the truth. In fact, Jessop's statements on the record indicate that she considered the truth to be inconsequential.


In recounting her conversations with "Sarah," the supposed polygamist child bride and abuse victim at the YFZ Ranch who was actually a childless adult woman named Rozita Swinton in Colorado Springs, Jessop describes how the caller suddenly -- and conveniently -- became twin sisters named Sarah and Laura. She also candidly described those conversations as an elaborate game of "Let's Pretend":


"[At] one point during my conversations with the girl I was speaking with, I had actually asked her and confronted her ... and said, If you're the twin sister of Sarah, Sarah is in Texas, Dale Barlow [the supposed abuser] is in Colorado City [Arizona], things don't add up. And she said, Well, can we pretend? And I said, yes, we can pretend. And she said, Well, then let's pretend that when Sarah called, she couldn't tell the name of her husband because then she would be hurt worse. So Sarah actually used the name Dale Barlow because Dale Barlow was hurting her twin sister in Colorado City. And I said, So are we pretending that Sarah was trying to get help for both Sarah and Laura because they were both being hurt? And she said, yes, let's pretend that. I asked her, I said, Can we pretend that Dale Barlow is Laura's -- the twin sister's new dad? And she said, No let's not pretend that. And she was very elaborate in her ruse, very well rehearsed."


So: We're supposed to believe that the child "protection" system worked because it sprung into action on the basis of a transparent "ruse"?


Indeed we should -- assuming that we, like Jessop, the Texas CPS, and others who believe themselves to be exalted above normal human considerations of honesty and equity, subscribe to a purely consequentialist worldview.


In a conversation with the Arizona Republic, Jessop insisted that (in the words of the paper's paraphrase) "the calls in Texas had a good outcome, even if they were fraudulent, because they prompted police to raid the FLDS ranch."


This is a good thing, supposedly: FLDS children behind barricades in a detention facility health care workers called a "concentration camp."



In fact, she considered it necessary to continue the deception long after it was clear that the calls were phony, and even after the raid and child-grab were underway. Explains the Republic: "Jessop said she had to maintain the pretense that her caller was real so that Texas police could continue investigating."


"At that point," Jessop observes, "I was working with authorities and trying to keep contact with her."


This isn't the first time that Jessop has peddled puerile fabrications to the media. Four years ago, after taking in two 16-year-old female runaways from the FLDS redoubt in Hildale/Colorado City, she dramatically announced that six more teenagers had sought her out for support and shelter. "The majority are boys, but there are some girls," Jessop insisted, claiming that they were "spooked" and "not talking to anybody but me." She also refused to provide any tangible proof that the runaways existed.


Jessop's claims prompted a mixture of puzzlement and annoyance from others working to free discontented FLDS members from the authoritarian community.


"The information Flora's putting out that there's a mass exodus, it just isn't happening," insisted Bob Curran, director of a St. George, Utah-based group called Help the Child Brides. Rowenna Erickson of Tapestry Against Polygamy complained that Jessop's "inaccuracies" and "rumors" were undermining the credibility of the anti-polygamist cause.


According to Pennie Petersen, another FLDS defector who fled at age 14 when confronting the prospect of being "sealed" to a middle-aged man who reportedly had molested her, Jessop actually had come across a group of FLDS youth, but they weren't interested in leaving.


"There are no runaways," Petersen told the Deseret News. "Those kids were partying and they all went home late. They never wanted to leave." Petersen, who has often been at odds with Jessop, shared the concerns expressed by others in the counter-polygamy cause, and expressed them a bit more pointedly: "Flora's been getting away with these stories for a long time now, and it's time to shut her down. She's just hurting the organizations and our cause."


Flora's "stories" -- by passing Swinton's fabrications along when she knew them to be false, Jessop took ownership of those lies -- have now hurt hundreds of children who were pried away from their parents and placed into one of the country's most notoriously corrupt foster care systems.


It could have been even worse -- much, much worse. There were snipers targeting the YFZ property when the Child-Snatchers attacked. It's a matter of God's grace that none of the parents and children therein met the fate of Vicki and Sammy Weaver.


If such a tragedy had ensued, Flora Jessop -- who has a longstanding relationship with Texas law enforcement -- would likely have been among the first to insist that the bloodshed was entirely the fault of the FLDS and their leaders.


As it stands, nearly all of the FLDS families from YFZ Ranch remain torn apart. Despite recent legal reversals and the fundamental illegitimacy of the entire enforcement action (given the fatal defects in the original warrant), Texas authorities are continuing their criminal probe.


If they're looking for a slam-dunk criminal indictment, they could have one against Flora Jessop:


She has publicly confessed to making a "False report regarding [a] missing child or missing person," as defined by Chapter 37, section 081 of the Texas Penal Code.


Given that Flora Jessop appears to be the proverbial poisoned tree in this entire matter, she is the only legitimate target for a criminal probe -- unless, of course, the probe turns up tangible evidence of deliberate criminal misconduct on the part of CPS officials.


Assuming that her much-flaunted passion for justice extends beyond an understandable preoccupation with the FLDS Church, Jessop should cooperate in a genuinely independent inquiry, if such an undertaking is possible now. It would be fascinating to learn what she knows about the following questions:


*Was she, as many suspect despite repeated denials, the chief "anonymous" source mentioned in the original search warrant? How long and how extensive is Jessop's relationship with law enforcement bodies in Texas? What role did she have in tuning public and official expectations about the FLDS -- to the extent that a heavily armed raiding party was sent to confront the YFZ community?

*In her above-mentioned Fox interview, Jessop mentioned this interesting detail: "It's my understanding that [Rozita Swinton] was caught with -- when they went into her apartment, that they found reams and documents and just tons of information on the FLDS." Oh? Who provided Jessop with that "understanding"? Might she help us find out exactly what kind of information Swinton had, and -- if it's something beyond what might be turned up through diligent googling -- who provided it to her?


Miss Swinton, likewise, presents us with some very interesting questions. According to a profile in Westview (.pdf), a publication out of Nashville, "Rozita is a Mormon who suffers from MPD/DID [Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder] which falls under the heading of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.... Since she was a teenager, Rozita has flashbacks to a time when she was an abused child ... and to times when she had been locked up and kept hostage."


Swinton's Tennessee childhood was troubled in other ways. Her father was convicted of first degree murder in 1965 and released in 1977 along with hundreds of other felons by former Governor Ray Blanton, who was eventually convicted of granting pardons in exchange for bribes. In 1992, continues the profile, Rozita was a ward of the Tennessee Department of Human Services and protected from contact with her father by a restraining order. She spent years shuttling from foster home to foster home, eventually ending up in Colorado in 2005.


One of her foster parents has published books under the pseudonym Kate Rosemary. One of those books, Raising Shane, refers to Rozita by name, describing her as a loving member of a multi-ethnic foster family. At some point, she apparently made a mission trip to El Salvador.


Rozita Swinton's confirmed role in this imbroglio already plays like something out of a John Grisham novel. But as always, owing to the questions that remain unanswered (for instance, who posted Miss Swinton's bail in Colorado?), there are other possibilities -- not "probabilities," mind you, but possibilities -- that would take us into Dean Koontz territory.


The foster care system is a huge industry. So is the "tolerance" industry, which features such outfits as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the multi-multi-million-dollar racket operated by reputed pervert Morris Dees.


Both the foster care/adoption industry and the "tolerance" industry have had the FLDS in their scopes for a while. The SPLC, in particular, has been Jonesing for a crack-down of some kind on a "hate group" for a while, and the FLDS enclave in Eldorado -- occupied as it was by helpless, unarmed, unassuming white folks -- was an irresistible target.


The SPLC, it should be remembered, liaises with law enforcement agencies across the nation, indoctrinating them about various "hate groups" (which means, in practice, any group of people Dees and his comrades hate). And there's nothing that brings out the martial valor of paramilitary law enforcement agencies like the sight of an urban gathering of unarmed, peaceable white people. (I make that observation free of ethnic self-interest, as the photographic evidence will attest.)





















From tabloid trash to official policy: This porridge of herd-poisoning themes pretty much typifies the media's treatment of the FLDS; it also demonstrates how the same war propaganda methods used to whip up foreign conflicts can be used to demonize domestic groups targeted for assault by the State.


The foregoing is not to be construed as the beginnings of a conspiracy theory; instead, it's offered as a guide to some directions a real inquiry might take, should such a thing ever happen.


It's entirely irresponsible to think that the abduction of hundreds of children in Texas could reflect collaboration of some kind among anti-polygamy agitators, corrupt child protection and foster care officials, and the country's most obnoxious "hate group" crusader.


That would be like believing the Iraq War was somehow brought about through the covert collaboration of ideological White House zealots and a small-gauge Iraqi con artist like Ahmed Chalabi.


I mean, get real, dude.


Update --

Yesterday (Monday, May 26), Dale Williams of KTKK radio in Salt Lake City had me on to discuss the FLDS atrocity. The MP3 of that program can be found here (scroll down to the archive section). I consider Dale to be a bold, honest, and exceptionally insightful host, and also appreciate Barbara Jean for including the interview in her archive.




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