Lassiter v. Department of Social Servs. of Durham Cty.

452 U.S. 18, 101 S. Ct. 2153, 68 L. Ed. 2d 640, 1981 U.S. LEXIS 107

• Court: Supreme Court of the United States
• Decided: August 28, 1981
• Docket: 79-6423
• Status: Published

Opinions

Justice Stewart

delivered the opinion of the Court.

I

In the late spring of 1975, after hearing evidence that the petitioner, Abby Gail Lassiter, had not provided her infant son William with proper medical care, the District Court of Durham County, N. C., adjudicated him a neglected child and transferred him to the custody of the Durham County Department of Social Services, the respondent here. A year later, Ms. Lassiter was charged with first-degree murder, was convicted of second-degree murder, and began a sentence of 25 to 40 years of imprisonment.¹ In 1978 the Department petitioned the court to terminate Ms. Lassiter’s parental rights because, the Department alleged, she “has not had any contact with the child since December of 1975” and “has willfully left the child in foster care for more than two consecutive years without showing that substantial progress has been made in correcting the conditions which led to the removal of the child, or without showing a positive response to the diligent efforts of the Department of Social Services to strengthen her relationship to the child, or to make and follow through with constructive planning for the future of the child.”

Ms. Lassiter was served with the petition and with notice that a hearing on it would be held. Although her mother had retained counsel for her in connection with an effort to invalidate the murder conviction, Ms. Lassiter never mentioned the forthcoming hearing to him (or, for that matter, to any other person except, she said, to “someone” in the prison). At the behest of the Department of Social Services’ attorney, she was brought from prison to the hearing, which was held August 31, 1978. The hearing opened, apparently at the judge’s instance, with a discussion of whether Ms. Lassiter should have more time in which to find legal assistance. Since the court concluded that she “has had ample opportunity to seek and obtain counsel prior to the hearing of this matter, and [that] her failure to do so is without just cause,” the court did not postpone the proceedings. Ms. Lassiter did not aver that she was indigent, and the court did not appoint counsel for her.

A social worker from the respondent Department was the first witness. She testified that in 1975 the Department “received a complaint from Duke Pediatrics that William had not been followed in the pediatric clinic for medical problems and that they were having difficulty in locating Ms. Las-siter . . . .” She said that in May 1975 a social worker had taken William to the hospital, where doctors asked that he stay “because of breathing difficulties [and] malnutrition and [because] there was a great deal of scarring that indicated that he had a severe infection that had gone untreated.” The witness further testified that, except for one “prearranged” visit and a chance meeting on the street, Ms. Las-siter had not seen William after he had come into the State’s custody, and that neither Ms. Lassiter nor her mother had “made any contact with the Department of Social Services regarding that child.” When asked whether William should be placed in his grandmother’s custody, the social worker said he should not, since the grandmother “has indicated to me on a number of occasions that she was not able to take responsibility for the child” and since “I have checked with people in the community and from Ms. Lassiter’s church who also feel that this additional responsibility would be more than she can handle.” The social worker added that William “has not seen his grandmother since the chance meeting in July of ’76 and that was the only time.”

After the direct examination of the social worker, the judge said:

“I notice we made extensive findings in June of ’75 that you were served with papers and called the social services and told them you weren’t coming; and the serious lack of medical treatment. And, as I have said in my findings of the 16th day of June ’75, the Court finds that the grandmother, Ms. Lucille Lassiter, mother of Abby Gail Lassiter, filed a complaint on the 8th day of May, 1975, alleging that the daughter often left the children, Candina, Felicia and William L. with her for days without providing money or food while she was gone.”

Ms. Lassiter conducted a cross-examination of the social worker, who firmly reiterated her earlier testimony. The judge explained several times, with varying degrees of clarity, that Ms. Lassiter should only ask questions at this stage; many of her questions were disallowed because they were not really questions, but arguments.

Ms. Lassiter herself then testified, under the judge’s questioning, that she had properly cared for William. Under cross-examination, she said that she had seen William more than five or six times after he had been taken from her custody and that, if William could not be with her, she wanted him to be with her mother since, “He knows us. Children know they family. . . . They know they people, they know they family and that child knows us anywhere. ... I got four more other children. Three girls and a boy and they know they little brother when they see him.”

Ms. Lassiter’s mother was then called as a witness. She denied, under the questioning of the judge, that she had filed the complaint against Ms. Lassiter, and on cross-examination she denied both having failed to visit William when he was in the State’s custody and having said that she could not care for him.

The court found that Ms. Lassiter “has not contacted the Department of Social Services about her child since December, 1975, has not expressed any concern for his care and welfare, and has made no efforts to plan for his future.” Because Ms. Lassiter thus had “wilfully failed to maintain concern or responsibility for the welfare of the minor,” and because it was “in the best interests of the minor,” the court terminated Ms. Lassiter’s status as William’s parent.²

On appeal, Ms. Lassiter argued only that, because she was indigent, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment entitled her to the assistance of counsel, and that the trial court had therefore erred in not requiring the State to provide counsel for her. The North Carolina Court of Appeals decided that “[w]hile this State action does invade a protected area of individual privacy, the invasion is not so serious or unreasonable as to compel us to hold that appointment of counsel for indigent parents is constitutionally mandated.” In re Lassiter, 43 N. C. App. 525, 527, 259 S. E. 2d 336, 337. The Supreme Court of North Carolina summarily denied Ms. Lassiter’s application for discretionary review, 299 N. C. 120, 262 S. E. 2d 6, and we granted certiorari to consider the petitioner’s claim under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, 449 U. S. 819.

II

For all its consequence, “due process” has never been, and perhaps can never be, precisely defined. “ [U] nlike some legal rules,” this Court has said, due process “is not a technical conception with a fixed content unrelated to time, place and circumstances.” Cafeteria Workers v. McElroy, 367 U. S. 886, 895. Rather, the phrase expresses the requirement of “fundamental fairness,” a requirement whose meaning can be as opaque as its importance is lofty. Applying the Due Process Clause is therefore an uncertain enterprise which must discover what “fundamental fairness” consists of in a particular situation by first considering any relevant precedents and then by assessing the several interests that are at stake.

A

The pre-eminent generalization that emerges from this Court’s precedents on an indigent’s right to appointed counsel is that such a right has been recognized to exist only where the litigant may lose his physical liberty if he loses the litigation. Thus, when the Court overruled the principle of Betts v. Brady, 316 U. S. 455, that counsel in criminal trials need be appointed only where the circumstances in a given case demand it, the Court did so in the case of a man sentenced to prison for five years. Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U. S. 335. And thus Argersinger v. Hamlin, 407 U. S. 25, established that counsel must be provided before any indigent may be sentenced to prison, even where the crime is petty and the prison term brief.

That it is the defendant’s interest in personal freedom, and not simply the special Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments right to counsel in criminal cases, which triggers the right to appointed counsel is demonstrated by the Court’s announcement in In re Gault, 387 U. S. 1, that “the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that in respect of proceedings to determine delinquency which may result in commitment to an institution in which the juvenile’s freedom is curtailed,” the juvenile has a right to appointed counsel even though those proceedings may be styled “civil” and not “criminal.” Id., at 41 (emphasis added). Similarly, four of the five Justices who reached the merits in Vitek v. Jones, 445 U. S. 480, concluded that an indigent prisoner is entitled to appointed counsel before being involuntarily transferred for treatment to a state mental hospital. The fifth Justice differed from the other four only in declining to exclude the “possibility that the required assist-anee may be rendered by competent laymen in some cases.” Id., at 500 (separate opinion of Powell, J.).

Significantly, as a litigant’s interest in personal liberty diminishes, so does his right to appointed counsel. In Gag-non v. Scarpelli, 411 U. S. 778, the Court gauged the due process rights of a previously sentenced probationer at a probation-revocation hearing. In Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U. S. 471, 480, which involved an analogous hearing to revoke parole, the Court had said: “Revocation deprives an individual, not of the absolute liberty to which every citizen is entitled, but only of the conditional liberty properly dependent on observance of special parole restrictions.” Relying on that discussion, the Court in Scarpelli declined to hold that indigent probationers have, per se, a right to counsel at revocation hearings, and instead left the decision whether counsel should be appointed to be made on a case-by-case basis.

Finally, the Court has refused to extend the right to appointed counsel to include prosecutions which, though criminal, do not result in the defendant’s loss of personal liberty. The Court in Scott v. Illinois, 440 U. S. 367, for instance, interpreted the “central premise of Argersinger” to be “that actual imprisonment is a penalty different in kind from fines or the mere threat of imprisonment,” and the Court endorsed that premise as “eminently sound and warrant [ing] adoption of actual imprisonment as the line defining the constitutional right to appointment of counsel.” Id., at 373. The Court thus held “that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution require only that no indigent criminal defendant be sentenced to a term of imprisonment unless the State has afforded him the right to assistance of appointed counsel in his defense.” Id., at 373-374.

In sum, the Court’s precedents speak with one voice about what “fundamental fairness” has meant when the Court has considered the right to appointed counsel, and we thus draw from them the presumption that an indigent litigant has a right to appointed counsel only when, if he loses, he may be deprived of his physical liberty. It is against this presumption that all the other elements in the due process decision must be measured.

B

The case of Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U. S. 319, 335, propounds three elements to be evaluated in deciding what due process requires, viz., the private interests at stake, the government’s interest, and the risk that the procedures used will lead to erroneous decisions. We must balance these elements against each other, and then set their net weight in the scales against the presumption that there is a right to appointed counsel only where the indigent, if he is unsuccessful, may lose his personal freedom.

This Court’s decisions have by now made plain beyond the need for multiple citation that a parent’s desire for and right to “the companionship, care, custody, and management of his or her children” is an important interest that “undeniably warrants deference and, absent a powerful countervailing interest, protection.” Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S. 645, 651. Here the State has sought not simply to infringe upon that interest, but to end it. If the State prevails, it will have worked a unique kind of deprivation. Cf. May v. Anderson, 345 U. S. 528, 533; Armstrong v. Manzo, 380 U. S. 545. A parent’s interest in the accuracy and justice of the decision to terminate his or her parental status is, therefore, a commanding one.³

Since the State has an urgent interest in the welfare of the child, it shares the parent’s interest in an accurate and just decision. For this reason, the State may share the indigent parent’s interest in the availability of appointed counsel. If, as our adversary system presupposes, accurate and just results are most likely to be obtained through the equal contest of opposed interests, the State’s interest in the child’s welfare may perhaps best be served by a hearing in which both the parent and the State acting for the child are represented by counsel, without whom the contest of interests may become unwholesomely unequal. North Carolina itself acknowledges as much by providing that where a parent files a written answer to a termination petition, the State must supply a lawyer to represent the child. N. C. Gen. Stat. § 7A-289.29 (Supp. 1979).

The State’s interests, however, clearly diverge from the parent’s insofar as the State wishes the termination decision to be made as economically as possible and thus wants to avoid both the expense of appointed counsel and the cost of the lengthened proceedings his presence may cause. But though the State’s pecuniary interest is legitimate, it is hardly significant enough to overcome private interests as important as those here, particularly in light of the concession in the respondent’s brief that the “potential costs of appointed counsel in termination proceedings ... is [sic] admittedly de minimis compared to the costs in all criminal actions.”

Finally, consideration must be given to the risk that a parent will be erroneously deprived of his or her child because the parent is not represented by counsel. North Carolina law now seeks to assure accurate decisions by establishing the following procedures: A petition to terminate parental rights may be filed only by a parent seeking the termination of the other parent’s rights, by a county department of social services or licensed child-placing agency with custody of the child, or by a person with whom the child has lived continuously for the two years preceding the petition. § 7A-289.24. A petition must describe facts sufficient to warrant a finding that one of the grounds for termination exists, § 7A-289.25 (6), and the parent must be notified of the petition and given 30 days in which to file a written answer to it, § 7A-289.27. If that answer denies a material allegation, the court must, as has been noted, appoint a lawyer as the child’s guardian ad litem and must conduct a special hearing to resolve the issues raised by the petition and the answer. § 7A-289.29. If the parent files no answer, “the court shall issue an order terminating all parental and custodial rights . . . ; provided the court shall order a hearing on the petition and may examine the petitioner or others on the facts alleged in the petition.” § 7A-289.28. Findings of fact are made by a court sitting without a jury and must “be based on clear, cogent, and convincing evidence.” § 7A-289.30. Any party may appeal who gives notice of appeal within 10 days after the hearing. § 7A-289.34.⁴

The respondent argues that the subject of a termination hearing — the parent’s relationship with her child — far from being abstruse, technical, or unfamiliar, is one as to which the parent must be uniquely well informed and to which the parent must have given prolonged thought. The respondent also contends that a termination hearing is not likely to produce difficult points of evidentiary law, or even of substantive law, since the evidentiary problems peculiar to criminal trials are not present and since the standards for termination are not complicated. In fact, the respondent reports, the North Carolina Departments of Social Services are themselves sometimes represented at termination hearings by social workers instead of by lawyers.⁵

Yet the ultimate issues with which a termination hearing deals are not always simple, however commonplace they may be. Expert medical and psychiatric testimony, which few parents are equipped to understand and fewer still to confute, is sometimes presented. The parents are likely to be people with little education, who have had uncommon difficulty in dealing with life, and who are, at the hearing, thrust into a distressing and disorienting situation. That these factors may combine to overwhelm an uncounseled parent is evident from the findings some courts have made. See, e. g., Davis v. Page, 442 F. Supp. 258, 261 (SD Fla. 1977); State v. Jamison, 251 Ore. 114, 117-118, 444 P. 2d 15, 17 (1968). Thus, courts have generally held that the State must appoint counsel for indigent parents at termination proceedings. State ex rel. Heller v. Miller, 61 Ohio St. 2d 6, 399 N. E. 2d 66 (1980); Department of Public Welfare v. J. K. B., 379 Mass. 1, 393 N. E. 2d 406 (1979); In re Chad S., 580 P. 2d 983 (Okla. 1978); In re Myricks, 85 Wash. 2d 252, 533 P. 2d 841 (1975); Crist v. Division of Youth and Family Services, 128 N. J. Super. 102, 320 A. 2d 203 (1974); Danforth v. Maine Dept. of Health and Welfare, 303 A. 2d 794 (Me. 1973); In re Friesz, 190 Neb. 347, 208 N. W. 2d 259 (1973).⁶ The respondent is able to point to no presently authoritative case, except for the North Carolina judgment now before us, holding that an indigent parent has no due process right to appointed counsel in termination proceedings.

C

The dispositive question, which must now be addressed, is whether the three Eldridge factors, when weighed against the presumption that there is no right to appointed counsel in the absence of at least a potential deprivation of physical liberty, suffice to rebut that presumption and thus to lead to the conclusion that the Due Process Clause requires the appointment of counsel when a State seeks to terminate an indigent’s parental status. To summarize the above discussion of the Eldridge factors: the parent’s interest is an extremely important one (and may be supplemented by the dangers of criminal liability inherent in some termination proceedings); the State shares with the parent an interest in a correct decision, has a relatively weak pecuniary interest, and, in some but not all cases, has a possibly stronger interest in informal procedures; and the complexity of the proceeding and the incapacity of the uncounseled parent could be, but would not always be, great enough to make the risk of an erroneous deprivation of the parent’s rights insupportably high.

If, in a given case, the parent’s interests were at their strongest, the State’s interests were at their weakest, and the risks of error were at their peak, it could not be said that the Eldridge factors did not overcome the presumption against the right to appointed counsel, and that due process did not therefore require the appointment of counsel. But since the Eldridge factors will not always be so distributed, and since “due process is not so rigid as to require that the significant interests in informality, flexibility and economy must always be sacrificed,” Gagnon v. Scarpelli, 411 U. S., at 788, neither can we say that the Constitution requires the appointment of counsel in every parental termination proceeding. We therefore adopt the standard found appropriate in Gagnon v. Scar-pelli, and leave the decision whether due process calls for the appointment of counsel for indigent parents in termination proceedings to be answered in the first instance by the trial court, subject, of course, to appellate review. See, e. g., Wood v. Georgia, 450 U. S. 261.

Ill

Here, as in Scarpelli, “[i]t is neither possible nor prudent to attempt to formulate a precise and detailed set of guidelines to be followed in determining when the providing of counsel is necessary to meet the applicable due process requirements,” since here, as in that case, “[t]he facts and circumstances . . . are susceptible of almost infinite variation . . . .” 411 U. S., at 790. Nevertheless, because child-custody litigation must be concluded as rapidly as is consistent with fairness,⁷ we decide today whether the trial judge denied Ms. Lassiter due process of law when he did not appoint counsel for her.

The respondent represents that the petition to terminate Ms. Lassiter’s parental rights contained no allegations of neglect or abuse upon which criminal charges could be based, and hence Ms. Lassiter could not well have argued that she required counsel for that reason. The Department of Social Services was represented at the hearing by counsel, but no expert witnesses testified, and the case presented no specially troublesome points of law, either procedural or substantive. While hearsay evidence was no doubt admitted, and while Ms. Lassiter no doubt left incomplete her defense that the Department had not adequately assisted her in rekindling her interest in her son, the weight of the evidence that she had few sparks of such an interest was sufficiently great that the presence of counsel for Ms. Lassiter could not have made a determinative difference. True, a lawyer might have done more with the argument that William should live with Ms. Lassiter’s mother — but that argument was quite ex-plicity made by both Lassiters, and the evidence that the elder Ms. Lassiter had said she could not handle another child, that the social worker’s investigation had led to a similar conclusion, and that the grandmother had displayed scant interest in the child once he had been removed from her daughter’s custody was, though controverted, sufficiently substantial that the absence of counsel’s guidance on this point did not render the proceedings fundamentally unfair.⁸ Finally, a court deciding whether due process requires the appointment of counsel need not ignore a parent’s plain demonstration that she is not interested in attending a hearing. Here, the trial court had previously found that Ms. Las-siter had expressly declined to appear at the 1975 child custody hearing, Ms. Lassiter had not even bothered to speak to her retained lawyer after being notified of the termination hearing, and the court specifically found that Ms. Lassiter’s failure to make an effort to contest the termination proceeding was without cause. In view of all these circumstances, we hold that the trial court did not err in failing to appoint counsel for Ms. Lassiter.

IV

In its Fourteenth Amendment, our Constitution imposes on the States the standards necessary to ensure that judicial proceedings are fundamentally fair. A wise public policy, however, may require that higher standards be adopted than those minimally tolerable under the Constitution. Informed opinion has clearly come to hold that an indigent parent is entitled to the assistance of appointed counsel not only in parental termination proceedings, but in dependency and neglect proceedings as well. IJA-ARA Standards for Juvenile Justice, Counsel for Private Parties 2.3 (b) (1980); Uniform Juvenile Court Act § 26 (a), 9A U. L. A. 35 (1979); National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Model Rules for Juvenile Courts, Rule 39 (1969); U. S. Dept, of HEW, Children’s Bureau, Legislative Guide for Drafting Family and Juvenile Court Acts §25 (b) (1969); U. S. Dept, of HEW, Children’s Bureau, Legislative Guides for the Termination of Parental Rights and Responsibilities and the Adoption of Children, Pt. II, § 8 (1961); National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Standard Juvenile Court Act § 19 (1959). Most significantly, 33 States and the District of Columbia provide statutorily for the appointment of counsel in termination cases. The Court’s opinion today in no way implies that the standards increasingly urged by informed public opinion and now widely followed by the States are other than enlightened and wise.

For the reasons stated in this opinion, the judgment is affirmed.

It is so ordered.

1 The North Carolina Court of Appeals, in reviewing the petitioner’s-conviction, indicated that the murder occurred during an altercation between Ms. Lassiter, her mother, and the deceased:

“Defendant’s mother told [the deceased] to 'come on.’ They began to struggle and deceased fell or was knocked to the floor. Defendant’s mother was beating deceased with a broom. While deceased was still on the floor and being beaten with the broom, defendant entered the apartment. She went into the kitchen and got a butcher knife. She took the knife and began stabbing the deceased who was still prostrate. The body of deceased had seven stab wounds . . . .” State v. Lassiter, No. 7614SC1054 (June 1, 1977).

After her conviction was affirmed on appeal, Ms. Lassiter sought to attack it collaterally. Among her arguments was that the assistance of her trial counsel had been ineffective because he had failed to “seek to elicit or introduce before the jury the statement made by [Ms. Lassiter’s mother,] ‘And I did it, I hope she dies.’ ” Ms. Lassiter’s mother had, like Ms. Lassiter, been indicted on a first-degree murder charge; however, the trial court granted the elder Ms. Lassiter’s motion for a nonsuit. The North Carolina General Court of Justice, Superior Court Division, denied Ms. Lassiter’s motion for collateral relief. File No. 76-CR-31Q2 (Mar. 20, 1979).

2 The petition had also asked that the parental rights of the putative father, William Boykin, be terminated. Boykin was not married to Ms. Lassiter, he had never contributed to William’s financial support, and indeed he denied that he was William’s father. The court granted the petition to terminate his alleged parental status.

3 Some parents will have an additional interest to protect. Petitions to terminate parental rights are not uncommonly based on alleged criminal activity. Parents so accused may need legal counsel to guide them in understanding the problems such petitions may create.

4 The respondent also points out that parental termination hearings commonly occur only after a custody proceeding in which the child has judicially been found to be abused, neglected, or dependent, and that an indigent parent has a right to be represented by appointed counsel at the custody hearing. § 7A-587.

Ms. Lassiter’s hearing occurred before some of these provisions were enacted. She did not, for instance, have the benefit of the “clear, cogent, and convincing” evidentiary standard, nor did she have counsel at the hearing in which William was taken from her custody.

5 Both the respondent and the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems, 4 Colum. J. L. & Soc. Prob. 230 (1968), have conducted surveys purporting to reveal whether the presence of counsel reduces the number of erroneous determinations in parental termination proceedings. Unfortunately, neither survey goes beyond presenting statistics which, standing alone, are unilluminating. The Journal note does, however, report that it questioned the New York Family Court judges who preside over parental termination hearings and found that 72.2% of them agreed that when a parent is unrepresented, it becomes more difficult to conduct a fair hearing (11.1% of the judges disagreed); 66.7% thought it became difficult to develop the facts (22.2% disagreed).

6 A number of courts have held that indigent parents have a right to appointed counsel in child dependency or neglect hearings as well. E. g., Davis v. Page, 640 F. 2d 599 (CA5 1981) (en banc); Cleaver v. Wilcox, 499 F. 2d 940 (CA9 1974) (right to be decided case by case); Smith v. Edmiston, 431 F. Supp. 941 (WD Tenn. 1977).

7 According to the respondent’s brief, William Lassiter is now living “in a pre-adoptive home with foster parents committed to formal adoption to become his legal parents.” He cannot be legally adopted, nor can his status otherwise be finally clarified, until this litigation ends.

8 Ms. Lassiter’s argument here that her mother should have been given custody of William is hardly consistent with her argument in the collateral attack on her murder conviction that she was innocent because her mother was guilty. See n. 1, supra.