I’ve been to Family Court a few times over the years, but it was never a place where I felt at home.  Everything about it felt wrong, from the essential absence of anything remotely resembling rights, to the way everyone in the room talked down to children as if they existed so every adult in the room could lecture them.  The one aspect of Family Court that I never gave much thought was that the courtrooms were closed.

Closed courtrooms in criminal court are bad, where the  constitutional right to a public trial is violated by the secret happenings behind closed doors.  The only time they were allowed to throw everybody out and close the courtroom was when the undercover took the stand, and then only when he remained active and could articulate a threat, either to him or his assignment.  When the prosecutor asked that the courtroom be closed, we fought it. No star chamber would be allowed without a fight.

Somehow, this never translated to Family Court. I never gave it any thought, as it seemed appropriate when the subject was children that their identities not be made public, that their future not be burned for something that happened when they thought like a child.  I was wrong.

In an investigation in the New York Times, a reporter tried to enter Family Court courtrooms.  Apparently, the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals at the time, Judith Kaye, had ordered that they be open to the public.

New York State’s Family Courts were ordered to be opened to the public with much fanfare in 1997, supposedly allowing anyone to witness the cases of domestic violence, foster care and child neglect that inch through by the hundreds of thousands every year. But now, 14 years later, the Family Courts remain essentially, almost defiantly, closed to the general public.

What’s striking about this that we’re talking about courtrooms, the physical situs of law and people, where the groundlings are held accountable for what the law, as manifested by robed judges sitting on elevated benches.  This is the one place, more so than any other place, where adherence to the rule of law should be honored.  And it was just completely, inexplicably, ignored.

Some courtrooms were locked, and many were marked with “stop” and “do not enter” signs. Court officers stationed at courtroom doors repeatedly barred a visitor, sometimes with sarcasm or ridicule, frequently demanding to know who he was and what he was doing. Armed court officers at times appeared so rattled by a visitor’s efforts to enter courtrooms that, in several instances, a group of them nervously confronted the visitor, their holsters in easy reach.

On the fifth floor of Family Court in Downtown Brooklyn, where people waited in bleak assembly areas for their cases to be called, an officer was asked whether a member of the public could attend — as is permitted in other New York courts. “Not allowed, not in Family Court,” he said flatly. Outside Judge Susan Larabee’s courtroom in Manhattan Family Court, an officer flashed his badge and said disdainfully, “You don’t just walk in.” In Staten Island Family Court, three officers challenged a visitor even as they stood beneath a sign that took official note of the 1997 rule:

“The court is open to the public.”

That I took for granted that these courtrooms were special, somehow distinct from all other courtrooms, reminds me of how easy it is to mindlessly adopt the norm, the culture, without questioning whether it’s proper and right.  Without giving it a second thought, I would have said that Family Court isn’t open to the public, because that’s how it’s always been done. 

I suspect that the court officers, blocking doorways and questioning the reporter who was trying to gain entry to a place he had every right in the world to be, similarly never thought there was any chance they were wrong.  That’s how Family Court was always run, and anyone who suggested otherwise was either insane or a moron.  Turns out they were the fools. Just like me.

Imagine if the reporter refused to identify himself, show his press pass, push his way into the courtroom, through the armed officer who told him he couldn’t go in.  It would have gotten ugly, and there would be blood on the tracks.  The court officers wouldn’t have had the slightest reservation stopping the reporter, physically, to keep him out of the courtroom.  And the reporter, well aware of his right to be inside, would have still felt the pain of cuffs being tightened around his wrists.

Judge Kaye went her order to the judges who administer the courthouse, and no doubt they sent the memo around to all the chambers and courtrooms in their building.  If they read it, they forgot.  Then they went back to doing what they always do, keeping people out of the room because that’s what they do in Family Court.  This article is quite embarrassing to judges, whose lectures on the law are repeated a hundred times a day to recalcitrant kids with faces showing their disdain for authority, or their fear and humiliation when they recognize that their joke went too far.

And now those judges look like they are clueless. Or just as disdainful as the children they lecture. 

On Thursday, Edwina G. Richardson-Mendelson, the administrative judge of the New York City Family Courts, was told of the many blocked attempts to enter courtrooms. She said she was troubled to hear that courts around the city had not been open and said she planned a review. It was an opinion echoed by several other court officials apprised of the reporter’s efforts.

“We don’t have policies or rules for them to be ignored,” Judge Richardson-Mendelson said. “We’re a court of law, and law matters.”

Troubled?  You bet, but nothing close to an explanation for how this happened.  And how this happened under her watch.  And how this happened in a building filled with judges, all of whom are supposed to not only know the law, but adhere to it.

Courtrooms can still be closed when a judge makes an individualized finding that it’s needed, but there was no reason to even consider need when the rule was that nobody was allowed to enter a courtroom in Family Court.  And that means that for all these years, nobody really knew what happened behind those closed doors.  But we do know, now at least, that things happening behind closed doors to children in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania were a travesty, and went on until maybe 6500 children were lost.

The doors of courtrooms, all courtrooms, should be open, as should the minds of all lawyers who may take the culture of closure for granted.  I’ve learned my lesson.