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Tuesday, April 21, 1987 / University Daily Kansan
Adoption debated in Illinois
The Associated Press
CHICAGO — Unfit parents are more likely to surrender their children for adoption if they can maintain some contact, says a task force report urging Illinois lawmakers to give their rights in some adoption cases.
"This is no crusade . . . and it's not as new as it sounds." Wedgie Schultz, president of Illinois Action for Children and one of a group of experts who helped draw up the recommendation, said yesterday.
Contracts allowing birth parents rights, ranging from awareness of their children's whereabouts to regular visitation, are "already arranged between consenting groups of adoptive parents, birth parents and the children themselves, when they are old enough." Schultz said.
"All we propose is that such (arrangements) be given legal standing," she said. Informal arrangements for visitation, unlike a legal contract, can be terminated if things don't go well, without the birth parents having any recourse in the courts.
But William Pierce, president of the National Committee for Adoption, argued the proposal amounts to "kind of plea-bargaining with abu- and neglectful parents ... by offering the carrot of continued contact."
"The child would be told his parent is not fit to be a parent, but society and the court requires that this unfit child have access to him." Pierce added.
The report containing the proposal for limited "open adoption" was prepared by the Illinois Task Force on Permanency Planning and distributed to state lawmakers beginning yesterday.
The Illinois report is itself part of a three-year, $7.5 million federally financed study administered by the Court. Juvenile and Family Court Judges.
Council spokesman Robert Praksti, director of the project, said while the council supports open-adoption arrangements in some cases, it would not endorse extending legal standing to such contracts.
He said that as far as he knew, Illinois would be the first state to enact such a law if the recommendations were followed.
Studies indicate that parents who lapse into abuse or neglect of their children are more likely to give them up when some contact is guaranteed, said Pamela Elsner, who served on the task force. She is executive director of Illinois Action for Children, the private child-welfare advocacy group of which Schultz is president.
Many abused children now live in foster homes for years, while their parents fight any state attempt to strip them of their parental rights or to arrange permanent adoption, Elsner said.
Schultz argued that being able to offer birth parents varying degrees of contact could help remove children from risk that they may be subject to abuse or neglect.
The task force report also recommended that the state guarantee any abused child access to counseling or other aid.
Soviet paper prints letter faulting labor camps Prisoner's description of conditions may be first published official criticism
The Associated Press
MOSCOW - A paper has published a letter from a former prisoner criticizing Soviet labor camps and information about them be released.
Western diplomats said the letter may be the first published in official mass media criticizing the camps. There is no official information available.
The letter was signed by former convict V. Stavrovsky of Smolenski and said the camps, estimated to hold at least one million prisoners, turned people into hardened criminals.
"It is high time to say what is going on in the corrective labor camps," the weekly Literary Gazette, which published the letter in its current edition, said in an accompanying commentary.
Publication of the letter appears to be part of a review of the criminal justice system. Soviet media have published examples of miscarriages of justice over the past year, and some high-ranking officials have given better protection of citizens against false arrest and imprisonment.
"It's possible something like this
appeared before in legal publications, but that something with a critical tone of the camps should show up in the Literary Gazette is astonishing. a Western diplomat said privately.
Literary Gazette is one of the country's largest newspapers, with a large number of bookstores.
I its commentary said some readers probably would be upset by publication of a convict's letter, but "the rules of glasnost (openness) tolerate no exceptions." The reference was to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev's program of publicizing some social problems.
Stavrovsky's letter said little about camp conditions, which have been described in detail by former political prisoners freed in a recent review of dissident cases, but he wrote of the inability of a common criminal to reform himself in the camps.
"The development of vicious inclinations in the individual flourishes," he said. "They say this is a formal re-education, but in reality, it is a continuation of the process in which education leads to mistrust, either in himself or others. The so-called political and education work is just wretched.
'A letter like mine can't be sent from the camps. I learned from my own experience. The rules say you must be sent to a punishment cell for 'illegal mailing of letters containing slanderous statements about the
V. Stavrovsky former prisoner
administration.'
"Having served his term, the person is simply incapable of keeping to the norms of life common in society."
He did not say where he was imprisoned or for what offense. Stavrosky said he had several convictions and believed repeat offenders were much more numerous than those serving first terms.
"A letter like mine can't be sent from the camps," he said. "I learned from my own experience. The rules say you must be sent to a punishment camp." He also told letters containing slanderous statements about the administration."
In the accompanying commentary signed by Yuri Shchekochikhin, the paper said, "It is time to make public the statistics of the corrective labor camp results. Is the system effective? Is it turning people who made mistakes once into hardened criminals? There are many questions around this closed topic. It is necessary to investigate them."
No statistics are published in the official press about the number and capacity of prisons and labor camps or how many prisoners they hold. According to Western estimates, there are more than 1,000 prisons and labor camps holding between one million and two million inmates.
The most widely noted example of recent publicity about abuses in the
Reagan consults leaders about arms control
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Reagan, ending a 10-day California vacation, returned to Washington yesterday to consult congressional leaders about what he believed were promising arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union.
Besides meeting with top Democratic and Republican leaders this week, Reagan is expected to give instructions to his arms negotiators, who will start a new round of U.S.-Soviet talks in Geneva on Thursday.
Reagan said during the weekend that while significant issues still divided the superpowers, "our negotiators will intensify their efforts to clear them away when talks resume
response could be made to the Soviets, because the NATO allies also must be consulted.
A House delegation, led by Speaker Jim Wright of Texas, also talked with Soviet leader Mihail Gorbachev in Moscow last week. Congress returns from its spring recess today.
The president sounded optimistic concerning the Soviet proposals, which include the removal of entire categories of nuclear weapons from Europe, made last week during Secretary of State George Shultz's three-day visit to Moscow.
in Geneva."
"Direct consultations with our allies will continue on further negotiations and plans," Reagan said. "We must look at this issue in a calm, careful and deliberate manner."
justice system was a report in December by the Communist Party daily Pravda told the KGB arrested a Ukrainian journalist on trumped up charges after he wrote articles critical of local officials.
"When I return to Washington, I will meet with the bipartisan congressional leadership to review this issue. Mr. McHale said in his radio address Saturday.
The president made clear that it would be some time before a formal
The president said after meeting with Shultz, "All I heard today is in the direction that I want to go in."
Stories in other publications have told of ineffective defense lawyers, corrupt judges, beatings during interrogations and convictions of innocent people.
The president and his wife, Nance,
wrapped up their Easter break on
Sunday by attending services at a
presbyterian church in Santa Barbara.
One of his recommendations was that defendants be provided with lawyers during pre-trial proceedings. Under current practice, a defendant often does not meet his lawyer until the trial starts.
On Saturday, the president delivered his radio address from the 688 acre ranch, and later in the day, the couple met with dozens of young
cancer patients at a camp in the Santa Ynez Mountains.
On the ranch, the president kept up a rather busy work schedule, mixing riding and clearing brush with routine paperwork.
Alexander Yakovlev, a candidate member of the party's governing Politburo, proposed several reforms of the legal system last fall.
On Friday, Reagan imposed $300 million in duties on selected Japanese electronic goods in retaliation for the use of cyberbombing computer chips in foreign markets
Shultz flew to the ranch late Thursday to brief the president on his meetings in Moscow, and Reagan spoke with reporters afterward to highlight his optimism about chances for an agreement limiting medium-range weapons.
High Court to hear World War II case
He said a 1983 suit, which seeks compensation for property losses suffered by those imprisoned, was filed in the wrong federal court and
The Politburo said in October that a consistent restructuring of the work of the prosecutor's office, the police, courts and other law enforcement agencies was needed.
A federal appeals court ruled that the government must defend itself at trial against the property-loss claims, estimated in the billions of dollars. The Supreme Court's decision is expected by July.
on questions of legal jurisdiction and a on questions of statute, the case represents the court's first opportunity to decide whether a decision condoning the interment.
Fried said the intermend program was tainted by a racial cast, which
Although its decision may center
was filed too late
But Fried also used the administration's strongest language to date in condemning the internment, in which 120,000 U.S. citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry were taken from their homes and put in concentration camps for up to four years.
Benjamin Zelenko, the lawyer representing those who sued the government, argued that the suit was not filed too late beyond a six-year statute of limitations written into a memorandum of agreement because he said, government concealment and fraud hid the government's liability until 1982.
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Solicitor General Charles Fried, the administration's top-ranking courtroom lawyer, argued that "ordinary rules of law" should apply to the lawsuit "no matter how much he would like to apply to the wound."
The Associated Press
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WASHINGTON — The Reagan administration said yesterday that the World War II detention of Japanese-Americans in U.S. prison camps shamed the nation, but it still urged the Supreme Court to kill a lawsuit stemming from the internment.
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