Angela Jean Williams flips open two wallet-sized, plastic-covered photo albums to show off snapshots of her son—6 pounds, 7 ounces, 21 inches, with blue eyes and brown hair—in his plastic hospital bassinet.
The minute the ultrasound revealed that he was a boy, she’d decided to name him after Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh. In anticipation of the birth, she bought stuffed Tiggers for the nursery, a room the young boy would see in person only recently.
His mother meets me in the Farmington, Mo., office of Gary Matheny, her new court-appointed attorney. A short, sturdy woman with long, wavy brown hair and expressive brown eyes, she quietly retells the story of her past four years, sticking mainly to facts and giving no hint of the psychiatric condition that prompted both a physician and a judge to pronounce her an unfit parent.
Williams and Matheny are about to enter what they hope will be the final round of a landmark Missouri case that pits the rights of parents with disabilities against the power of courts to come between them and their children. Matheny reminds his client that she is under no obligation to answer a journalist’s questions, but she does not hesitate. The more people who know her story, she figures, the better her chance of reclaiming the son who was taken from her when he was three days old.
Williams sensed something amiss when nurses whisked Christopher out of the Barnes-Jewish Hospital delivery room instead of laying him in her waiting arms right away. He’d been born with a cleft palate and micrognathia, a small lower jaw that would require him to be fed with special nipples and bottles.
She admits that she was a little shaken when she learned about his condition, no longer so confident of her ability to care for him. Her marriage had already begun to crumble when she found out she was pregnant; she and her husband had agreed to divorce, and he intended to sign away his parental rights. She could handle it alone, she promised herself.
Because she’d had a Caesarean section, she stayed in the hospital for three days. No one asked questions or raised concerns. “The whole thing didn’t happen until an hour before I was leaving the hospital,” she says. “I had a car seat and everything. I was already discharged when they said, ‘Sorry, he’s not leaving.’ I was very confused and angry.”
Later, Williams learned the details: A Barnes neonatologist had hotlined the Children’s Division of the Missouri Department of Social Services to report a risk of neglect, saying that Christopher required careful feeding and constant care and would need regular medical follow-ups. According to court records, he reported that “Angela did not follow through with feedings and constant care that was needed, and she has a significant clinical psychiatric diagnosis which impairs the mother’s ability to take care of Christopher.”
Williams says she was given instruction about feeding Christopher after the delivery. “I was never corrected on feeding him,” she says. “I was not aware that I wasn’t doing it right.” The psychiatric condition was bipolar disorder; she had been diagnosed at 16. During her pregnancy, her medication had been changed to a monthly injection.
Missouri is one of 37 states that allow termination of parental rights for reasons of mental illness. After a hotline call, standard procedure begins: The division assigns a social worker to investigate, and based largely on that worker’s report, a juvenile court judge may consign the child to foster care. Which is exactly what Sandra Martinez, juvenile court judge in the 24th Judicial Circuit in Farmington, did with Christopher.
Martinez ordered Williams to receive mental-health counseling and take parenting classes if she wanted Christopher back. She allowed Williams to visit with her baby for one hour every week, supervised; an in-home service agency would provide training in parenting and child development. Within the first two weeks, however, a new problem arose: Williams called the agency to say she would have to miss one of the training sessions, since she was going to help her estranged husband move out of town. Williams thought she’d made the right choice, saying that the social worker assigned to her case had urged her to “get rid of him.” But as a penalty for missing the session, the division canceled the services altogether.
The court appointed Geoffrey L. Pratte, a long-time family lawyer in Farmington, as Williams’ attorney, and they met right after this decision. “From that time on, it seemed she couldn’t do anything right for the Children’s Division,” Pratte says. “They were always giving a negative spin to anything they could,” repeating in report after report “every negative thing that had ever been said” about her.
As for Pratte, he found his estimation of Williams growing. She had seemed unsettled and defensive when they first met, but she quickly came to trust him. When he learned that with the stress of the divorce and the loss of Christopher, she’d stopped receiving the injections that controlled her bipolar disorder, he talked to her like the proverbial Dutch uncle, and she resumed the injections immediately. He says the change in her amazed him—yet the Children’s Division took no notice of what he saw as her stabilized health and increasing maturity. “It seemed like we were banging our heads against the wall.”
In their required periodic appearances before Martinez, Pratte says he pleaded in vain for a change of venue for Williams’ supervised one-hour visits with Christopher—to a park, to a McDonald’s, to Williams’ place, anywhere but the bare-bones room at the Children’s Division. Christopher needed to be held constantly, and mild cerebral palsy had left Williams’ left side weaker than the right. “They didn’t have a bassinet, they didn’t have a baby swing, they didn’t even have a chair with an arm on it,” Pratte says. As Christopher grew, he became eager to play and balked at being confined to the room.
Because the case involves a minor child, the Children’s Division’s reports of those visits are sealed. But when the judge decided the case in February 2006, she wrote that Williams had failed to develop “significant emotional ties” with her son.
Martinez acknowledged that Williams had complied with her agreements to take classes and get counseling, visited Christopher faithfully, brought him Christmas and birthday gifts, and neither abused him nor took drugs. But Martinez pronounced her “unfit to be a party to the parent and child relationship,” noting that Williams had made several suicide attempts as a teenager and that she had lapsed from taking her medicine for her bipolar condition. She also wrote, “Ms. Williams continues to have relations with someone she has admitted she knew had a substantiated sexual abuse report.”
(Pratte says the report was not substantiated; the report was made during the man’s divorce proceedings, and he was never charged. He also notes that the doctor’s report Martinez offered as evidence of Williams’ mental incapacity was more than 2½ years old at the time.)
Martinez terminated Williams’ rights to Christopher, putting him up for adoption at age 2½.
Martinez’s decision was consistent with the national Adoption and Safe Families Act, put on the books in 1997 in reaction to an 85 percent increase over the previous decade—to a total of 500,000 nationwide—in the number of U.S. children in foster care. The measure requires states, after exhausting reasonable efforts to return foster children to their biological parents, to begin proceedings to terminate the rights of birth parents whose children have been in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months. Angela and Christopher Williams clearly bumped up against that time limit, but whether the state had made reasonable efforts on their behalf—and whether the judge had sufficient current information to make the call—was open to question.
Martinez’s judicial circuit (made up of St. Francois, Ste. Genevieve, Madison and Washington counties) contains slightly less than 2 percent of Missouri’s population, yet according to state Supreme Court statistics, her court accounted for 4.5 percent of the state’s parental terminations in 2006.
“It’s no bias particular to this case,” says Matheny. “I think it’s just her philosophy. She believes in the juvenile justice system, where a lot of us private practitioners are suspicious of it.”
Martinez, elected to her second six-year term on the bench last November, did not respond to requests for comment.
Christopher stayed in foster care, with his mother barred from seeing him, while Pratte appealed Martinez’s decision. In September 2006, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Eastern District, citing a procedural technicality and stating the larger importance of the case, passed it up to the Missouri Supreme Court. In his brief for the high court, Pratte allowed that Williams was an unruly teenager, in foster care herself from time to time. He conceded that she was in a relationship with a man accused of child abuse, but pointed out that such accusations are all too common in acrimonious divorce cases and reiterated that the man was never charged. (Williams has said in court that if the judge asks her to stop seeing the friend whose accusation of abuse caused such concern, she will do so.)
Pratte also took Martinez to task for basing her judgment on a psychological evaluation of Williams that was more than two years out-of-date and a “highly prejudicial” report on her from her social worker, who was only one month out of college and new to her job when she got the Williams case.
On the way to the Supreme Court, Williams acquired two high-profile allies: the American Civil Liberties Union for Eastern Missouri and the Washington, D.C.–based Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. Together, the two advocacy organizations filed a brief for the Missouri Supreme Court, describing Williams’ social worker as a “novice” and a “neophyte,” warning of a pervasive societal bias against mentally ill parents and noting the “paucity” of competent evidence against Williams.
Jennifer Mathis, deputy legal director of the Bazelon Center, is the attorney who signed the amicus brief. She’s been practicing disability-rights law for a dozen years, and she’s seen similar terminations of parental rights “happen without good reason, over and over again.” Bazelon took Williams’ case because the facts were clear, she adds: “I saw nothing there that they could rely on to justify what they’d done.”
The high court heard the case last December. A month later, its judges unanimously overturned Martinez’s decision and sent the case back to her. Now the outcome would hinge on what happened next; in other words, whether Williams would bond with her child and prove herself capable of caring for him.
It’s not easy for a judge to entrust a child to a woman she suspects of irresponsibility, incapacity or inconsistency. Nor is it easy for a child to decide his real mother is a woman he sees once a week for two hours while a stranger takes notes. Williams’ case was the most complex parental-rights case Pratte had ever handled, and when he retired, he reluctantly turned the Williams case files over to Matheny without the closure he’d hoped for.
“I think of Angela quite often,” Pratte says when I call him. I tell him that she is seeing Christopher again, and the court is allowing them to visit away from the Children’s Division, under the supervision of a special counselor who is working to reunite them and encouraging him to call her “mommy Angela.”
Williams offers me a new picture of the two of them at one of these meetings, she with her hair swept up under a cowboy hat, he a skinny 4-year-old preschooler in a sleeveless red athletic shirt, his round doe eyes dead ringers for her own. Their first couple of visits went well, she says. “I told him, ‘I love you,’ and he said, ‘I love you too.’” Though he hasn’t always been so responsive to her, she believes they’re making “remarkable progress considering the time he’s been away from me.”
She lives alone, and although she holds an associate’s degree in paralegal studies from St. Louis Community College, she’s not working at the moment; she schedules her week around a series of court-mandated therapy and social-worker appointments. She says she hasn’t missed an injection since she resumed them four years ago, and she hasn’t needed to go to the hospital since she began the injections five years ago.
Christopher no longer needs special feeding, but his condition requires continuing medical care and speech therapy. “Sometimes he’s a little difficult to understand when he gets excited,” Williams says, “but that will improve as they improve his palate and he continues speech therapy.”
Matheny says his strategy is to bring Martinez around to enough of “a level of comfort” with Williams that she will gradually allow her longer and longer visits with Christopher and eventually give her full-time custody. “Angela may not be as optimistic as I am,” he says. “It’s not moving as rapidly as she’d like. But the judge is slowly opening the door.”
Matheny is patient for a reason: He doesn’t want a premature decision. The case hinges on Williams’ bonding with her son, and Christopher has already bonded, over the past four years, with foster parents Matheny thinks want to adopt him. “They’ve been passively cooperative,” he says. “They are jumping through the hoops because they have to, but with very little enthusiasm.”
The foster parents are not named in the record, and Matheny and Williams declined to provide their names.
In July the court increased Williams’ weekly hour-long supervised visit with Christopher to a weekly two-hour supervised visit that could take place in her home. Only then did Christopher finally see and play in the room she prepared for him four years ago, to which she recently added “some really big Tiggers, about as tall as he is.”
Williams’ next court date is October 15, and Matheny intends to ask the judge to grant her even more time with her son. The spiral seems to be reversing: “The better their relationship, the more chunks of time I’ll be able to ask for,” he says.
Williams is afraid to hope for what she’s hoping for: “I’d love to have a family portrait taken and a chance for Christopher to play with his cousins. I want to be there for his first day of school.”
The waiting is stressful, but Williams feels there is no other choice: “Giving up,” she says, “is not an option.”
