A California appeals court issued a tentative ruling this week indicating that it is prepared to overturn a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge's decision to open juvenile dependency court hearings to the press.
For years, advocates of greater transparency in the child welfare system have argued that allowing more access to dependency courts would improve the public's sense of how that system works when government workers remove children from their homes and place them in foster care.
In January, Michael Nash, the presiding judge of Los Angeles County Juvenile Court, issued a decree that dependency hearings, which had been presumptively closed, were now presumptively open to the press.
But the appeals court's tentative ruling, issued Wednesday, said Nash's order violated state law.
"There may be merit in effecting the reforms provided in the blanket order, but it is not the role of the judiciary to provide a more open system," said a panel of judges on California's 2nd District Court of Appeal.
"It is for the Legislature, not the courts, to effect changes to the system it has put in place," the judges said.
A final decision will be made following oral arguments on Dec. 19, but the tentative ruling said that California law requires that judges apply their discretion on a case-by-case basis when a reporter attempts to observe a hearing.
Nash's ruling — which allowed reporters to be barred only if lawyers showed that their presence would harm a child's best interest — also placed an unfair burden on the child and the child's attorney to monitor the courtroom for journalists, the appellate court said.
Nash's order was challenged in the appeals court by a 15-year-old girl after a judge granted The Times access to a hearing to decide whether she should be placed in foster care following an assault by her stepfather.
The Times typically does not report identifying details about victims of child abuse, but lawyers for the girl argued that there was still risk that she would be harmed by having information about her situation reported in the newspaper.
"We fully understood the goal behind the order [from Nash] but had hoped for some limited protection for our clients," said Leslie Starr Heimov, director of the Children's Law Center, the court-appointed law firm representing the girl.
The Times and the Children's Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law filed briefs asking the appeals court to keep the hearings open.
The institute's director, Robert Fellmeth, said, "We fully agree that there are many instances where it's appropriate to have confidentiality and protect vulnerable children from exposure. Nash's order allowed that, liberally."
"What we oppose," he said, "is the draconian cloak of secrecy that conceals this profound exercise in state parenting."
If the appeals court makes a final decision to overturn Nash's order, Fellmeth said, his organization would lobby for a change in the law.
Similar efforts to open the courts advanced in Sacramento in recent years but were eventually scuttled by social worker unions and legal organizations that supported a higher level of privacy for abused and neglected children.
Dependency courts in New York, Minnesota and other jurisdictions across the country have already opened their doors to news media.
garrett.therolf@latimes.com
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