NEW YORK CITY ACS DEFENSE LAWYER

  Council Votes to Hold ACS More Accountable and Better Help Families Dealing with the Agency October 21, 2021 The Council will also vote to help newsstand operators survive City Hall, NY  – Removing a child from his or her home is a last resort but too often the Administration for Children’s Services relies on emergency removals, which allow the agency to remove a child without going through family court. The Council is voting on a legislative package designed to better report on these emergency removals, better inform parents of their rights and hold the agency more accountable. The first bill requires ACS to provide parents and/or caretakers with written information about their right to request a fair hearing to challenge a report made against them during an ACS child protective investigation. The Council will also vote on a bill that requires ACS to report on the total number of emergency removals of children each quarter, providing information disaggregated by race, com...

  Doctors never examined 4-year-old Jayce Eubanks’s cuts and bruises. Child welfare workers did not alert the police to 7-year-old Julissia Batties’s black eye. Investigators closed Aisyn Emerson-Gonzalez’s case despite his swollen eye and a lump on his head. All three children were beaten to death at home in the closing weeks of this summer, Their deaths were among a string of fatalities involving children who were the subject of warnings to child welfare authorities or the police in New York City. While the number of homicides of children in the city this year is close to that of recent years, the series of killings has exposed the holes in a multiagency safety net, from social workers to detectives, where a wrong decision could mean the death of a child. In recent weeks, city officials have examined how investigators skipped steps, were slow to follow up or might have closed an abuse case too soon. Several children died even after their cases had been escalated to the city’s “In...