A Visit from the CAS

This is a war story—doing battle with the complicated world we have created for ourselves. I was acting for a young man, and at our last court appearance, his mother told a tale on him while we were waiting in the lobby.

My client was 18 or 19 at the time. There was something odd about him. Something psychological. He was competent to give instructions. I had no concerns about coherence or lucidity or comprehension. Still. In the race of life he was not the swiftest. But there was something more than that. He had longish brown hair that hung a little over the eyes and gave an impression of detachment, as if he were emotionally unhooked from events swirling around him. That made him a little unpredictable. His girlfriend had alleged that he was violent. I could understand how a judge might look at him and find the allegations credible. And so she had gotten sole custody of their baby along with a restraining order.

One day the girlfriend called in a panic. The social worker from the Children’s Aid Society had just phoned to say that the woman would be over for an inspection. Things were a mess. She didn’t know where to start. If things didn’t get in order, they might take away the baby. But she couldn’t do it by herself.

It seems the girlfriend was a teency bit hooked on crack cocaine.

Our faithful hero rushed over to the apartment and found the mother of his baby sitting in the middle of the floor stoned out of her gourd. All around her were candy wrappers and beer bottles and old pizza boxes, garbage all around her, and the baby crawling in the middle of it. First, he took up the baby and gave her a bath since she hadn’t had her diaper changed in days. Then he fed her and put her down in the crib. Then he went to work on the garbage problem. He used a snow shovel and ploughed everything into big green garbage bags, and mopped down the floor. Finally, he set to work on his girlfriend. He forced her into the shower, hosed her down and threw out her clothes. While she washed up, he tidied the bedroom and washed dishes and wiped down the kitchen table. The girlfriend came out of the bedroom wearing fresh clothes, hair dried and with a little bit of makeup on.

There was a job well done! And just in time, too, because the social worker was due any minute now. Just a sec’. The girlfriend picked up the phone and dialed 911.

The police arrived and hauled away our poor hero for violating his restraining order.

The social worker from the CAS arrived and found everything in order. Immaculate. Wonderful. Nice girl. Cute baby, too.

But there’s more …

The woman’s story must have taken her back to a time when she was her son’s age—young, newly married, with a young baby to care for. Her husband beat her for the slightest reason.

Sometimes misery compounds itself. The baby died, probably because of SIDS. The woman was beside herself with grief. And the husband was beside himself with rage. He forced the woman into the crib with the dead baby and he bound her hand and foot to the rails. He left her there with the dead baby for 3 days.

When she told me this, I had no words. I could barely look at her. I felt awkward. I felt numb. I felt angry.

Lawyers are the butt of many jokes. If there are such lawyers, I haven”t met them. “The first thing we do, let”s kill all the lawyers” from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, is usually misquoted to support a generalized distaste for the profession and its inscrutable ethic. Yet it is as often to lawyers as to clergy that such confidences are made. There are moments when the boundaries of the solicitor/client relationship expand to encompass the simple fact that we are all fellow travelers on a hard path, and sometimes we need to reach out for help, and at other times we need to reach out to offer help.