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Innocent Convicted By Child Abuse Index

By Steven Rodriguez

The state of California has a Child Abuse Central Index, a database containing 819,000 names from which even a judgment of innocence isn’t enough to secure removal. Unlike the better-known database created by Megan’s Law, which registers and tracks 63,000 named sex offenders, the child abuse index is neither actively managed by the state nor periodically purged of erroneous or unsubstantiated entries — despite efforts by the wrongly included to escape its shameful stain. The California Department of Justice has been ordered in at least three court decisions in recent years to create a standard way to remove from the child abuse index the names of those exonerated by courts or social service investigations. A halfhearted and piecemeal effort a few years ago to update the child abuseindex showed significant error rates — more than 20% in some counties — among the few reporting agencies that carried out the reviews...continue to full post

Full post as published by LA Criminal Defense Blog on December 11, 2008 (boomark / email).