By Amaris Elliott-Engel
Of the Legal Staff
The new Philadelphia family courthouse is slated to open at the end of the summer in 2014, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Kevin M. Dougherty, administrative judge of the family division, said during a meeting this week at the Philadelphia Bar Association's family law section.
There will be 29 courtrooms on floors three to six, administrative offices on floors seven to 12 and judge's chambers on floors 13 and 14, Dougherty said. There will be a total of 15 floors in the family court, but the additional story will be preserved for any expansion needed in the future, The Legal previously reported.
In addition to reporting on the future of a new physical plant for the family court, Dougherty reported on many other changes in the operations of family court.
The court system has worked “diligently to try to reduce the number of children in placement,” Dougherty said.
In the juvenile part of family court, 85 percent of the kids in the system are African-American, Dougherty said. There is “disproportionate minority contact within our system,” Dougherty said.
Dougherty said that he couldn't control who police arrest in juvenile cases, but he could control the number of adjustments made by probation officers, who do the intakes of juveniles charged with crimes at the Youth Study Center.
Prior to becoming administrative judge, Dougherty said that not a lot of adjustments were made.
The Philadelphia District Attorney's Office was in agreement that more adjustments needed to be made, so now young African-Americans males between the ages of 15 and 17 charged with possessing small amounts of marijuana will get the same type of remedies as white, male college-age students charged with underage drinking, Dougherty said.
The judge pointed out that most people would rather sit next to a young man who has consumed a marijuana blunt than one-fifth of a bottle of whiskey.
The person who has drunk one-fifth of a bottle of whiskey “may be inclined to hit ya with that bottle,” Dougherty said.
In juvenile cases, there was diversion in about 30 percent of the cases in 2011, Dougherty said.
In terms of delinquency cases, the average length of stay for youth has been reduced from 20.5 months to nine months, Dougherty said.
The number of kids on probation has fallen from 5,000 to a little north of 3,000, Dougherty said. The number of kids on probation has been reduced because of more intensive treatment and fewer arrests being made, Dougherty said.
In dependency cases, Dougherty said there has been a six percent decrease in placing children out of their homes and a 45 percent decrease in placing children outside of Philadelphia County or out of state.
Dougherty attributed the decrease in the number of placements because dependency cases are now reviewed every 90 days in court.
There also have been changed in adoption cases, Dougherty said.
The number of adoptions has increased 88 percent, Dougherty said.
It used to be adoption petitions would be filed without all the necessary paperwork and no court date would be given, Dougherty said.
Now the court requires a date certain for the adoption cases to be ready to go forward, Dougherty said.
There were 339 adoptions in 2007, and adoptions are now up to over 700, Dougherty said.
Dougherty said he and Judge Margaret T. Murphy, supervising judge of the domestic relations section, sit at the will of the state Supreme Court. But as they enter the seventh year of their leadership, Dougherty said he remains confident that they have the backing of the Supreme Court.
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