New Clinics for Kids in Trouble

It is not the sort of clientele that is welcomed at the paneled doors of a typical corporate law firm. It includes runaways, drifters, glue sniffers, battered children and subteen prostitutes, many rejected by their parents and in trouble with the law. Until recently, they had few legal rights and not many more attorneys interested in protecting them.

Now, as courts and legislatures gradually define and expand children's rights, many young lawyers are experimenting with clinics that provide legal services for kids. They are using the broadened rights to challenge traditional methods of dealing with problem youths.

One of the more successful clinics, San Francisco's Legal Services for Children, was opened 18 months ago by Carole Brill, 28, an attractive, intense attorney with a background in prisoner rights law. Operating with local foundation financing out of a refurbished downtown factory building, the clinic's three attorneys and three paralegals can devote personal attention to individual problems that overburdened legal-aid attorneys and probation officers do not have time for. Since most of its clients are involved in juvenile court, the legal goal often boils down to finding an alternative to reform school, and persuading the judge to go along with it. One recent example: a boy of twelve, caught mugging an elderly man, was placed successfully at a part-time job in an old folks' home instead of being sent to a correctional camp. Says Brill: "We want to demonstrate that the system is not doing the job too well. We want lo shou them how it can be done beuci "

Although a sign in their clinic reads

HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR CHILD TODAY?, Brill and her colleagues occasionally find themselves acting as advocates for children against their own parents. One lawyer represented a six-year-old boy who had been neglected by his mother; though the court ruled that the parent could keep the child, a program of supervision was set up to discourage future mistreatment. Occasionally there are heartening successes: a youth injured while chasing a purse snatcher turned out to be a former purse snatcher himself, rehabilitated through clinic-inspired counseling and work programs.

For the first half of the century, juvenile courts were considered to be benevolent centers concerned with the welfare of children, who thus did not require formal legal safeguards. But practice fell short of the ideal. In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed juvenile justice procedures through In re Gault, a case involving an Arizona boy abruptly jailed after making an obscene telephone call. The court decided that Gault and other young defendants should have many due-process rights available previously only to adults. Among them were the rights to consult an attorney and to cross-examine witnesses.

Side Questions. In Kremens v. Bartley, a class action expected to be decided this spring, lawyers are asking the court to require due-process protections before a child can be committed to a mental institution by his parents. The case was brought on behalf of five minors who were placed by their parents in a Pennsylvania mental institution for truancy, drug use, sexual misbehavior and other reasons. Their attorney insisted that the children should not have been committed simply on the say so of their parents, and demanded various precommitment safeguards, including a hearing. But state officials worry that such procedures could deprive parents of the right to supervise the upbringing of their own children. The case raises bewildering side questions: When does a child have the right to challenge his parents? At what age? Who should represent the child?

Court procedural battles are only a part of the broader questions of basic fairness to children and their futures. Says Marian Wright Edelman, head of the Children's Defense Fund, a foundation-supported advocacy group: "If no resources are provided to assist children, the new rights do them no good." She argues that "the juvenile justice system has become an uncaring machine. It desperately needs more money, more people and more thought so that the long-term needs of young people can be paramount again." Experiments like the San Francisco clinic are effective challenges to indifference,.she concludes: "I hope there will soon be Carole Brills in every city in the country."

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