After a quarter-century on the bench—alternating, sometimes in a single week, among family, divorce, and criminal courts; urban, suburban, and rural circuits; babies, troubled teens, and supposed grownups—Judge Thomas Frawley is retiring. He carries away a reputation for cutting through bullshit and connecting with the kids whose lives he’s deciding. His voice still cracks when he talks about “these kids who’ve been dealt a hand of garbage and they just keep moving forward.”
When you took over the city’s family court, you already had foster kids of your own. At one point we had five between the ages of 3 and 8. [He shrugs.] We couldn’t have kids of our own. Seemed like a good idea to me.
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In three years, you slashed the city’s foster care population by more than one-third. The state wanted more frequent, more meaningful hearings, but they told us we’d never be able to do that, because we were a metro area and we had so many kids in care. I had a wonderful juvenile officer. I looked at her, and she looked at me, and we said, “Game on.”
What else did you do differently? We started bringing kids to court, which really wasn’t done very much before, and we fleshed out their parents’ lives. We also flushed out division social workers who weren’t doing their jobs. The kid would say, “Who’s that?” “She’s your caseworker.” “I’ve never met her.”
In what ways are judges’ hands tied? Well…People will tell you I’m a cowboy. I have no filter. I’ll push to make the system more attentive to stuff that the system isn’t built for. Do you think when the framers were sitting around creating the three branches, they were thinking about the judiciary doing custody cases? Gay marriage? Frozen embryos? There’s no law on that! You have to figure out how to fit a system that wasn’t designed to solve the problems that take up most of its time. So, yeah, I’m doing things differently.
You’ve been unusually open, for a judge… I’ve worked hard to be transparent. I do not know what the code is for the judges’ elevator. I ride up and down with everybody else, and I walk through the halls. From the start, I made a conscious effort to be a person, rather than just somebody sitting up there. And I do everything in court, so I get in trouble for saying things that if my colleagues say them, they say them in chambers. I never thought lawyers should carry my water. If I’m going to say it, I should say it.
You’re also known for meeting kids where they are… I ask caseworkers, “Have you talked with her about birth control?” I ask the kids, “Are you sexually active?” Born and raised Catholic, should I be having that conversation? I dunno. But it’s what you’ve got to do. One of the young ladies stepped outside the box, got a boyfriend. What’s our primary job? To keep them safe. So I said, “I want to meet him.” We got her out of high school and into junior college classes, she didn’t get pregnant before 21, and we kept her safe.
And you engage kids in conversation. It’s their life, for God’s sake. The theory used to be “Don’t put them in the middle.” They are living in the middle. I try to be honest with them, let them know there’s somebody who cares. Not the theoretical—“Do you understand what the foster care system…” but “What are you doing for fun? You got game? You think you could beat a 70-year-old man?” Just talking to them.
Why is that so hard for so many adults to do? Well, first of all, as judges we’re trained differently—and some of us are wired differently. If I’m trying a civil or criminal case, my role is to stay the hell out of the way and let the lawyers try their case. Divorce is somewhat the same. And I think juvenile is the exact opposite. We need to engage.
Yet some judges shy away from that. It’s a little easier to decide your fate if I haven’t met you and talked to you. It becomes a lot harder once I have—as it should be. There’s a person with blood running through their veins who is impacted by what I say.
Kids whose cases you’d adjudicated even showed up at your retirement party. I think they know I give a shit.
What do you tell caseworkers before a court date—other than your trademark “S’plain it to me, Lucy”? I say, “I don’t want the reports. You need to write ’em, and that’s fine. But I’m not going to go away and read a report and come back with a question or two. We are going to talk. You are going to tell me what’s going on.” The juvenile docket is the most important work we do. We are dealing with those who are the most fragile.
What’s been your most heartbreaking case? Depends on your definition. Sometimes it’s the ones that have worked so hard, and they just can’t climb the wall. Sometimes—I had a case where the child was born with no brain stem. The question had to be, “How long do we keep her alive?” I said to the hospital, “I didn’t sign on for that!” But I had to make the call. Then there was a couple that adopted a young girl from Russia because they wanted a sister for their daughter. The young lady had some mental issues, and they threw her back. Said, “We don’t want her anymore.” The guardian and I—every time I see him, we both just still seethe. I didn’t want to terminate the parents’ rights, because I wanted them to pay child support. But for her sake, she needed to be adoptable.
What keeps you in the job, when you’re facing that kind of thing every day? After one of those, they’d give me some kid who was going home, because the parents had busted their butts. You see the best and the worst. You have this euphoria of a kid who’s adopted or is going home or who’s been successful against all odds. And then you have parents who don’t do squat, or kids who are so self-destructive they have to be in a secure facility, and parents who don’t have the finances to pay for the mental health care, so they have to have their kids go into foster care to get that help. I don’t know how they put one foot in front of the other. We are just not as attentive to their needs, as a system, as we need to be. At least in my opinion—I’m sure somebody will say I’m full of crap. But I just don’t think we do enough.
What allows some kids to survive the worst and thrive? The theory used to be “Kids bounce.” That’s horseshit. Not all kids are resilient. The hope is that they find somebody they know cares about them.
What’s changed since you took the bench? I’m 70 years old, and I need to realize it’s a different world. A young lady corrected me one day—I’d asked if she had a boyfriend, and she said, “You know, it doesn’t have to be a boy.” And I said, “Thank you. You’re right.”
Do any of those anger management and drug and parenting classes work? They all work—if you have the mindset to let them work, and you have the mental capacity to understand what you are being taught. But why aren’t those classes interactive? In Troy [Missouri], we’re going to have parents go to school, learn how to use the app to check grades, tell us the next day what their kid’s grades were, read about the importance of education, write a short paper about it… Even with parents, it can be the first time anybody’s ever said, “Hey, good job.”
What’s the secret of presiding over family court? You’ve gotta want to be there. You’ve gotta want to engage, to be a participant in the process and not just a principal signing an order. Now, some guys will say, “That’s not the way the system is set up.” I agree—it’s not. It should be.
