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In this article, you will discover:
The hospital’s social worker will file a report of suspected child abuse with CPS in the county where the child is currently. If the child is in an Oakland County hospital, the report would go to Oakland County CPS.
Oakland County CPS will assign a caseworker, and that caseworker will visit the hospital, speak to the doctors and the nurses, and attempt to interview the parents. Suppose CPS determines and verifies abuse, which they almost always do. In that case, they will then contact the local police agency, whether that is a city police department or the county sheriff, who will then begin the criminal investigation.
CPS and law enforcement respond almost immediately to child abuse allegations reported by a hospital or medical staff. Child abuse allegations speak to every sense of protecting the weak and the vulnerable that we have as a society.
There is nothing that gets law enforcement’s attention quite like an allegation that a child is being abused. The CPS and law enforcement have a well-funded and powerful ally in these cases.
The hospital’s child abuse protection doctor and their team will perform a significant portion of the investigation and provide law enforcement and CPS with a substantial portion of the information and evidence necessary to file a CPS petition or criminal charges.
Attorney Mark Satawa is a skilled lawyer based in Southfield, Michigan, who has helped numerous clients like you navigate the intricacies of child abuse law. With years of experience, he is prepared to defend you at every stage in a child abuse investigation and will ensure you understand the potential consequences of the investigation process.
Still have questions? Ready to get started? Contact Satawa Law, PLLC, today to schedule an initial consultation.
The most difficult aspect of the initial phase of a child abuse investigation is struggling with uncertainty: not knowing answers and not having enough information. In the early phase of a child abuse investigation, particularly in a shaken baby syndrome, abusive head trauma, or medical child abuse allegation, the parents are told nothing.
You will frequently be cut off from even seeing your child. Your child will be put on a no-visitors list. Sometimes, you will not be allowed in your child’s room. Other times, you will be allowed in your child’s room with a nurse or a social worker, but you can’t be alone in the room with them.
You are no longer asked to give consent to whether your child should undergo medical procedures. CAT scans, MRIs, X-rays, and bone surveys can be performed not only without you being told the results, but without you even knowing that it’s happening.
Children not only can be, but they frequently are, removed from the home prior to criminal charges being filed. In fact, it often happens weeks, if not months, before criminal charges are issued or filed.
CPS cases tend to have short deadlines and a rapid timeline. A child can be removed from the home based on a CPS petition, which is a one-sided, ex parte document filed in the family court or the juvenile court of the county.
An initial appearance on that petition will happen almost immediately. At that initial appearance, a preliminary hearing will be scheduled with a very short timeframe.
If the preliminary hearing is held, the petition can be authorized all within a matter of days, whereas the criminal investigation typically takes several weeks, if not months. During that timeframe, in the vast majority of cases, the child has already been removed weeks or months ago through the CPS investigation and petition.
Attorney Mark Satawa is a skilled lawyer based in Southfield, Michigan, who has helped numerous clients like you navigate the intricacies of child abuse law. With years of experience, he is prepared to defend you at every stage in a child abuse investigation and will ensure you understand the potential consequences of the investigation process.
Still have questions? Ready to get started? Contact Satawa Law, PLLC, today to schedule an initial consultation.
Immediately. Your interview process will go from the triage nurse to the ER doctor, to a social worker. The moment the hospital staff’s questions go from a focus on what happened to the child to what you did to the child, you are the subject of an investigation. You are being suspected of medical child abuse, and you need to hire an attorney.
The moment CPS or the police show up, stop talking and hire a lawyer.
My empathy is with my client, and the sharpness needed for an aggressive defense is focused and targeted on CPS, the police, and the prosecutor. Any experienced defense lawyer who specializes in shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma cases has to be able to compartmentalize.
You have to understand the science and medicine in these cases. You have to know that many of the assumptions that the child abuse pediatrician community uses are false or fraudulent. You have to understand that the child abuse pediatrician community will feed those false and fraudulent assumptions to CPS, police, and prosecutors.
For those reasons, you know that a significant percentage of people charged with medical child abuse, abusive head trauma, and shaken baby syndrome are innocent. They didn’t do anything.
So, the outrage and righteous indignation must be focused on the proper targets: the child abuse pediatrician community, CPS, the police, and the prosecution. Meanwhile, you have to understand and remain empathetic to the client, because they are nothing more than a target of a modern-day witch hunt.
If you can’t feel sympathy or empathy for someone who’s falsely accused of the worst accusation possible, harming their child at the most vulnerable stage of life, you shouldn’t be handling these cases. If you can’t understand that the target of your outrage, confrontational advocacy, and righteous indignation is the people responsible for falsely accusing your client – the child abuse pediatrician, CPS, the police, and the prosecution – then you shouldn’t be handling these cases.
The biggest reward you get from properly handling these cases is knowing you protected an innocent parent, falsely accused of the abuse of their infant.
For more information on hospital child abuse reports filed in Oakland County, MI, an initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you are seeking by calling (248) 419-6133 today.
Attorney Mark Satawa is a skilled lawyer based in Southfield, Michigan, who has helped numerous clients like you navigate the intricacies of child abuse law. With years of experience, he is prepared to defend you at every stage in a child abuse investigation and will ensure you understand the potential consequences of the investigation process.
Still have questions? Ready to get started? Contact Satawa Law, PLLC, today to schedule an initial consultation.