Once a national model, Georgia’s child death reviews now an empty exercise

Alan Judd

Published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 9, 2014:

BY ALAN JUDD – THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

By the time the local child fatality review committee took up her case, Marnee Kay Downey had been dead one day longer than she lived.

The committee, as mandated by state law, compiled the details of the 8-month-old’s life and death: Chronically malnourished, she weighed less than 10 pounds. Child-protection workers had removed her siblings from their home. And her death, on Oct. 10, 2012, was a homicide: an intentionally administered overdose of a potent painkiller intended for terminally ill cancer patients.

But the committee remained silent on perhaps the most pertinent question: Why was Marnee even with her parents? Her mother took illicit drugs during pregnancy, the child was born with drugs in her system, and her parents celebrated the conclusion of a child-neglect investigation by getting high.

The review committee’s report mentioned none…

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