If you’ve been reading this newspaper, it would be impossible for you to miss the fact that our Legislature is very busy.
Our lawmakers seem fully occupied with their battles against Obamacare, the Common Core, abortions and those who would limit where Georgians carry guns.
But how much time and rhetoric will they devote to the silent war that claimed 8-month-old Marnee Kay Downey?
If you read the front page of this newspaper today, you would know that Marnee weighed less than 10 pounds when she was given a fatal dose of a painkiller intended for dying cancer patients. Her parents accuse one another of killing her.
What was the response of the citizen’s committee that was supposed to investigate this assault on Marnee’s right to life? A shrug.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 1990, after this newspaper reported on this state’s shameful record of protecting its children, the Legislature, including then-Sen. Nathan Deal, decided to lead the country in protecting vulnerable children.
Lawmakers created a statewide panel to examine these deaths to learn what we can do better to protect the thousands of children who are in clear risk. Local committees were established to investigate and report on the death of every child. All other states followed Georgia’s lead.
That was then; the now is pretty sad.
As Alan Judd tells us today, we have surrendered our leadership.
More than 900 children died in Georgia last year; yet, the local committees filed reports on only 464, Judd reports. The deaths of nearly 500 children we simply ignored. To be sure, most of these deaths were from natural causes and demand no deeper review.
But Judd’s analysis shows that dozens of these children died under circumstances that raise significant questions – the kind of questions these local committees were created to ask.
And of the 464 child deaths that were examined by these committees, no one seemed to wonder about mistakes by caseworkers or any other government officials who could have done something to intervene.
In only a quarter of the cases did the local committees even bother to issue recommendations on what might help next time. And “recommendation” is a strong word for what they produced: When a Fulton County baby died from a methadone overdose, the committee recommended more “parent education.”
Really? How can a civilized people tolerate this? I suspect we expend more energy getting to the bottom of mistreated pets.
In Marnee’s case, the committee dutifully reported the bare but horrible facts. But the committee expended no energy to get to the bottom of why so many failures piled up to end her life.
In fact, Judd expended more time and energy probing Marnee’s death than the committee did.
This is what a big city newspaper does: It spends a lot of time and money to delve into issues such as the unexplained deaths of our children. No one else does this kind of work. Judd’s predecessor in this cause, Jane O. Hansen, performed much the same service in the late 1980s and 1990s. Her searing reporting prompted a raft of reforms. But over the years, the reforms meant less and less.
Moreover, the state made it harder for the public to examine what happened in these cases. One of Judd’s biggest challenges this time around has been a move by the Legislature five years ago to make secret much of the official record of these deaths. But Judd is a formidable reporter who found his own ways to get at the truth to again detail the tragedies of our failures.
And the Legislature again is moving toward action.
Swirling among the red-meat topics is HB 923. If it passes in the Senate, the responsibility for looking into these deaths would move from the Office of the Child Advocate, a division of the governor’s office, to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. As important, it would lift the shroud of secrecy surrounding the deaths of children.
The measure has bipartisan support – including that of Gov. Nathan Deal.
Unlike the hotter issues that dominate the conversation under the Gold Dome, it lacks the passion of conflicting ideology, advocacy groups and well-paid lobbyists. Few if any politicians stump on the promise of getting to the bottom of why the lives of so many mostly poor children are so easily snuffed. People prefer to look away from these nightmarish truths. The zeal of fresh reform surrenders to the despair of knowing the truth.
If the law is changed, it seems a good start. But if this raft of reform isn’t followed by something more, then I’m not sure it matters.
