Earlier this week, I told you that Wanda Larson, the social services child protection supervisor from Union County, North Carolina--just south of my home in Charlotte--got an outrageously light "sentence" after pleading guilty to abusing several kids under her care. Among them was an 11-year-old boy who was chained to the porch in cold weather with a dead chicken around his neck. Larson was "sentenced" to 17 months in prison and five years' probation. If that isn't outrageous enough, with credit for time served while awaiting trial for almost two years, she is due to go home as early as Wednesday.
That doesn't sit well with a lot of people around here. Indeed, Jeremy Bess, a member of the board of the Justice for All Coalition, a child advocacy group in the area, told WCNC-TV in Charlotte that his group is openly hoping for federal intervention.
The Union County District Attorney's office says it didn't send the case to trial for the victim's sake, so he wouldn't have to relive the abuse.
But Bess believes not going to trial is even worse, and now he hopes federal authorities will step in.
"You had a chance to protect the children and you did not do it. Now's the time to give them justice, not to protect them. You can't protect them," he said.
Believe it or not, there actually may be something to this. One of the reasons people are outraged that Larson got so little jail time is that prosecutors seemed to overlook the appalling conditions in which those kids lived. When sheriff's deputies rescued the kids, they found feces on the floor of Larson's house, and no running water. Indeed, the smell was so awful that it still lingered two days later.
Prosecutors believe that Larson's boyfriend, Dorian Harper, was the primary abuser, and that Larson knew about the abuse and did nothing. Larson admitted as much; one of the charges to which she pleaded was willful dereliction of her duties as a child-protection worker. But you can't blame the squalor in which those kids had to live solely on Harper. Apparently Bess thinks that since Larson was a DSS worker, allowing such conditions to exist amounted to a violation of the kids' civil rights by a state government employee. This seems to be a question worth asking. If a child protection worker knows or has reason to know about this kind of abuse and willfully ignores it--or worse, actively contributes to it--does that rise to the level of a civil rights violation?
I'm reminded of the tragic case of Jeremiah Oliver, the Massachusetts toddler who disappeared in September 2013. However, nobody knew about it until December. It turns out that the social worker assigned to Jeremiah's case received a blizzard of phone calls expressing concern for Jeremiah, but nothing was done. Jeremiah's remains were finally discovered last April.
One thing gives me pause about going this route. First, will it address the larger systemic dysfunction present in so many child protection agencies? All too often, these agencies are chronically understaffed, and the case workers are severely underpaid. If you do make a federal case out of this, you'd have to have pretty ironclad proof that the negligence was willful, and not just a case of being overloaded. Still, it's an idea worth considering.