Legal News

Nebraska Tweaks Safe-Haven Law; What Happens to Those Who Used It?

By Ashby Jones

This past Friday, the governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, signed into law a change to the state’s so-called “Safe Haven Law.” As originally enacted, on July 18, the law allowed parents to drop off a child in the care of a hospital. While the original law provided no age limit for the children, Friday’s change capped the age at 30 days.

The law’s change put the Cornhusker State more in line with that of the other 49 states, all of which already had Safe Haven laws on the books. But what now happens to the nearly three dozen children — most of them teenagers — who were abandoned at Nebraska hospitals between July 18 and Friday?

In a page-one story over the weekend, the WSJ’s Elizabeth Bernstein and Dionne Searcey raised the question. The answer, for now, doesn’t really exist. The courts are still deciding what to do with the children relinquished under the original law. Many have histories of severe psychiatric or behavioral problems. Click here for a USA Today story on the law’s unintended consequences, from September.

One thing made painfully clear by the story, however: Many parents were using the Safe Haven law only as a last-case scenario, after exhausting every other avenue to help their deeply troubled children.

“The reality is that these parents are coming to get services because there is nowhere else to go,” says Darcy Gruttadaro, director of the Child and Adolescent Action Center at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an education, support and advocacy group.

That said, the state maintained that Nebraska provides adequate mental-health and social-service resources for children. “The role of the state’s child-welfare system is to protect children who are fundamentally unsafe,” Todd Landry, director of the state division, said in testimony this week as the Nebraska Legislature met in a special session on lowering the age limit in the law. For children who are otherwise safe, he said “it is not the role of government to intervene” in families’ lives.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 24, 2008 (boomark / email).