This article was produced by the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center in collaboration with The New York Times. Learn more about our work here.

The Office of the State Public Defender in Mississippi filed a lawsuit Wednesday arguing that state officials are jeopardizing the rights of parents and children who find themselves in youth court.

The filing came just days before a seismic change in state law is scheduled to take effect July 1. Defense attorneys across the state argue that the change will worsen the already spotty access to youth court case information they need to adequately defend their clients.

Mississippi law makes youth court proceedings and records strictly confidential. That is left unchanged. But a separate law that contains the necessary exceptions to confidentiality – which allow the child welfare agency, courts, providers and lawyers to communicate and ensure families are treated fairly and receive needed services – is set to vanish next week. The statute has an automatic repealer, meaning the Legislature must actively renew it every few years.

In their session earlier this year, lawmakers considered a youth court reform bill, which, among other sweeping changes, would have kept the exceptions to confidentiality intact. But after much negotiation, lawmakers let the proposal die in the final days of the session without renewing the exceptions. 

The public defenders’ complaint described the impending law change as a “ticking time bomb” and called out officials on all levels for failing to take action. 

In the civil rights lawsuit, filed against the Administrative Office of the Courts, the public defender’s office is asking the federal court to declare the practice of denying youth court records unconstitutional. It also requests a temporary restraining order and injunction requiring the office to provide counsel for parents with access to youth court records.

Come next week, the lawyers argued they’ll be otherwise blocked from accessing their client’s records – something they say already occurs in some counties, but would become mandatory statewide. 

In the impending legal landscape, Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services Commissioner Andrea Sanders warned that youth court proceedings would “grind to a halt,” Mississippi Today first reported in May. The change could also jeopardize parents’ ability to push back against court decisions they think are unfair, defense lawyers said.

The Administrative Office of the Courts was not responsible for the law lapsing, but it governs the policies and procedures of youth court access. The lawsuit alleges that both the office and local youth court judges routinely deny requests for access to records from parent defenders.

“The fact it’s going to go from bad to worse is why we felt we had to file today,” said State Public Defender Andre De Gruy.

Not all counties are the same. Lee County Court Judge Staci Bevill, who oversees youth court cases, said access to records isn’t an issue in her county because parent defenders in her court are granted access to the case management system. For any outside private attorneys taking youth court cases before her, she enters an order giving them access. 

Bevill, who chairs the Council of Youth Court Judges, said she’s also working with other youth court judges on a stock order they may file in hopes of rectifying the upcoming lapse in confidentiality exceptions and continuing providing records. But there’s no mandate that judges across the state participate.

Parents can appeal if a family court judge revokes custody of their children. But these challenges are relatively uncommon and difficult to raise, experts told Mississippi Today, in part because of the difficulties accessing court records. Appeals could become even harder, if not impossible, starting next week without a measure to allow such records to be obtained by defense layers, experts said.

Take the case of Redonn Malone, a father who is incarcerated and nearly lost parental rights to his now 3-year-old child. He secured a rare legal victory at the Mississippi Supreme Court last week.

When Malone’s baby tested positive for drugs after birth, child welfare officials took custody of the child and recommended Malone take rehabilitative measures for them to reunify. But a Jackson County judge disagreed. After hearing about Malone’s criminal history, including that Malone had stabbed a man in 2021, the judge determined the state did not have to make the required efforts to reunify Malone with his child. Malone later received a 15-year prison sentence for the assault. The next step would have been to terminate his parental rights.

But four state Supreme Court justices overturned the youth court judge’s decision on June 18, finding that Malone’s past offenses did not meet the legal standard for bypassing reunification. The opinion returned the case to youth court, providing Malone another opportunity. “The youth court ‘acknowledged that Malone was excited about being a father for the first time in his life,’” the opinion reads.

The Office of the State Public Defender represented Malone.

The office argued in its lawsuit filed Wednesday that making youth court records entirely inaccessible to parents and their lawyers would violate the parents’ constitutional rights to due process. There are other concerns, including whether child protection workers could communicate information to doctors or service providers.

“I really think youth court is going to end up shutting down because CPS is not allowed to share information. They can be held criminally liable for it,” said Jennifer Morgan, the parent defense program manager for the public defender’s office. “Our clients, the parents, have the greatest interest in information about their children and we want to make sure that right is preserved for them.”

The public defenders’ lawsuit was filed against the Administrative Office of the Courts, which helps run the day-to-day operation of Mississippi’s judicial system and controls access to the statewide filing and docket management system for youth courts. A representative said she could not comment on pending litigation.

Regardless of the impending statute change, the complaint alleges that the state’s youth court system is already structured in a way that leads to constitutional violations. The suit takes issue with secrecy around court decisions in child protection cases as well as delinquency cases against minors. Youth courts make “life-changing decisions behind closed doors,” the lawsuit states, such as permanently severing parental rights or locking children in detention.

Without access, the lawsuit argues, “parents and children are completely in the dark about why the government is trying to destroy their family or lock up a child, and the attorneys standing next to them function as little more than lay companions, stripped of any meaningful ability to apply their expertise and experience to oppose the full weight of the Mississippi government bearing down on their clients’ fundamental rights.”

It describes the custom of some judges, based on their interpretation of the confidentiality statute, of ordering families with youth court cases not to speak about their case with anyone or risk jail time. It also claimed that judges and CPS may retaliate against parents they deem difficult.

“The broad range of outcomes you have is because people can’t talk to each other. The secrecy envelopes everything,” said Arman Miri, a defense attorney who represents parents in the Pine Belt area and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.