My colleague Ben Garber, PhD sent this fascinating article about the misuse of expert testimony, from ProPublica:

Diane Baird had spent four decades evaluating the relationships of poor families with their children. But last May, in a downtown Denver conference room, with lawyers surrounding her and a court reporter transcribing, she was the one under the microscope.

Baird, a social worker and professional expert witness, has routinely advocated in juvenile court cases across Colorado that foster children be adopted by or remain in the custody of their foster parents rather than being reunified with their typically lower-income birth parents or other family members.

In the conference room, Baird was questioned for nine hours by a lawyer representing a birth family in a case out of rural Huerfano County, according to a recently released transcript of the deposition obtained by ProPublica.

Was Baird’s method for evaluating these foster and birth families empirically tested? No, Baird answered: Her method is unpublished and unstandardized, and has remained “pretty much unchanged” since the 1980s. It doesn’t have those “standard validity and reliability things,” she admitted. “It’s not a scientific instrument.”

Who hired and was paying her in the case that she was being deposed about? The foster parents, she answered. They wanted to adopt, she said, and had heard about her from other foster parents.

Had she considered or was she even aware of the cultural background of the birth family and child whom she was recommending permanently separating? (The case involved a baby girl of multiracial heritage.) Baird answered that babies have “never possessed” a cultural identity, and therefore are “not losing anything,” at their age, by being adopted. Although when such children grow up, she acknowledged, they might say to their now-adoptive parents, “Oh, I didn’t know we were related to the, you know, Pima tribe in northern California, or whatever the circumstances are.”

The Pima tribe is located in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

It went on and on like this. Baird acknowledged that her entire basis for recommending that the foster parents keep the baby girl was a single less-than-two-hour observation and interview that she’d conducted with them — her clients. She’d never met the baby girl’s biological grandmother, whom the county child services department had been actively planning for the girl to be placed with, according to internal department emails. Nor had she even read any case documents.

A fundamental goal of foster care, under federal law, is for it to be temporary: to reunify children with their birth parents if it is safe to do so or, second best, to place them with other kin. Extensive social science research has found that kids who grow up with their own families experience less long-term separation trauma, fewer mental health and behavioral problems as adolescents and more of an ultimate sense of belonging to their culture of origin.

But a ProPublica investigation co-published with The New Yorker in October revealed that there is a growing national trend of foster parents undermining the foster system’s premise by “intervening” in family court cases as a way to adopt children. As intervenors, they can file motions and call witnesses to argue that they’ve become too attached to a child for the child to be reunited with their birth family, even if officials have identified a biological family member who is suitable for a safe placement.

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