Constitutional Danger in the State Taking of Children from Parents

Dr. John Fisher  

A father lost custody of his 7-year-old son and didn’t get to see him for a week after mistakenly buying the boy an alcoholic lemonade at a baseball game.

Christopher Ratte, a professor of archaeology at the University of Michigan, bought his son Leo a drink called Mike’s Hard Lemonade at a Detroit Tigers game, not knowing it was an alcoholic drink.

A stadium guard approached Mr. Ratte during the ninth inning, and asked Ratte if he knew he was serving his son liquor. "You've got to be kidding," he replied, trying to read the bottle. But the guard "snatched it before Ratte could examine the label," the Detroit Free Press reported.

Leo Ratte was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance after complaining of minor nausea. Blood tests found no trace of alcohol in his system.

The police and social workers agreed the father had made a mistake, but said there was nothing they could do. They had to follow protocol.

Michigan’s Child Protective Services (CPS) took Leo into custody and didn’t let him speak to any member of his family for three days. He spent his first night crying in front of a television set while his parents waited outside the building where he was being held.

After three days he was allowed to go home to be with his mother. Finally, after a week the father was able to join his family.

According to the lawyer representing the Ratte family, the Michigan standard for the emergency removal of children from their parents does not reflect current federal constitutional law, which requires proof of immediate danger to a child.

Ratte later stated, "I feel that this was a massive overreaction to our case, and I think that everyone would have to conclude that." He and his wife, who is also a university professor, have filed a formal complaint with the CPS ombudsman’s office.

This case should give all citizens pause. The right to have and raise children, Judge Andrew Napolitano has averred, is akin to the right to free speech, yet the state increasingly intervenes and takes children from their parents for the slightest mistake or apparent infraction made by the parent. It does so even when the instigating event is itself a fraud, as in the case of the raid on the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas.

There, hundreds of children, including a new born baby, were forcibly removed from their mothers and placed in state custody in a raid that was wildly unconstitutional. Said Houston lawyer Dick DeGuerin, the Texas raid is "like Alice in Wonderland, off with their heads! And then we'll have a trial." According to DeGuerin who was interviewed on the subject by the Houston Chronicle, "It's the classic case of arrest first and investigate later. They took 500 people away from their homes to a makeshift prison without any evidence they've done anything wrong."

If we are to remain a free people, citizens of a great republic where the rule of law governs, then we must insist that the state respect the entire Bill of Rights, including the Fourth Amendment, so that people will again be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures...."