Newton, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine – type shootings WILL NOT STOP and WILL ESCALATE until we educate about, make access easy to, and fund mental health care

I am a retired pediatrician in Chicago.  I also have a PhD in pathology and trained for six months in forensic pathology observing and participating in autopsies including many gunshot victims. In addition I was medical director of a mental health care group practice. I know what I am talking about as I have treated babies and children who have been boiled, beaten, shot, and shaken.  I have smelled their burned flesh and held their brain tissue in my hand.  I have attended their autopsies. The destruction of tissue by high-powered weapons is unbelievable.  Tissues explode inside of you as the tissue is vaporized and the bullets wobble and gas from heated vaporized tissue expands the damage. There is absolutely no reason for high-powered, high magazine capacity weapons for civilian use. I fear though that it will take decades to confiscate them all as there are millions out there and millions of high capacity magazines.  Too many people do not secure their weapons and too many can buy them without background checks. The ratio of weapons to people in this country is so astonishing it is beyond belief.  No weapons ban will fully work until we start taking this ratio down.

However we have to start somewhere like limiting the availability of high-capacity magazines and certain types of bullets.  Although limiting guns in UK and Australia has worked well, it won’t work so easily in America where 5% of the world population has 50% of weapons owned  by civilians!  What are we going to do?  Have a massive confiscation campaign?  Eliminate the 2nd Amendment? NO!  We must close the loopholes concerning background checks.  We must start banning semiautomatic weapons to some extent and slow down their  proliferation.  The number in this country already is more than we will ever need. We must link all background registries at the national level. BUT! How are we going to  define mental illness that makes a person dangerous and that deserves to put them on the registry?  How are we going to help wrongfully convicted felons clear their names.  Are all felons deserving of having a ban on owning fire arms?  I think NOT!

I was wrongfully  convicted of aggravated battery of an officer for “bumping” him with my wheelchair and sentenced to two years in prison, a false charge as Sgt. Anthony Salemi actually attacked me in my wheelchair, falsified his records and committed perjury. Now Chief Judge Evans in Cook County is banning all cell phones from courthouses as the eavesdropping law was declared unconstitutional so no citizen can document corruption of Sheriff officers and judges in courthouses even outside of the courtrooms!

We have no choice with this amount of weapons in our country and t he impossibility of banning them due to the numbers already out there, but to make schools as secure as courthouses.  This is the sorry reality and it will cost us dearly – causing fear in our children and enormous government expenditures. Our 2nd Amendment with the technological advances in weapons and astonishing proliferation of weapons in the hands of citizens in America make us a dangerous overly armed population.

We MUST increase the requirements for police officers training and education.  We have a pitifully under trained and corrupt law enforcement legacy in this country. Read my blogs in the following.  We are now even killing a whole lot of people unnecessarily with Tasers!

We also must MASSIVELY increase our funding for mental health care.  We need 30,000 certified child psychiatrists but only have about 5,000 in this country.  We have been forced to choose between drugging people and providing cognitive or talking therapy.  Drugging won as our healthcare system won’t pay to talk to anyone.  I believe however that talking therapies are critical and drugging often does more harm than good!

Those doctors who do procedures (cardiac and ortho surgery for example) get obscenely high payments while psychiatrists, psychologists, and general practitioners, as well as pediatricians and family practitioners are the lowest paid.  We also pay by the pound.  My patients (Vincent triplets) are in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “lightest triplets in the world” (1997 edition), yet I was paid $50 to put in central lines into ultra premees while vascular surgeons were paid $500 to put in central lines into adults! Go figure! Our priorities are goofy.

Our justice system is so corrupt that honest  harmless people like me are wrongfully convicted (in my case in retaliation for whistle blowing against corrupt police and officials – see my other blogs links to the right) and criminals know all the loopholes.  Some of the most dangerous people are very intelligent and also mentally ill yet are not even in the mental healthcare system.

I fear the backlash against most mentally ill people who are harmless.

I fear that people with post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD) will be discriminated against and labeled wrongfully as dangerous. I suffer from PTSD and although I am a non-violent pacifist, I cower and swing my arms in front of my head trying to defend myself against flashbacks of being beaten by corrupt  police (I have been beaten several times and falsely accused of attacking these officers – see my blogs: http://cookcountysheriffdeputies.wordpress.com and http://cookcountyjudges.wordpress.com). This massacre in Newtown has caused me to have more flashbacks revisiting seeing wounded and dying children in the emergency rooms where I worked in Chicago 10-20 years ago.

There is NO mental health care in America; no understanding, respect and compassion for the mentally ill; no support for their families; no help available; just disdain, disrespect, hatred, blame, and ignorance. LaPierre’s and others’ descriptions of mentally ill shooters as “lunatics” and other derogatory terms I would rather not repeat makes the defamation against the mentally ill even worse.

Would you blame a person for becoming sick with cancer or being born with a deformity?  Yet we blame the criminally insane and defame them as evil!  We are a very sick society!

I treated a boy who attempted suicide and when I was releasing him from the hospital, the major university children’s hospitals in Chicago and its suburbs said they didn’t take these kids in transfer who didn’t have insurance (Loyola University, Northwestern University Medical Center, Rush Medical Center, Christ Hospital affiliated with the United Church of Christ and part of Advocate Healthcare) they had a year-long waiting list (Mt. Sinai Hospital and Medical Center), they only took transfers to their mental health unit of persons on Medicaid who lived in their zip  code (University of Chicago); or such other lame excuses all due to the country refusing to pay for mental health care.

I tried to testify in juvenile court that an aunt who was trying to help her nephew, whose parents were in prison for murder, had a child who was dangerous due to his mental illness, a liar and that the aunt was not a child abuser. Instead the child needed hospitalization and mental health care for life. He may grow up to be a mass murderer.  His aunt was falsely labeled a child abuser due to the child’s lies without a legitimate fair due process court hearing. The aunt lost custody of the boy and his brothers. The children were placed in foster care or given to their criminal drug dealing and gang member relatives who the aunt had protected them from. He has already become a rapist and was in prison for a year. His brothers have become burglars and teen drug dealers under the wings of their relatives and the lives of the brother who were doing well with the aunt have been ruined by the Cook County judges and court system.   We need extensive judicial reform!  I would love to testify before Congress.

Instead the judge threw me out of the courtroom, declared I was not a reliable witness, instead listened to a child welfare worker who had a few months training after getting a bachelor’s degree in psychology, ended up destroying my career and now corrupt officials arrested me on many false criminal charges and jailed me in retaliation after I began this campaign to get help for these  people.  Read my other blogs: here, here, here, here & here. The corrupt officials who divert Social Security Title IV-D funds from helping families to judicial pensions and fees for incompetent court-appoint hacks who claim to do mental health evaluations and claim to evaluate family situations (child representatives and guardian ad litums in divorce and custody cases), vilify anyone who tries to change the system and get the country to really look at mental health care, custody decisions, divorce courts, and misuse of government funds because we threaten their illegal funding stream. Read about that here.

Until the Affordable Care Act (ACA) known as “Obamacare”, patterned after “Romneycare” in Massachusetts, is in full swing and expanded to deal with mental health care and cover all Americans as a universal single  payer health care system, none of these mothers will have help and the shootings will continue. Victims also need access to mental health care.

See my suggested 15 point plan to address gun violence and gun deaths in America here: https://twitter.com/DrLindaShelton (1/2 of them are suicides and most are not mass murders but are murders by people known to the victims – 11,000 per year in the U.S.  – compared to about 35-50 in either England or Australia who have both banned and confiscated weapons after mass murders in schools).

Please consider joining the group “Newtown United” on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/NewtownUnited

The following is a MUST READ that has begun this conversation: http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/12/thinking-unthinkable.html

The following poem expresses all of our grief and sadness: http://newtown.patch.com/blog_posts/dear-santa-7cbef59a

Statement by former Representative and victim of shooting Gabby Giffords husband Kelly at her shooter’s sentencing excoriating the government and Gov. for not dealing with gun violence and mental illness: http://jezebel.com/5959149/gabby-giffords-husband-stares-down-her-shooter-gabby-and-i-are-done-thinking-about-you

Romney clueless about widespread abuse of Billions in Social Security Title IV-D and WAVA Funds destroying children

Politicians are TOTALLY ignorant of the widespread abuse of custody & order of protection laws used by corrupt courts & court-appointed attorneys (child representatives & guardian ad litems) to make false allegations against parents (mothers or fathers), get false orders of protection by wrongfully villifying parents with just hearsay and no due process, wrongfully destroy relationships between a parent a child, & then rape the estates of the family including confiscating college funds to pay court appointed attorneys as much as $400/hr or $300K/ case.

See how Romney is totally clueless and ignorant on this topic.

They also pay these court-appointed blood sucking lawyers, in this cottage industry, by federal dollars, Social Security Title IV-D funds, and dollars from VAWA (Violence Against Woman Act).  This is federal felony funding fraud to misuse these funds.  This is NOT in the best interest of the children.

Billions have been wasted in Social Security Titile IV-D and WAVA funds that are fraudulently used across the country to enrich the corrupt courts and court-appointed lawyers, while destroying families and children, the direcct opposite of what these laws were enacted to prevent.

For more information see here., here,  here. and here.  Join 400,000 now organizing to fight court corruption destroying families, elderly, and children through exploitation, lies, and federal felony funding fraud at govabuse.org.

“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it”. -Albert Einstein

Top CDC officials indicted – involved in H1N1 flu and vaccine-autism link mis-information

Money rules in America and it has now corrupted our system from stem to stern.  Now there is clear-cut evidence in the highest levels of our healthy policy makers. Big business and multi-national corporations rule America, not the people. Those of us who speak up are quashed like a bug. See details about what happened to me here and here.

Not only have the percentage of ALL income in America, for the top 20%, in personal income group, increased from 20% to 60% in the last 30 years meaning that now 80 % of the population receives only 20 % of the income, but our officials who decide our country’s policies and give our population recommendations are being increasingly shown to be greedy, morally corrupted, and unreliable. See the facts here.

Trickle down doesn’t work. As taxes for the ultra-weathy have decreased from 63% to less than 20% (considering all the loopholes), the rich are getting richer and the ranks of the poor are rapidly increasing.

The rich are getting richer off the labor of the 80% of those of us who bust our butts. The middle class is disappearing. The rich are taking possession of our property as we lose it in foreclosure; as our children, elderly, and disabled lose their rights, parents, freedom, and property through corrupt divorce and probate courts – with the government becoming their guardian; and as the wealth of the 99% crashes, which will be further diminished as the dollar’s value crashes and the stock market falls because both have been artificially bubbled just like housing stock. The present rise in stock values is an illusion.  The fundamentals are not there to sustain it. Eventually there will be a much bigger correction than we have already seen.

See the details of the charges against CDC officials here.

Our healthcare system is corrupt.  Our criminal justice system is corrupt – view numerous blog posts here. Our financial system is corrupt. Our educational system is corrupt.

Wake up America.  It is time to act.  Contact your local Occupy Wall Street affiliate.  In Chicago Contact Occupy Chicago.

Occupy Chicago – Fight Corruption

Read about corruption in Chicago here (Crook County Courts and Judges), here (general Illinois Corruption), here (Crook County Sheriff deputies), here (Chicago FBI), and here (Chicago Federal 7th Circuit and District Courts).

Write your Senators and Congressmen and demand change in the law to take “personhood” away from corporations so they DON’T have more power than the people!

Demand that the rich pay their fair share!

Demand hearings to change the family and probate court system so that BILLIONS in Title IV-D Social Security funds are used to preserve families and support children, the elderly, and  the disabled instead of prolonging divorce cases by promoting argument and falsely villifying one  parent as “dangerous”, getting fraudulent orders of protection, in order to enrich court appoint counsel and counselors, as well as the corrupt court system; to care for the elderly instead of kidnapping them, abusing them, and stealing their estates when corrupt guardians make fraudulent presentations to the courts; and to protect the disabled instead of abusing them for profit. Read about how veterans are committing suicide after losing their families and being falsely villified here.

The judicial kidnapping of your own children under the color of law is like a repeated relentless rape

– a part of you – being ripped from you and there is nothing you can do about it!!! –

Sandra Padrone, judicially gagged mother of 4 children who have been kidnapped for 1 1/2 years – separated from the mother, under false pretenses.

18 veterans killing self daily, 90% new veterans divorced within 5 yrs, more die of suicide than of war, stop gov abuse http://wp.me/po8T5-9e

Demand hearings to change the justice system so that non-violent offenders don’t get long sentences and instead get public service saving billions in tax dollars and producing true rehabilitation. Stop retaliation against whistle blowers fraudulently charged with crimes they didn’t do to cover-up corruption of public officials.

Join People United to Stop Court Abuse of Children, Disabled, and Elderly August 12, 2011

For Immediate Release

Contact:          Gwendolyn Chubb 773-377-5468

Linda Shelton – picepil@aol.com, or David Bambic – ildbambic@govabuse.org

People Unite In Protest Across the USA to Stop

Judicial Abuse of American Families

Chicago – United Standing Up for Justice to Stop Judicial Abuse is what dozens of Illinois families will gather for this week across this nation and right in front of the Circuit Court of Cook County Family Division. Thousands of children, disabled and elderly Americans have been removed from their  loved ones without factual evidence by the courts. Protective parents and children ho seek the assistance of the courts when a loved one is being abused become the victims of a billion dollar corruption ring that exists today in the court systems and is protected by those who are to serve and protect the community.
Billions of dollars are used from the Title IV D program to literally destroy families.

Wonda Guider, a mother who filed for an Order of Protection to keep her six year old daughter safe from abuse stated, “I went to the courts to help protect my child. A Guardian Ad Litem was placed by Judge Panter and the unimaginable happened, my daughter was ripped from our home. The courts GAVE HER TO THE ABUSER. I fight for Justice today and protest against the GAL’s Office for all the harm they have done to my child and we stand for all children across this nation being victimized by the court system.”

Gwendolyn Chubb, a mother who has not seen her children for over 3 years because of a FRAUDULENT ORDER signed by Judge Edward Arce who later recused himself for having prior contact with her ex-husband’s boss Commissioner Roberto Maldonado stated, “I protest today because of the excruciating and agonizing pain I must live with each day I am without my children. My children were ripped from me without cause or reason…I stand today in prayer for my children and pray that this never happens to anyone anywhere ever again.”

Many of the cases of abuse have gone to the FBI and the Department of Justice without results. Many advocates for these families believe that the very courts that were established to interpret the constitution and assure the rule of law are allowed to run the courts like a cartel that abuse the system that we the American people pay for through our tax revenue.

Dave Bambic, a father whose children have been removed from him withyout cause as te DCFS allegations of neglect or abuse were declared UNFOUNDED  said, “Judge Haracz and Child Rep David Wessel conspire to alienate me from being the primary caregiver of my children. They have told me that I will be made an example of in Judge Haracz’ court room. I stand for Justice today because XXX and XXX love their father and I pray for all children who suffer like my girls in this nation because of corruption.”

Sandra  Padron during a divorce when her son complained of being beaten in the stomach by the father until he was sick and as a pediatrician she found suggestive signs of child abuse on her baby, had her children removed from her and placed with the abuser when  she called DCFS and asked for an investigation because the investigation, which was incomplete, was declared unfounded. She has been denied unsupervised  visits for more than one hour per week with her children because the judge said this was a sign of mental illness. Sandra says, her toddler is reported to be running around the house crying “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.” Regina Scannicchio, the court appointed child representative has made no effort to thorougly investigate this case or bring these facts to the attention of the judge. She refuses even to look at the diary pages from the older children documenting the abuse.

Child Representatives & Guardian Ad Litems are court appointed and CHARGE FEES ANYWHERE FROM $400 – $1200 PER OUR. Legal fees for these attorneys are paid from funds through the Social Security Title IV D Fund. Also it is known practice that family court Judges run private referral services with therapists that they personally know and many families are bankrupted by these fees.

Therapists are to serve the best interest and welfare of the children but in many cases the children are emotionally raped and alienated from one of their
parents to benefit the corruptive practices of the “courtroom cartel”.

Salvador Contreras, who back in 2009 reported the neglect, abuse & suicidal thoughts of his daughter in the home of her mother & stepfather stated,”I went to the court system to help save my daughter but instead of helping my child Judge Katz places an ORDER OF PROTECTION AGAINST ME WITH HEARSAY FROM MY CHILD’S ABUSER. Then my worst nightmare happens my child is taken from me for 1 ½ years and we can only see her once a week presently. Her court appointed therapist Dr Beth Wilner never allows her to talk about her suicidal thoughts and we can never discuss the true problems but Dr Wilner does discuss her fees and monthly bills”

Many of these court appointed therapist are part of the corruption and abuse of innocent children and the financial ruin of their families who pay high fees for “therapy” sessions. Families who are placed in this corruptive scenario FILE BANKRUPTCY BECAUSE OF COURT ORDERED THERAPY AND LEGAL FEES. Families lose their homes and college funds.

Gloria Sykes, WHOSE  91 YEAR OLD MOTHER WAS NEVER DECLARED INCOMPETENT BUT WAS IMPRISONED IN A NURSING HOME, STRIPPED OF HER ASSETS AND PLACED UNDER GUARDIANSHIP was ripped from her care said,”I compare this court abuse of the elderly to Hitler’s concentration camps. The pain, fear and the unknown wrongful suffering is unimaginable. I rally today for justice and to stop the court and its officers from abusing our families.”

Julie Contreras, an advocate for many families and whose stepchild is being victimized by the “Court Cartel” stated, “Judges in the family courts today are the ones who determine the fate of many children. All these individuals who partake in the family court system are human and very capable of being wrong, careless, corrupt or just plain lazy. MISTAKES ARE MADE BY JUDGES AND INNOCENT CHILDREN BECOME VICTIMIZED by the very system that was created to protect
them.”

Victims and advocates will stand united to stop the abusive practices of removing a child or elderly person from the custody of the protective parent or family in the court system. At the beginning of each hour of the protest a prayer will be offered to stop the abuse of children, disabled and elderly across this nation.

Organizers of the event invite the public to join and support the families and stop the abuse.

When:            August 12, 2011

Time:            9am – 5pm

Where:           Noth Daley Center Plaza
50 W. Washington
Chicago, IL  –

and in every major city in the United States – see: http://govabuse.com  for the location of the protest site in your city

Protest child protection abuses: Send letter, join national protest Aug 12 at Daley Center

This is the letter I sent  to my U.S. senators and congressman. Please copy it, edit it for your needs and send it to your senators and representatives. Reserve the date August 12, 2011 to be at the Daley Center for a national protest about abuses of child protection agencies, family courts. and juvenile courts.  Watch for more information.

Get more info at Luke’s Army, U.S..  Protest info for August 12, 2011 can be found  here.

Sign the petition here.  My letter was sent from this link where I modified it as follows.  Either use this link to send a letter or copy my letter, modify it to personalize it and mail it yourself.  The link allows you to find your congressman’s and senator’s addresses, send the letter as an e-mail or send it as a letter which is done for you with a $9 fee.

My senators’ and congressman’s  addresses in IL and the 3rd congressional district are:

___________________________

Senator Richard Durbin
711 Hart Senate Building
Washington, DC 20510

202.224.2152  phone

202.228.0400  fax

_________________________

Senator Mark Kirk
524 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC, 20510

202.224.2854 phone
202.228.4611 fax

___________________________

Representative Daniel Lipinski
3^rd Congressional District IL
1717 Longworth HOB
Washington, DC 20515

202.225.5701 phone
866.822.5701 phone
202.225.1012 fax

_______________________________

June 25, 2011

Dear [Your Federal Senators and Representative],

Nationwide, there are State run agencies who are supposed to be protecting abused children in dangerous situations. Each State has many different titles for them. All of them are main stapled as CPS (Child Protective Services). For example, in Texas they’re known as DFPS. (Department of Family and Protective Services)

In Illinois DCFS and the family courts, whether the issue is divorce or child neglect and abuse, or orders of protection, act AGAINST the best interest of the children.  Instead of seeking re-unification or joint parenting, appropriate counseling and family support, false accusations are made against parents to force them into expensive counseling by unqualified hacks. Laws regarding Title IV money have been extremely corrupted and now are more about  profit to agencies, unqualified counselors, and corrupt child representatives, than about preserving families and acting in the best interest of children. There are huge profits in declaring a parent unfit, supervising prolonged efforts at re-unification, and then adopting out a child in DCFS custody.

Child representatives and guardians ad litem are more  concerned about extending divorce and custody proceedings, which increase their profits and their agencies profits using Title IV money, than interested in solving parental alienation syndrome, protecting kids from drug abusing parents and mental/physical abuse, or providing necessary quality mental health services.

The costs to our economy of destroying families, reducing them to poverty, increasing their reliance on public assistance is STAGGERING! Please act now. Please contact me and let me come to talk to you  with concrete suggestions as to how to solve the problems, as well as with concrete statistics!

While there is an important need to find abused children and to protect them, the current system is only finding a small percentage of those truly abused children. The rest of their statistics that guarantee a high departmental income are from families who never abused their children. Where they get this income and the sources of information will be posted after the next paragraph.

I am not calling for an abolishment of CPS. What I am petitioning for is an overhaul and restructure to bring them in line with lawful investigation practices, to maintain Constitutional Rights and proper training for Agents who never had children, and psychological evaluations to find and replace the Agents who were themselves abused as Children and see abuse in every home regardless of the situation. This is not, I repeat, not a rare occurrence. I will supply statistics to support this and how this has escalated. I will also supply the sources.

Departmental income has become more important to CPS and their offices than actually finding abused children and protecting them. Each and every time they remove a child from the home, they get paid from the Federal Government. Here they are:

1. Public Law 93-247 known as the Mondale Act of 1974.

2. Public Law 96-272 known as the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980

3. Social Security Title IV-E funds.

The ASFA- Public Law 105-89 known as American Safe Families Act of 1997 is one of the most horrific laws on the books today. While it sounds nice in the title, when you get through the legal jargon, what this means is so wrong. If you ever had a child removed from your house by CPS, even UNFOUNDED and you are innocent, they will take that child in minutes after the child is born! Babies are highly adoptable and the Federal Government pays out $6,000 to the CPS office who conducts the legal kidnapping and gets them adopted quickly without regards to the biological Mother and her family. Since she was investigated once, they do this in the “best interests of the child” as she is a “potential” abuser.

The largest targeted type of families are folks with low incomes, children on SSI and are minorities. If you even have one of those three issues, you are a target for CPS to illegally investigate you. While these things are a surefire magnet, they have been known to do illegal investigations against families if they were reported falsely with malicious intent. Example is an ex-wife wants to get even with her ex-husband and his new family, she could report them and put them through Hell.

Why are the reasons CPS Agents actually find so little true abuse?

1. Agents who never had children and don’t understand that a few toys in the corner of the room is not a hazardous mess.

2. Agents are not trained in real evidence recognition. In fact, no Agent in CPS has any training in evidence, the                       Constitution or criminal justice. They are given anywhere from 3 to 6 months of training, being taught that it is ok to   break into a Home without probable cause or exigent circumstances.

3. Agents are trained to use subjective speculation and not objective factual reporting.

4. The Agents do not get psychological evaluations. A number of Agents who were abused as a child themselves see abuse in  every home they go into, even if it’s not there.

5. Most States do not require Agents to have a degree in Social Sciences. Any degree will do, doesn’t even have to be related to the field.

6. The Agency has no checks and balances. A field Agent can lie to a judge or police officer with absolutely no proof and have it entered as factual evidence in a court of law!

7. Agents are trained to believe they are immune from the authority of the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment. They violate this in every investigation done nationwide.

Here are the statistics and sources to support these facts:

Number of Cases per 100,000 children in the United States. These numbers come from The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) in Washington.

CPS- Physical Abuse (160) Sexual Abuse (112) Neglect (410) Medical Neglect (14) Fatalities (6.4)

Parents- Physical Abuse (59) Sexual Abuse (13) Neglect (241) Medical Neglect (12) Fatalities (1.5)

As you can see, children are abused far more in care than at home. The calculated average is for every 1 abused child removed from an abusive home, there are 17 unabused children removed from loving non-offending homes nationwide.

Constitutional Violations and Court Rulings that CPS Ignores to this very day!

1. It’s unconstitutional for CPS to conduct an investigation and interview a child on private property without exigent circumstances or probable cause. – Doe et al, v. Heck et al (No. 01-3648, 2003 US App. Lexis 7144)

2. All CPS workers in the United States are subject to the 4th and 14th Amendment – Walsh v. Erie County Dept. of Job and Family Services, 3:01-cv-7588

3. Police officers and social workers are not immune for coercing or forcing entry into a person’s home without a search warrant. Calabretta v. Floyd (9th Cir. 1999)

4. The mere possibility of danger does not constitute an emergency or exigent circumstance that would justify a forced warrantless entry and a warrantless seizure of a child. Hurlman v. Rice (2nd Cir. 1991)

5. Police officer and social worker may not conduct a warrantless search or seizure in a suspected child abuse case absent exigent circumstances. Defendants must have reason to believe that life or limb is in immediate jeopardy and that the intrusion is reasonable necessary to alleviate the threat. Searches and seizures in investigation of a child neglect or child abuse case at a home are governed by the same principles as other searches and seizures at a home. Goodv. Dauphin County Social Services (3rd Cir. 1989)

6. The Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures extends beyond criminal investigations and includes conduct by social workers in the context of a child neglect/abuse investigation. Lenz v. Winburn (11th Cir. 1995)

7. Making false statements made to obtain a warrant, when the false statements were necessary to the finding of probable cause on which the warrant was based, violates the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Aponte Matos v. Toledo Davilla (1st Cir. 1998)

What can be done to change this for a better, more healthy Child Protection System?

I. Child Abuse is a Crime, not a touchy feely civil complaint and should be investigated as a crime.

II. Have the abuse allegations investigated by a Detective or Police Officer, who are trained for this as a career, whereas CPS workers are not. All investigations are joint ones with said Officers of the Law and with warrants properly issues under probable cause.

III. Re-train Agents to respect and obey the laws of the Constitution of the United States. If a family is guilty of abuse, a legal investigation will find it.

IV. Repeal the Mondale Act, Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act, Title IV-E rewards to CPS from Social Security and the American Safe Families Act. Remember, they are not what the title sounds like and has been the root core of many loving homes losing their children to a system that will abuse them.

V. Make CPS legally investigate those who sign up to be foster parents. They do not do this today, and many foster parent who want the money for fostering them are actually child abusers who never get caught!

VI. All interviews to be audio and video recorded just like it happens with the police!

VII. Hold CPS Agents and foster parents and the records keeper responsible for every child who vanishes or dies in their care for their location.

VIII. Also investigate the person or persons reporting the abuse, and if done maliciously with intent to disrupt a family, prosecute the reporter to the fullest extent of the Law regarding making false claims to Government Agencies to affect an unnecessary and costly investigation.

IX. Abuse is a Crime, guarantee the accused retain their right to face their accusers in a court of law. As the system currently is, this is not done.

X. The Children are to be tracked on a weekly basis, so no more children vanish in the system.

XI. If a disabled, mentally retarded or sick Child is put into Foster Care, the Child’s current Physician will need to provide a copy of the diagnosis and treatment, and medications, if any, will be provided as prescribed by the Physician. All appointments must be kept while in Foster Care. Any violations without a very good reason will result in the Foster Parents losing their certification for Foster Care.

XII. If a Foster Child dies while in Foster Care, there will be an Investigation by the FBI and all parties responsible for the Death of a Child will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

XIII. There will be a National Database where all known abusers are recorded and can be accessed by Law Enforcement. Everyone who is found not guilty won’t have their Convictions and Abuse Reports listed. It will be illegal to keep records of any sort on innocent individuals or families. If they are convicted in a court of law by a jury of their peers, then the report of abuse they are guilty of will be the only report listed.

Currently, none of this is done, and innocent families who are not guilty of anything are losing their Children based on the word of others where there is no burden of proof for Prosecution, for the sake of getting Federal Funds for tens of thousands of dollars. The few truly abused children are ending up in a system where they are worse off than where they came from, even to the extent of being killed. Also, the innocent children who are never abused are also killed.

Injustice against one American is injustice against all Americans. Help us put the Justice back into Child Protective Services and get them focused on finding and saving abused children. It’s time we removed them from the profitable business of tearing loving non-offending families apart.

DCFS in IL is not a family protection agency. It is a family destruction agency for profit with corrupt and incompetent  courts backing them up. We need TOTAL TRANSPARENCY and supervision of the courts and agencies. First however, we need to have an intense investigation to follow the money and name the profiteers!

MOST importantly we need rapid repeal of the above laws that give the corrupt state and agency abusers of children huge profits, reducing the families to poverty.

Sincerely,

Dr. Linda Shelton
9905 S Kilbourn Ave
Oak Lawn, IL 60453-3539