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Tennesee Dep't of Children's Services v. R.G.T.5/30/2003
I.
On September 21, 2000, the Tennessee Department of Children's Services ("DCS") filed a petition for temporary custody of one-day-old L.B.T. The petition alleges that L.B.T. was a dependent and neglected child "in that the parents . . . by reason of mental incapacity are unfit to properly care for such child." The petition goes on to state that the court had previously terminated the parental rights of Father and N.J.T. ("Mother") with respect to their other children, the siblings of L.B.T. ("the child") When the child came into the custody of DCS, she was placed in the home of the family that had adopted her four siblings.
On December 6, 2000, DCS filed a petition to terminate the parental rights of Father and Mother to the child. Four months later, the trial court entered an order, finding that the child was dependent and neglected due to the mental incapacity of the parents and awarded continued custody of the child to DCS. In addition, the trial court granted the parents the option of exercising supervised visitation with the child, ordered the parents to undergo a new psychological evaluation, and adopted the permanency plan filed by DCS.
Visitation with the child did not go well. A quarterly progress report submitted by the child's DCS case manager on June 29, 2001, addresses the parents' visitation thusly:
The foster mother . . . has to remain in the room at all times because [the child] will not tolerate being alone with her parents. She cries and screams continuously if her foster mom leaves her, even briefly.
Two and a half months later, the parents filed an answer to the petition to terminate, alleging that DCS "comes to Court with unclean hands" because of its refusal to allow the parents to visit with the child. On the same day the parents filed their answers, the trial court entered an order terminating visitation. The order states that the matter had been pending before the trial court since December 6, 2000; that the case had been reset three times due to defense counsel's difficulty in obtaining an independent psychological evaluation; that the only issue that remained to be litigated was the mental and psychological health of the parents; and that the termination hearing would proceed as scheduled on October 3, 2001.
On October 1, 2001, counsel for the parents deposed psychologist Nancy L. Lanthorn, Ph.D., who had performed the psychological evaluation of the parents. Dr. Lanthorn testified that she could say within "a 95% degree of confidence [Father] has an IQ of between 64 and 72." She further stated that this IQ placed Father in the "extremely low to borderline range of intellectual functioning," which was previously classified in psychological terms as mild mental retardation. While Dr. Lanthorn agreed with DCS that Father was mentally incompetent to parent the child, she opined that Mother was competent to parent the child and that Father and Mother "work nicely as a team."
Apparently based upon the results of the psychological evaluation, DCS dismissed the petition to terminate on October 2, 2001. At the end of the month, the trial court entered an order which allowed the parents to have supervised visitation with the child. The order also stated that DCS could videotape the visitation, starting with the parents' third visitation session.
On December 19, 2001, DCS filed a new petition, this time seeking to terminate visitation. DCS alleged that the videotapes of the visitation sessions "demonstrate the parents' inability to calm the child during the visitation period." The December 27, 2001, quarterly progress report recites the following:
The child screams
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