The Eastern District Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to place the boy of a mother who was labeled disruptive and dysfunctional by court insiders in a foster family out of state.
St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Ellen Dunn’s decision to allow the boy, identified only as J.G.W. in court documents, to be adopted by a couple in Washington D.C. was challenged by his mother in the case In the Interest of: J.G.W.
“What appears to be harassing to court professionals is a parent’s natural response to the loss of a child and yet, the system labels these parents as dysfunctional, noncooperative, disruptive, and harassing and uses the parent’s behavior as the basis to remove the child from the family,” said Evita Tolu, a St. Louis attorney who has represented several divorced parents in child custody cases.
The mother’s attorneys, William Grant and Rose Feldman of St. Louis, did not respond to requests for comment.
“As a legal professional, I am left puzzled about what constitutes disruptive and dysfunctional conduct,” Tolu told the St. Louis Record. “It is an amorphous phrase. Everything can be thrown into its definition to take a child away from a parent. I have never met a parent who rejoiced at the prospect of losing his/her child.”
One of J.G.W.'s siblings drowned in their mother’s custody and Judge Dunn subsequently found that placing the boy out of Missouri was in his best interests.
Although there are no statistics from the Department of Family Services (DFS) on the number of local children adopted out of Missouri, some 8,451 adoptions have occurred statewide, according to a 2021 DFS report.
“There are no checks and balances to hold family court professionals accountable for their decisions,” Tolu added. “No one knows what takes place in these closed adoption cases. There is no oversight by independent unbiased outsiders. The only oversight is provided by the system itself – the DFS, the guardian ad litem, the child psychologist or the juvenile officer – professionals who may benefit from federal and state funding.”
Senate Bill 71, which passed 140-5 in the House and 32-2 in the Senate, gave J.G.W.’s mother a pathway to challenge his placement out of Missouri before final judgment, according to media reports.
However, the appellate court found no abuse of discretion by the lower court in J.G.W.’s case.
“Mother engaged in a pattern of harassing and disruptive behavior towards several interested parties including some of J.G.W.’s prior foster parents, representatives of the Children’s Division, and J.G.W.’s Guardian ad Litem,” Eastern District Court of Appeals Judge James M. Dowd wrote in the Nov. 8 opinion. “This conduct not only supports the court’s placement order here but has made reunification with Mother increasingly less likely.”
The unanimous decision in favor of relocation out of state included Judges Kelly C. Broniec and Philip M. Hess.
Tolu further argues that a parent losing a child to adoption would naturally experience grief and agitation and likely result in disruptive and dysfunctional conduct during the process.
“It is troublesome that the Court of Appeals only provided a conclusory phrase that the adoption and placement of a child out of state were 'due in large part to the mother’s disruptive and dysfunctional conduct,' without providing any facts to support this conclusory statement,” she said. “The adoption system and the parties involved have the financial resources that such a parent probably does not have.”
As previously reported in the St. Louis Record, Tolu is currently representing a mother in federal court who sued the court-appointed guardian ad litem of her 14-year-old daughter after the teen committed suicide during child custody proceedings.
“Working with parents who have lost children in family court proceedings, I've learned that in many cases none of these court professionals are equipped with the knowledge and experience to understand the difference between parental trauma and misconduct,” she said.