Louisville Courier-Journal Pens More Editorial About Kentucky's "Gestapo".

The reckless conduct of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services continues to astonish in cases where its employees appear to be running roughshod over some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged citizens of this state.

Twice in recent months, judges have rightly rejected the efforts by cabinet lawyers to wriggle out of findings that the agency is in contempt of court for violating the law or ignoring court orders.

Just last week, a state Court of Appeals panel refused to lift a contempt of court finding from Fayette Family Court against cabinet officials for not following the law in a case where they were seeking to terminate parents’ rights and permanently remove two children from their custody.

That follows the refusal in September of a federal judge in Lexington to lift a year-old contempt order against the cabinet for its handling of litigation over Medicaid coverage in which the judge repeated his frustration over the cabinet’s failure to help some of the state’s poorest and sickest Medicaid patients secure adequate health coverage.

But the details of one family’s case from Northern Kentucky, as alleged in a federal lawsuit pending against two cabinet social service officials, are even more stunning, indicating a willingness by cabinet employees to violate rights of families, ignore the law and rely on outlandish allegations of child abuse so fantastic they were promptly rejected by a judge.

Yet, that particular family’s nightmare dragged on for more than a year as a Boone County man fought to clear his name, as outlined recently by reporter Jim Hannah in the Cincinnati Enquirer, an affiliate of The Courier-Journal.

The story details the plight of Kenneth Lalley, awarded sole custody of his four children after a divorce, who was stunned when a social worker showed up at his door late at night on April 10, 2012, seeking to take all four of his children from him based on allegations of abuse.

The evidence? Claims from his teenage son who was then hospitalized for severe mental illness that he had been sexually abused multiple times not only by his father but by Boone Family Court Judge Linda Bramlage who had presided over the father’s contentious divorce from the teen’s mother.

The claims included bizarre allegations that the father and the judge assaulted the boy together on multiple occasions and frequently wandered around the house in front of him nude.

The youth later would admit he made the claims up hoping he could return to live with his mother.

Yet, with only cursory investigation of these claims, the worker removed the children from Mr. Lalley that night, without the required order signed by a judge, the father’s lawsuit claims.

Two days later, a cabinet social worker took the unsupported abuse allegations to Judge Bramlage, the same family court judge who presided over the divorce, but who had no idea she had been falsely accused of abuse. The worker asked her to sign an order authorizing the state to remove the children from their father—concealing from Judge Bramlage that she was one of those accused of the abuse, according to the father’s lawsuit.

A different judge took over the case, decided that no abuse had occurred and ordered three of the children returned to the father. The teenage son remains hospitalized.

Yet the cabinet for months afterwards refused to remove Mr. Lalley from an internal register it keeps of child abusers—only recently notifying his lawyer, Shane Sidebottom of Covington, it had done so after it apparently was shamed by Mr. Hannah’s news story Nov. 3.

The actions of the cabinet employees in this case appear as inexplicable as the determination of top officials to defend them.

“We are very supportive of these staff and are confident that court proceedings will demonstrate that their focus, as always, has been to protect the children,” a cabinet spokeswoman said.

We’ll see.

The cabinet isn’t faring too too well in court these days. Cabinet Secretary Audrey Tayse Haynes and Gov. Steve Beshear need to find out why its cases keep going so wrong and why citizens suffer.

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