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Hold the DA Candidates Accountable

By Randy Burton
Originally published in the Justice for Children Newsletter, March 2000

Harris County's leaders talk constantly about how tough on crime our district attorney's office is. Certainly, we have the bragging rights about the number of inmates that we place on death row. Yet, when we look at the way we prosecute crimes against children, we have nothing to brag about.

Child abuse is not only the most serious local crime issue, it's the most serious criminal justice issue in our country. According to national statistics, 3 million reports of abuse or neglect are made each year, of which roughly 1 million (by conservative estimates) are confirmed cases. Unfortunately, Texas leads the nation in child fatalities due to abuse or neglect—and by a wide margin. In almost half of these cases, Children's Protective Services and law enforcement authorities knew about the child's dangerous situation prior to the child's death, often receiving numerous reports and conducting investigations into previous allegations involving felony child abuse without taking any action to protect the child.

This must change. One way to start is by holding our candidates for Harris County district attorney more accountable on child abuse.

This unnecessary suffering inflicted upon children is impossible to measure or imagine. Besides the obvious physical scars left on the body by abuse and neglect, it is now well documented that the mental trauma associated with child abuse and neglect leaves permanent physical scars on the child's brain, altering the brain's chemistry and physical makeup. In the past few years, studies have linked childhood trauma with later physical and mental disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, suicidal depression, self-mutilation, addictions and sleeping and eating disorders, to name a few. Unprotected and untreated, the growing body of child abuse survivors of today become the child abusers of tomorrow who will prey on their and our young.

So why is it that the lead law enforcement organization in our county, the district attorney's office, has a blind spot when it comes to the prosecution of offenses against children? Each year, tens of thousands of reports of abuse and neglect pour into the intake units of our CPS offices and police departments. However, only a few hundred on these calls ever make it to the criminal courts and fewer still are actually prosecuted.

The district attorney's office is the only agency in our county with the authority to decide whether to file charges in a criminal case involving the abuse of a child. The DA alone decides which cases should be presented to the grand jury, what recommendation should be made to the grand jury as to whether an indictment should be returned, whether to plea-bargain the case and what punishment to offer the criminal defendant for his or her crime, whether to go to trial and on which of the available charges or whether to dismiss the case. This incredible array of charges and authority is what is known as the "prosecutor's discretion."

This prosecutor's discretion is being abused in the cases where children are the victims of unthinkable crimes. More than 70,000 calls involving children are made to CPS each year in the Harris County area, primarily through the State Child Abuse Hotline. Out of this number, CPS claims that 27,339 of the calls for 1998 (the last year for which such figures are available) constituted bona fide reports of child abuse or neglect involving 35,161 children at risk. CPS assigned only 15, 459 of these bona fide reports involving 22,540 children for its "civil" investigation as to whether the abuse occurred and whether the child should be placed into protective custody. Under state law, CPS also cross-referred these cases—all of which arguably involve crimes against children—to law enforcement for their criminal investigations. Of the 14,715 investigations actually conducted into these crimes, only 4,207 cases (6,064 child victims) were "confirmed" after the so-called "investigation" was complete.

According to a study published in October 1998 by Travis County state District Judge Scott McCown, a respected child abuse authority, the state consistently underclassifies allegations of child abuse and neglect as "reports" worthy of further investigation. If Texas CPS were to validly classify calls that it receives at the national rate, 86,448 more children would have been the subject of a report of child abuse or neglect every year.

Texas also assigns too few reports for investigation and completes the assigned investigations too slowly. Even Texas' rate of confirmed investigations is substantially below the national averages. From 1990 to 1996, the United States had an 18 percent increase in confirmed cases of abuse and neglect, whereas Texas had a 27 percent decrease. Most importantly, Texas removes children at roughly one-third the national rate. Small wonder then that we lead the nation in child fatalities due to abuse or neglect. Had Texas removed children from dangerous homes at even the national average, many thousands of children each year would now be in protective custody or adopted into safe homes.

The remaining number of child abuse cases takes an even more precipitous nosedive when these confirmed cases are presented to the DA's office for the filing of charges.

According to the most recent figures from both the Harris County district attorney's office and the Harris County district clerk's office, only 1,626 charges were accepted by the DA's office disposing of a mere 1,378 cases involving felony child abuse.

When you look at the population of child abuse cases disposed of where the defendant was not already on some form of probation, well over half of all perpetrators involved in felony crimes against children (56 percent of 1,122 defendants) received either "deferred adjudication" or had their charges dismissed by the DA. In other words, the abuser got off scot-free. Of the remaining felony cases, a paltry 409, or 36.5 percent of the defendants, received some time in the state penitentiary. Another 25 defendants received some days in the county jail. Thus, of the original 70,000 plus reports to child abuse authorities, only 409, or less than 1 percent, are meaningfully prosecuted by our district attorney's office.

Although child abuse cases may appear to be more complex and time consuming to the untrained prosecutor's eye, they are no more difficult than others to obtain a proper verdict. When the DA's office has chosen to go to a jury trial on child abuse cases, it has done extraordinarily well. The Child Abuse Division of the DA's office, a specialized unit which handles many of the most difficult child cases, went to trial 37 times in 1999 and in 34 of these times juries convicted the abuser. If given the chance, the average citizen does not have any problem with believing the testimony of children. And when given the opportunity to assess punishment in these cases, jurors routinely respond with lengthy sentences for crimes committed against children.

Prosecutors are always imploring their juries to "send a message to the community." What kind of message does this record of child abuse prosecutions send? And, what does it tell children about the seriousness with which the authorities will take their agonizing tales of torture?

This year, for the first time since 1980, Harris County will elect a new district attorney. His or her attitude on child abuse cases as our elected representative will set the tone for the rest of the DA's office staff. What message do we want to send to our newly elected leader of the law enforcement community? I suggest the following:

The community will not tolerate the torture, rape and maiming of our most precious charges.

We expect our district attorney's office to fearlessly and vigorously prosecute these cases or at least as fearlessly and vigorously as that of crimes against adults.
We want to have adequate numbers of specially trained prosecutors to try all of the crimes against children that should be tried and to assist with the evaluations of all child abuse cases at the Children's Assessment Center and local law enforcement agencies; not just the small handful of specialized prosecutors that currently exist and the trivial number of crimes prosecuted office wide each year.
We expect stronger penalties for child molester regardless of whether they are a stranger to the child or the child's relative.
We abhor the unbridled use of deferred adjudication for those guilty of abuse.
We expect the district attorney to stand up for child victims in court, as their champions against the monsters who prey upon them, who seek to deprive them of their childhoods, or worse.

With this election, we have an opportunity to install a new district attorney whose priorities will reflect those of the community and who will bring the proper emphasis and resources to the protection of our children and will seek to remove child predators from free society.

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