Washington Post: How an Arizona couple’s innocent bath-time photos of their kids set off a 10-year legal saga
Lisa and A.J. Demaree’s decade-long legal ordeal started with, by all accounts, an utterly innocent family moment.
In 2008, the couple took their three daughters, then ages 5, 4 and 1½, on a vacation to San Diego. They snapped more than 100 photos during the trip, like parents do, including several of the girls playing together during bath time. When they returned to their home in Peoria, Ariz., they dropped the camera’s memory stick off at a Walmart for developing.
Within a day, a police detective came knocking.
A Walmart employee had flagged the bath-time photos as pornographic, the detective told the parents. One showed the girls wrapped in towels with their arms around each other; another showed their exposed bottoms.
The Demarees said they were harmless shots of the children goofing around, no different than what you’d expect to find in any family scrapbook. But police and social workers launched a full-blown sex abuse investigation, raiding the couple’s home and putting the girls in protective custody for a month while they interviewed dozens of family members and friends about whether the Demarees were child sex offenders.
When authorities declined to bring charges — judges who reviewed the pictures found they were, in fact, harmless family photos — the couple sued two Child Protective Services employees, among others, alleging constitutional violations.
On Tuesday, after a series of defeats in the case, a federal appeals court affirmed what the Demarees have argued all along: that their children were taken from them for no good reason.
“The social workers did not have reasonable cause to believe the children were at risk of serious bodily harm or molestation,” a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit wrote. “Therefore, viewing the record most favorably to the Demarees, the defendants acted unconstitutionally in taking the three children away from home without judicial authorization.”
The decision, which came nearly 10 years after the parents’ initial encounter with police, revived the case against the two social workers after a lower court dismissed it in 2014. That court ruled that the social workers, as employees of the Arizona government, were entitled to “qualified immunity,” meaning they were protected from liability in lawsuits arising from their professional duties.
But the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit panel disagreed, ruling in a 47-page opinion that the social workers presented no evidence that the children were in danger of being abused.
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That video explains it all. Courts, judges, and lawyers are all bound up with RULES, rules, AND MORE RULES until nobody can figure the way out. It’s like to trying to disentangle a rat’s nest in your flyfishing line. The way to substantive justice is often VERY CLEAR, as in this case. But look at all this folderol to arrive at it! All that’s necessary is just a modicum of common sense. Why can’t the legal system see that!?
“The panel held that the social workers were not entitled to qualified immunity. Viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, the social workers did not have reasonable cause to believe the children were at risk of serious bodily harm or molestation when they removed the children from their home without judicial authorization.”
http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2018/01/23/14-16207.pdf
Also, here is the YouTube video of the oral argument (in case you, or anyone else, might be interested):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0HxJPD0kvU
thanks for this
yes, thank you! i was interested and watched it. I recommended it for it’s comical value alone. It seems they were having microphone issues… lol.
“Qualified Immunity” is nothing more than acceptance of officials’ ability to engage in a little absolute power to derail, disrupt, and bring chaos and pain into otherwise innocent lives. Be mindful what Lord Acton said about “absolute power” in the middle of the 19th century. “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” As a victim of it myself, I can say the phrase goes double for those accused of any sort of sex offense. A sex offender is guilty until proven innocent. And for THAT to happen, his accusers MUST be proved the Anti-Christ.
yes, thanks! I find oral arguments in these cases fascinating. Plus, I didn’t know it was going to be funny…. the mic issues had me rolling.
In my situation, years ago, the worst people we dealt with were the SOCIAL WORKERS. They seem to have to work hard to justify their jobs.
Our legal system is truly effed when it requires a 47 page court opinion to determine it’s ok to have innocent, non prurient photos of our children without the state seizing the children. Thankfully Florida has written this into statute. What parent doesn’t have some picture in a family album somewhere of their little children goofing off in the tub?
Perfect example of how ignorant the general public is. Social workers,Walmart employees , police,they don’t know what pornography is they don’t know what child endangerment is and want to be vigilantes.is it impossible for all these stupid people to wake up. Just think of all the money it cost this family plus trauma to the kids that could have been spent to raise them
Light them up, Demarees! The so-called child protection Nazis need a knock down.