Committee advances bill to let courts order removal of alleged offending parent so children can remain at home

The House Judiciary, Rules and Administration Committee voted to forward House Bill 159 to the full House with a “do pass” recommendation after hearing from a magistrate judge who said the change will give courts a workable tool to keep children in a family home when one parent is the alleged offender.

The bill would remove internal, inconsistent references to a “protective order” in Idaho’s child-protection statutes and create an express mechanism allowing the state to ask a court to remove an alleged offending parent while leaving the child in the care of a protective parent or guardian.

The bill’s sponsor, Representative Barbara Ehart, said the proposal grew from conversations last year with judges and committee members who were concerned that children removed from their homes were not always placed with relatives or family friends as the law intended. Ehart told the committee that ‘‘about 80 percent of the kids were wrongfully removed’’ was a statistic that had stayed with her from earlier work, but she did not provide source documentation for that figure during the hearing.

Magistrate Judge Andrew Ellis of Ada County, who handles child-protection cases and chairs the Idaho Supreme Court Child Protection Committee, told the committee the current statutory references to protective orders are “internally inconsistent and contradictory” and therefore unusable. He described the bill as doing two things: striking the nonworking “protective order” language and creating an ‘‘order to prevent removal’’ so law enforcement can remove an alleged offender while the child remains with a protective caregiver.

“If there’s a way for us to lessen the impact of these cases on our kids by leaving them in the home but removing the parent who is the threat to the child, we should do that,” Judge Ellis said, explaining that removal of a child is traumatic and that the proposal would give courts and prosecutorial agencies an enforceable option short of removing the child.

Ellis said law enforcement historically has avoided attempting to rely on the existing statutory text because officers do not have authority to issue enforceable orders at the time of a removal, and a recent state decision could render warrantless removal of a nonoffending parent unconstitutional. He said the bill would provide a legitimate judicial order that could be enforced by law enforcement.

Representative Heather Scott moved the committee’s recommendation that the bill be sent to the House floor with a due-pass recordation. The committee approved that motion by voice vote with no public testimony.

The bill will next proceed to the full House for floor consideration.

The hearing record contains committee discussion and legal concerns about whether existing statutory language permitted law enforcement to effectuate removals and whether the proposed language would be interpreted consistently; the committee did not amend the bill during the hearing.