Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Hi and welcome to the Politics of Justice. It's me, Amy Austin. I believe that this will be the last installment. I'm going to try to get through this in one video. But let me say this first, there are going to be a lot of spoilers. Obviously we're at the end of the book and when you get to the end, all is revealed. So if you have not read or you want to finish the book beforehand, please do that. The other thing I want to mention beforehand is that.
[00:00:39] How do I say this, let me try to think, is that somewhere in this book's evolution I wrote an epilogue that used to only be available to subscribers.
[00:00:50] Somewhere in those years I did add that to the book as a new last chapter.
[00:00:58] So if your book book has. I believe so I'm going to check here. 47 chapters, you have the latest. If I'm seeing 48 chapters, you have the latest. If your book has 47 chapters, then you might want to go and redownload it. I've had like, oh my God, I don't know, probably more than a hundred thousand downloads of this particular title. So all that said, if you, you don't have the last chapter called Acceptance, go to your retailer and redownload it. Once you re upload new material, it's usually available like Apple, actually there's a lot of Apple people.
[00:01:43] You get a notification everywhere else, you know you're on your own. But go do it.
[00:01:48] So second, I want to say I'm trying a new recording. So in la, I've actually never used the iPhone to record because it always looked really weird. But it seems like it may be better here because the lighting is weird. And yes, I have places I can record actually here in Budapest where there's not a window but the lighting, it's winter, the sunlight is not a lot.
[00:02:18] So I'm doing the best I can also.
[00:02:25] Okay, thank you so much for the emails. I've actually gotten a lot of emails regarding this video series. I'd love it if you liked and subscribed if you haven't already.
[00:02:33] And it's New Year's Eve as I'm recording this, so I will email you back, but maybe not today.
[00:02:41] So I do want to start this video with some statistics I mentioned in the last video I was reading. The book erased.
[00:02:51] Okay, I'm sorry.
[00:02:53] I finished the book.
[00:02:56] I have it both on email and I mean seriously ebook and audio and I listened to it yesterday.
[00:03:02] Most of it on the. Most of the end on the way to a museum exhibit which is Depressing. So I won't share that. But what I do want to say is that she, the author, Tubbs, had a lot of. Of interesting statistics that I want to share. So excuse me, I had to write it down because I don't want to keep switching back and forth from Canada.
[00:03:26] Okay, so the first is.
[00:03:28] And these are recent statistics. So when I wrote judged, and the time in which it took place was at this point, probably more than 20 years ago, and yet not much has changed. Okay, so first, 53% of black children will experience a child welfare investigation by age 18, which is. Blows my mind.
[00:03:51] The ABA estimates that 10% of Black children will be removed and placed in foster care in their lifetime. 10%.
[00:03:59] And then 1 in 41 black children will have their legal relationship with their parents terminated.
[00:04:06] So in the US for children termination, it's 1 in 100, which is obviously 1%. 1 in 41 is 2 point.
[00:04:15] Doing math in my head. I want to say 2.4 or 2.36.
[00:04:20] I'm not gonna do math on here. So.
[00:04:23] But about that, don't check my math, please.
[00:04:28] And that is. It's high. It's still high. And it's not necessarily any better.
[00:04:35] It is about politics. So I will briefly say that I have feelings about the Adoption and Safe Families act that was passed in, at this point, must be the 90s, early 2000s, late 90s, late 90s, which was an initiative spearheaded by Hillary Clinton and passed during Bill Clinton's term, which sped up the time, sped up the timeline for reunification or termination.
[00:05:06] Previous to that, children did spend, and I'm not saying this is good or bad, but did spend an interminable amount of time. What could be interminable time in the foster care system.
[00:05:15] And subsequent to that act, they had. Oh, I got it. Either six months or a year. Wow. Things you don't remember to get the reunification together or termination. And it did speed up termination, especially in a lot of cases that had been lingering.
[00:05:31] Whether that's good or bad, I'm not going to say. But it certainly added to the termination numbers. The idea was that these children would be adopted. But as anyone knows, everyone knows parents who are adopting generally like adopting babies.
[00:05:47] Children who are taken are generally not babies.
[00:05:51] And so they were just consigned to permanent foster care.
[00:05:57] And I did some volunteer work actually, after moving to Los Angeles with children who had aged out of the system. And it's a whole sad thing we'll talk about, but they end up in the criminal justice system often and.
[00:06:10] Or you know the criminal justice system.
[00:06:13] Moving on. Let's get to these chapters before the video gets too long.
[00:06:18] So we're starting with chapter chapter 39, called the Civil Rights Lawyer.
[00:06:24] I will say this in the cities in which I've lived, and probably other cities where I haven't lived, but certainly Cleveland had them, New York had them. LA probably does. I'd have to really think about it. There's a certain type of lawyer. I think of them as a civil rights lawyer who you will see on a dais at a press conference as soon as something bad happens. Usually like a police shooting of an unarmed black person, to be frank, or some other kind of violence in that vein, they pop up representing the victim or victim's family, victim's estate, whatever that would be.
[00:07:03] But they're prominent, they're well known, and this is when they turn up. So this is the kind of lawyer that Keith is going to go see in this chapter. His name is Vernon Dinwiddie. If you read Dickens, you can make your own interpretations of his name.
[00:07:19] The highlighted portion says it's Keith chapter. You're not wearing that, are you, Keith? You look like a security guard, Vayleen said, smoothing her own hair and checking her teeth in the saucepan's reflection. I am a security guard, I said, brushing Strayland from my pants. What's wrong with this?
[00:07:35] Your work uniform? I got us appointment with the best black lawyer in Cleveland. We need to dress like we're going to church, she said. I hear he picks which cases she takes. We don't want to give him a reason not to take us.
[00:07:46] So yeah, they they choose. So Valine is Keith's either girlfriend or wife. Things I don't remember.
[00:07:56] And she is a little more supportive. Like in my head she was going to be like an evil stepmother, because who doesn't like an evil stepmother trope? But she turned out not to be that person. It's funny when you write a book, I'm not a plotter, but you sort of have plans and often they go awry. So in my head, she was going to be this sort of evil stepmom, but she didn't turn out to be that. And she's really driving this thing. So Keith. Now we know that Keith can, as a family member, get custody of his kids, and Valine's really going to drive this bus because she doesn't think the child should be in foster care.
[00:08:36] So that's. Oops, excuse me. That's what goes on in that chapter. And I will say this, the Dinwiddie is no fool.
[00:08:44] He takes money, he talks about, he does this. I knew Dr. King. Everybody knew Dr. King.
[00:08:53] And in the likes of Andrew Young and Stokely Carmichael, there's a certain kind of guy who always claims this. You know, I'm getting older, so maybe new people have a new claim to fame. I don't know who they claim to know now, but back in the day, it was big civil rights leaders. So Vayleen empties her Christmas club account. When I was a kid, savings banks had these Christmas club accounts where you'd put money in and take it out once a year for your Christmas gifts or holiday stuff. I don't even know if they exist anymore.
[00:09:21] But a lot of people I know had a Christmas club account.
[00:09:23] A lot of black women I know, I don't know about the world, but a lot of black women in New York had Christmas clubs account. Okay, Christmas club accounts.
[00:09:31] So the next chapter is 40. It's called Home is more than four walls.
[00:09:36] Olivia. It's an Olivia chapter.
[00:09:39] And she talks about.
[00:09:43] It's sad. She's on the train. And she says, but she's on the train with Keith because he has managed. She's on a rain.
[00:09:53] He has managed to get custody even before there's been a paternity test. Because. And the thing I talked about earlier is that because divorced people in marriages are always presumed to be the father, he would be able. He'd be eligible immediately for placement. If the parents were unmarried in the foster care system, they would have to have a paternity paternity test before they would let a child go home with a father, even if everybody and their brother knew who the father was.
[00:10:23] But often people are not on the birth certificate for reasons.
[00:10:27] And there's no, like, automatically paternity test out there in the world because our laws are sort of biased towards marriage.
[00:10:34] So she's on this train, and she. She said she wants the world to swallow her up whole. She said her dad picked up from the social worker's office, and she's just sitting on the Red Line train with him, you know, hoping for the best, but she doesn't really know him.
[00:10:49] So while a relative placement generally is better, in this case, it is almost as foreign as any foster care placement.
[00:10:59] And for that, I'm a little bit sad. So she. She. They move into the place, and she's feeling better because Valine puts out a spread. She's like, I'm gonna cook food. I'm gonna make you a bath. I'm gonna, like, do all these, like, motherly type things that you would hope somebody in foster care would do, but maybe you can actually only get from relatives and relative adjacent people.
[00:11:26] So anyway, she's cooking all of this stuff.
[00:11:33] So at the end of the chapter, Valine says, and this is nice, you're here now and you're safe. Go and get dressed. No need for you to catch cold.
[00:11:43] I'll make a phone call and then you can help me with dinner.
[00:11:47] But what had happened just previously, and this is a trigger warning, she, Olivia's in the bath and Valene's helping her get a washcloth or do whatever in the bath. And it's at the time that Olivia discloses that she was molested by Jermaine.
[00:12:02] And what I wanted to portray is that she finally, like, even though it's sort of a foreign place, she's able to relax and do this disclosure. And Valine, like, answers the call, actually.
[00:12:15] So chapter 41 is called under Oath. And the highlighted portion, it's a Casey chapter.
[00:12:23] And the highlighted portion is she's okay, she's trying to get a hearing.
[00:12:32] I will say this about juvenile court hearings. Back then, when you got a hearing date, they would give you either a morning or afternoon, and if you're lucky, an entire day. Because the courts are slammed. They're always slammed. I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday. They're always booked to the health, but, well, in family, actually, they're all slammed. I don't know, like saying there's some exception of some empty court. You can walk in and just get a date. I don't think that exists because people are always in there. So what I wanted to say is that when I used to do appeals from juvenile court cases, the hard part was like consolidating a story because people would have hearings, like, for parental termination that would span months. They'd have like a day in April, a day in, like, you know, June, a day in July, because the hearings took time in. Getting subsequent days, like in a trial you'd see on television of anything was really difficult.
[00:13:29] So look, this is a writer's trick in order to expedite the book because we can't have those links spanning forever. In order to expedite the story, Casey is able to twist the clerk's arm and get consecutive days for hearing. In real life, the likelihood of that is, I don't know, 2%.
[00:13:46] So she said.
[00:13:47] So it's, it's, it is, to be honest, just a thing done for the book.
[00:13:53] So chapter 42 is temporary custody and this is the first part of the hearing.
[00:14:04] The highlighted portion is Cayce. It's another Cayce chapter.
[00:14:14] Yeah, it's another Casey chapter. So they're starting the hearing. They're doing, like, all this stuff. They like, talk about whether there's child support, like some sort of just baseline stuff, but it's a setup for what's going to happen.
[00:14:31] Like, look, I'm pulling the curtain back. There's like a lot of writer stuff that happens in the end.
[00:14:35] So she's like, I do know my pads. The prosecution laid on the basics. It was their case to win. And Foster, Dick Foster is the prosecutor here, was one of those lawyers who built it brick by boring brick. There'd be little cross examiners first. They.
[00:14:48] Thank you, Mrs. Wingfield, Foster said. Now on to November 16th. Your agency was also asked to administer a routine paternity test to Mr. Grant and Olivia, is that correct? Yes. At the request of cfs, we did a DNA test on Olivia and Keith Grant.
[00:15:01] Judge Grant leaned forward, her body tensing, her pen nearly snapping half in her hand. Alarm bells started going off of my head. Why was my client so tense? All this stuff was routine. I resisted the urge to look at or shake my client. I didn't want to tip off the judge that something might not be right.
[00:15:16] I put my own pen down and started paying close attention to the evidence being offered.
[00:15:22] So even though there's a presumption that he's the father, like I mentioned earlier, like, this is a conveyor belt system, so there are things that are done in every case regardless of whether or not they are legally necessary.
[00:15:38] And since they were married, there would be legal presumption of fatherhood. In some theoretical world, the.
[00:15:46] The county could save money because DNA tests were really expensive back then.
[00:15:50] I assume now they're not nearly as expensive. They were pretty expensive back then.
[00:15:56] In some. There is some world in which this wouldn't have happened.
[00:16:00] Olivia would, like everybody would presume that Keith was Olivia's father and all would be well. But in this case, this is just more foreshadowing that something's going to happen. And this did happen to me. Not the paternity thing. I don't think I was ever surprised by paternity. I don't know how to think about that. But there was every case that came with a little surprise.
[00:16:25] And, you know, usually know the surprise was coming when somebody would ask something in court and your client would, like, jerk, and you'd be like, oh, my God, here's the thing. I didn't know. And it's not for want of asking. I can't tell you the number of times I ask people, is there anything I need to know? That would be a surprise that would make you lose your case.
[00:16:47] And the number of times people said, no, there's nothing. And then you get to court and you find out the something there is is not zero.
[00:16:55] It should be zero.
[00:16:57] Oh, it's so hard.
[00:16:59] So this is that moment for her.
[00:17:04] Then we get to.
[00:17:15] So Judge Grant, they start arguing in court and Sheila says to they're having an argument like he's like we were planning to tell me. Then there's some kind of understanding that dawned in the man's eyes. Don't. Don't. Don't think I don't know who the father is. All those nights he spent working late, I knew something was going on. My mother always said, and then she says, your mother was always the damn problem, Judge Grant snapped. She rose from the table and stalked from the courtroom. I breathed in deep to calm my heart. The worst had happened. I'd gotten an unexpected surprise. The world hadn't ended. The case wasn't lost. I rose to my chair on wobbly legs and joined Foster and Dinwiddie.
[00:18:01] And then the next note is. I mean the next highlight is Judge Grant had created this hell for all of us and the flames are licking at my angles. It's just a fraterna phrase that I like.
[00:18:11] So that's chapter 43. So chapter 40.
[00:18:15] Chapter 42. Excuse me. So chapter 43 is an Olivia chapter and it's called you can never go home again.
[00:18:27] And this is like Vayleen and Keith talking.
[00:18:30] It must be. I don't know. I think. I don't know whose chapter it is. I thought it was maybe Keith's chapter.
[00:18:35] And Vayleen says, do you know who her father is? He looked away, shifting his gaze out of the window. My eyes followed his. There wasn't much to see. I think so, keith finally answered. Is he going to step up for his daughter?
[00:18:50] Keith took his head forcefully. This is a rich white man from a rich white family. No, nor needed to be said. It was an age old problem.
[00:18:58] And it is. There's nothing more to be said about that.
[00:19:01] So chapter 44 is temporary custody part two. So as much as much as Casey wanted an immediate hearing, she now has one.
[00:19:12] And it's the highlighted portion is the judge says, you got my attention, Ms. Grant. Most parents come in here contrite, ready to work on their problems. The agency usually doesn't make mistakes. There's a first time for everything. Mr. Force, Mr. Foster, your witness. I cringed inwardly. Nothing like the judge admitting her bias up front. I felt like a lone soldier trying to raise a flag over Iwo Jima. A platoon wouldn't be half bad right now. Probably highlighted, because I think I thought the writing was good there.
[00:19:43] I do like a good imagery, metaphor, whatever.
[00:19:48] So at this point, what is unique about this case, I probably should have pointed out, is that Olivia is actually fighting it.
[00:19:56] Most of the time. The parents fought it in the way of, I admit I'm wrong, look at what I've done to change and get better, and she's fighting in a way of the agency is wrong, and there's nothing I need to do. And that people didn't usually think, say, because it's sort of like a criminal case even.
[00:20:13] Okay, there's the presumption. There's always a presumption. There's a problem of innocence. As you know, we always say allegedly. There's always this presumption that things have to be proven in court. But I think the truth is, is that if somebody's in court, it's where there's smoke, there's fire situation.
[00:20:29] It made it very hard and criminal, which is why the burden's so high. But still, like, you would have to ask the jurors, are you biased? Are you willing to admit that, like, maybe the guy's, like, innocent, you know, he was wrongly arrested, whatever. But people think if you're there, you're there for a reason.
[00:20:43] And judges often share that bias. I'll just say that.
[00:20:50] So.
[00:20:53] So at some point, the school counselor's. School counselor is testifying, admitting that Olivia had disclosed in the meeting that her mom rang too much.
[00:21:04] And it's just a pause, right?
[00:21:07] Because it says. Then when I talked to Olivia, one on one, she reported that her mom routinely drank an entire bottle of rum in the evening. Foster paused, paused, allowing the damning evidence to sit with the judge for a moment. I steeled myself to limit my reaction. The visual. Poor child, watching her sloppily drunk mama plow through a bottle of 80 proof alcohol wasn't lost on me.
[00:21:29] And this is a good prosecutor can do this. They just say so. They just bring out evidence and then pause because everybody's like, about that presumption of innocence. We're. We're gonna let that go right now.
[00:21:47] So the next highlight is Foster was putting one nail, then the next in Judge Grant's coffin. Each witness was another bang of the hammer.
[00:21:57] So just A line I like.
[00:21:59] So then Judge Grant is talking, and she's, you know, I love my daughter with all my heart. I'm the best person in the world. And I did that to, like, because what it says is, there's nothing that can trump a mother's love.
[00:22:12] For all our biases, good or bad, we always assume that a mother's love is, like, the purest, like, most heartwarming thing.
[00:22:20] And it's. It's what, like, makes people cry in TV commercials or movies. It's the thing that we, I think, as society, believe above all others to be true, that a mother loves their child. And so I wanted to use that particular bias in favor of Judge Grant in. In this. In writing.
[00:22:45] So then they. They're back about who's a dad. And this is horrible because this actually happened to black women a lot. It. I'm not.
[00:22:53] Was like Jerry Springer or Maury Povich, but.
[00:23:00] So I uncrossed my fingers and gripped my thigh. Somehow the trial had migrated from child neglect to morality play. I never had a. I'd never. And this is. Casey. Had a lot of sexual partners myself, but women made missteps. There was no reason to lose a child. If that were the case. Many a mother wouldn't have their kids, which is true, but it was often a morality play.
[00:23:25] So the prosecutor's talking at this point because we're getting toward the end of the hearing, and it's like, this is maybe not the mom. Maybe it's cd, Social worker. Don't get me wrong. I think all of this is fixable, But I think mom needs some time apart from her daughter to get through rehab and get the training she needs for Olivia's problems, which are ADD or whatever, all this stuff that they assume that she has.
[00:23:53] And that was often the case. It was like, if we could just separate these people and the child could get this counseling and the mom could get this counseling, then they're going to be a better family, ignoring the fact that separating a parent from their children does its own huge amount of damage.
[00:24:12] So at this point, the prosecutor, it says they're talking about how they would consider placement with the father.
[00:24:21] But at this point, and this is true, Judge Grant refused to disclose who the father was. So, look, if she had disclosed, they would have brought the guy in for testing. I mean, that's.
[00:24:33] It's that world.
[00:24:35] And he would have found him in the father, and then they would have maybe placed Olivia with Peyton Bennett and Kimberly and his wife and his new family out in whatever suburb they Live in east on the east side of Cleveland.
[00:24:49] But judge Grant chose not to wrap her ex lover and former partner into this thing. Whether that's a good or bad choice, you can decide.
[00:25:01] I have my thoughts about it.
[00:25:05] So chapter 45 is called disclosure. And this. This is at the point where.
[00:25:13] And it was the trigger warning. But social worker Folium, am I to understand that Olivia Grant was graped while she was in the Williams's house? Judge McKinnon asked. All pretense and confidentiality gone. Foley looked pained. Foley, as you may recall, as a social worker judge. Your honor, foster home information isn't supposed. Ms. Foley, do not lecture me on the law. Answer my question.
[00:25:37] Yes, and she says the remain was another child in the home.
[00:25:40] Because in addition to a lot of things, the whole like, there's a lot of confidentiality in theory to protect children involved in the foster care system.
[00:25:50] So the fact that one foster child committed a crime against another sometimes couldn't be disclosed to the court in certain ways, especially since he was. He's not charged to protect the confidentiality of both. Because if he was a juvenile, I don't call him criminal, but a juvenile criminal offender, then those cases are sealed. And then these cases are sealed. So we have a lot of confidentiality masking crime.
[00:26:18] And who knows that that may be different now. So that's the disclosure. So the disclosure is made in the courtroom and the courtroom's quiet because we've had this whole like, not charade because that's not true. It's there.
[00:26:33] Judge Grant was excessively drinking, but we have this whole thing that she drinks too much and you know, Olivia went undiagnosed, but that is sort of the least of their problems. And they've gone in and created this worse harm, which I think is supposed to. Which. Supposed to. As a writer, I'm going to tell you, reflect back to an earlier thing in the book where judge Grant was presiding over that particular civil rights case about the abuse of a child in foster care because it happens often enough. People don't always sue about it, that's for sure. But it happened because there are protections for the government from that kind of lawsuit. But it happens. It's actually called qualified immunity, which was the original name of the book.
[00:27:15] And it. But it happens often enough.
[00:27:18] And unfortunately, unfortunately, it happened to her daughter as well.
[00:27:26] But that's just.
[00:27:28] That's just writing me trying to both tell a story and talk about the greater harm that we try to do in favor of a theoretical greater Good.
[00:27:45] So chapter 46 is appeal.
[00:27:48] So when I did this practice many years ago, I did a lot of appellate cases. They were appointed cases. They paid $750.
[00:27:59] I hope they pay more now. So juvenile cases all paid a fat fee of 750. And then the felony appeals I did paid a thousand.
[00:28:07] Maybe they paid more if you had a bigger crime. I actually don't remember that, but I would do the appeals because they're. I don't make them easy. But you don't have active client representation.
[00:28:16] You get the whole stuff. The this is why I know a lot more. You get the transcripts, you get all the stuff, you write the appeal. And then it's whether or not in a lot of juvenile cases, whether or not the standard was met to take the children away and whether or not they should get a new hearing.
[00:28:34] I was kind of successful doing the appeals. But the but is you can get a new hearing, but it's not like criminal. It's not a complete do over because the children have age. So in a criminal case you can get a new trial and you start the clock again as if the first trial had not occurred. And as long as like the witnesses were not dead. And there are many ways to overcome some of the time passage issues, that is great to get a fresh start, especially if there was biased information or the prosecutor didn't give the defense the proper exculpatory evidence or whatever that is.
[00:29:13] That said, in these cases, I could win on appeal, but the children had aged within two or three years and they're more into foster care and they're more integrated into the family or whatever it is.
[00:29:26] And so the appeal could be successful, but the reunification may not be.
[00:29:31] So in this case, Casey takes the appeal and she's doing the appeal for Judge Grant.
[00:29:37] She's saying that the standard wasn't met.
[00:29:42] The testimony of the school counselor is insufficient. Bringing in diagnoses later is unfair. She tries to refute it, so on and so on. But the first highlight talks about the special needs. And she said, you're going to rest on the idea that a well educated federal judge with time and resources can't get up to speed on add.
[00:30:06] Foster backtracked in a hurry. No, no, no, we're not saying that she can't. Mom hadn't completed anything on the case plan at the time of the trial. The county likes to supervise parents during the process to assure the child's safety.
[00:30:16] So which is it? Learning alcohol or learning disability?
[00:30:21] And this is the thing that I didn't like.
[00:30:24] It's something you can't do in criminal. You can't have an either or conviction, but you can't be like, either he shot him or he beat him. It has. You have to convince people beyond reasonable doubt that X happened.
[00:30:37] What I don't like, didn't like about the foster care system is, and I mentioned this earlier, they would take the child away. You don't have heat, but they would keep the child because you don't understand the ADD diagnosis. But it was such a routine play that in this case, Dick Foster did not alter his argument. He went in like, mom is. Like, mom is just a dumb lady, you know, and can't get up to speed, not taking into account who she was and whether or not the courts would consider her even as a black woman, but as somebody who's well educated that it's unreasonable to think that she couldn't get up to speed.
[00:31:17] Oh, okay.
[00:31:19] So she does the appeal.
[00:31:21] She, she leaves. We come back a little bit later, and it says the presiding judge spoke soon after. Everyone seated. Ms. Court, we called you and Mr. Foster here sua sponte. That means on the judge's orders. Because it has come to our attention that the factors have changed. We're taking judicial notice of the news reports and sheriff's report that suggests that Judge Grant has illegally removed her daughter from the county's custody.
[00:31:42] So, spoilers. We now know in this case that Sheila decided on self help because the confirmation was not guaranteed and reunification with her daughter was also not guaranteed. She took it upon herself to take the child out of. Take the child and leave the county. And the jurisdiction for foster care is like county wide. And there's 5,000 plus counties in the U.S.
[00:32:06] it is not like criminal, which is usually, well, statewide or federal, which is just countrywide, which means they can pick you up anywhere anytime this happened.
[00:32:20] It was something I always thought to myself. I'm like, well, if you don't like how Cuyahoga county doing, you need to move and just take your kid to Lake county or take your kid to Geauga county or take your kid to, like, the next county over.
[00:32:29] And in this case, it was the first time that I think I saw it once. I think there was one mom I know, and I think she may have been a white mom who took her kid out of the county. She's like, f this, I'm moving to the next county. And I only found out later because she was back in the system again. And then they found out she'd had an active case like five or six years ago in Cuyahoga county or in Lake county or whatever. It was some different backwards because I only practice in Cuyahoga and but in my head I was like, you know, you could just leave the county, take the kid if you know they're where they're in foster care or if they're with a relative placement, leave the county and nobody's going to ask any questions. They don't usually put out a bench warrant. It's not like a kidnapping charge. It's usually not that deep and you could live your life and by the time they're 18, there's no like, I'm not going to say there's no recourse because the world is full of recourse, but there probably would be little recourse. But it didn't happen. But for Sheila as a writer, I could give her this vigilante justice angle. So chapter 14 is Headlines and it's just basically like, it's a really short chapter. It's like judge's daughter kidnapped Cleveland is the byline dateline. Excuse me.
[00:33:50] Recently confirmed federal judge Sheila Harrison Grant has allegedly kidnapped her 13 year old daughter from the custody of the Cuyahoga County Department of Children Family Services and fled the county. On Friday, social workers said. I just, I. The note is I used to write for various newspapers over the years and miss this kind of writing. Sometimes I do, I just miss that distance like and then, you know, somebody did something the police said, but that's just me, that's just personal.
[00:34:16] So that at the end was the last chapter and the original last chapter of the book. All you knew as a reader was that Sheila Harrison Grant may have problems, but she saved her daughter from a system where there were more problems.
[00:34:39] Can I tell you the one thing readers dislike about my books are the endings. I'm going to be honest about it, maybe I'm not really great at endings.
[00:34:47] I personally as a writer and maybe as a reader love an ambiguous ending. If you just leave it out there hanging, I am fully satisfied.
[00:34:58] Turns out that everybody else in the world, as my son always says, I am not. My readers likes a more, a less ambiguous ending, a little bit more fixed. They don't like the little nebulous sorts of things I do.
[00:35:13] So that was probably the reason for writing this epilogue that is now the last chapter of the book which is called 48 acceptance.
[00:35:21] And it's. It was basically, you now know that Sheila moved to, I believe either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. She moved to Pennsylvania and she's in she her new job this Is.
[00:35:36] This is where we are. She's a paralegal. She says she's Willoughby and Waring.
[00:35:43] I think those are two streets in Los Angeles when you're driving north in, like, Hollywood or West Hollywood, near where I live. I know Willoughby and Wehrig. I think it's just two streets that you pass that are north of Melrose.
[00:35:59] I must have written it in la. Wow. Okay. I didn't know that because the book was written in Cleveland.
[00:36:07] The majority of it and the revisions were done in la. But okay. Willoughby and Waring. It's okay. Cute.
[00:36:15] Anyway, so once she'd altered her resume to use her maiden name and say that she'd attended but not completed Michigan Law School. And after that, getting a job was easy because it was super easy for people to assume that she had those kind of level of qualifications. If she had used a real name and real resume, A, people would have found her, which is, you know, its own problem. But B, probably people would not have believed her.
[00:36:38] But I will say that she did this. Peyton had come through with one last favor. Giving me a reference legitimized me, made it easy for me for the head of paralegals to offer me a position.
[00:36:47] I gritted my teeth when she almost patted me on the head and told me I've been lucky to be hired, given my age. But she observed I was getting glowing reviews in just my first week because she's a judge turned paralegal.
[00:36:58] So that's just the last sort of note that I want to include.
[00:37:07] And with that, I get to the end here of Judged.
[00:37:14] It was a ride. It was a ride. I at the time. And there are articles written in the Plane Dealer about this. At the time, I was really on fire about how this system worked. I'm not saying I'm not on fire anymore, but it's not. I don't get up every day fired up and, like, upset about the Cleveland or Cuyahoga county foster care system.
[00:37:41] But although that book yesterday, the erased book, like, brought up all those feelings.
[00:37:47] I'm like, oh, my God. I'm like, doing this video series. And here are these statistics that haven't changed in, like, 30 years. Oh, my gosh. You know, sort of got me a little head up.
[00:37:59] But I wrote it because I really deeply cared about exposing the flaws in the system.
[00:38:06] And I haven't read reviews in years. I don't do that, although I think we're at over a thousand. But I don't. I think a lot of earlier reviews were like, this is really realistic.
[00:38:20] But sad.
[00:38:26] Or this is really realistic, but not what I was looking for in this kind of story.
[00:38:32] And so I've changed how I've written books since that first one. I mean, it's been a long journey. Like, I'm.
[00:38:39] I'm about to start in book 31, I think.
[00:38:41] But it was so important for me, the time to tell that story, not only to unburden myself from all the feelings I had about growing up with a mother who was an alcoholic and not doing something about it. I don't know what I was supposed to have done about it, but, you know, I felt for many years I should have done something to save myself from that experience.
[00:39:05] Okay, I still have some regrets, but we're not gonna get into that. But I also.
[00:39:11] I wanted to tell that story, but I also wanted to tell the story of a young lawyer bucking against the system and tell the story of how the system operates and just keeps grinding, no matter who's in it. And for all of those things, I'm happy. I rewrote the book 23,000 times. I think it was eight.
[00:39:30] And I'm happy that I was able to tell that story.
[00:39:34] It satisfied something in me that remains actually filled to this day. I no longer feel the need to, like, tell this story. Get this out here. I still have feelings about. I still think there's a lot of unjustness in the justice system.
[00:39:49] But with closing that book and, like, closing that chapter, it did a lot of healing and gave me a lot of satisfaction to have said my piece on that part of my history and that part of the world in which we live. So with that, I end this particular series on Judged.
[00:40:18] This has been the politics of justice. It's me, Amy Austin.
[00:40:22] I probably will do Ransomed next. I don't know when I'll start that.
[00:40:29] Have a great happy new year in 2026.
[00:40:35] By the way, Judged, the book I'm talking about is free on every book platform. Grab it wherever you read.
