The plaintiffs and defendants have until Monday to file a joint letter addressing the next steps in the litigation, with the plaintiffs’ hopes for a class action effectively dead pending appeal. She added that an expert report on the foster care system’s deficiencies presented by the plaintiffs offered only “weak evidence” that the children had all “suffered the same injury.”

“Countless decisions by numerous stakeholders - children, parents, advocates, and judges, to name a few - make each child’s case unique,” the judge wrote. She also noted plaintiffs hadn’t demonstrated which policy or institutions were most clearly responsible for what they faced in foster care. In a Friday decision, Judge Kimba Wood of the Southern District Court of New York did not rule on the merits of the long-running case alleging that children taken from their parents had been poorly cared for and had spent too long in foster care.īut she sided with the city and state in denying “class certification” to the group of 19 youth, concluding that the litigators representing the foster children had not demonstrated common “questions of law or fact” in their struggles, or that their challenges were typical among the more than 7,000 kids in city foster care. Photo by Hiram Durán.Ī federal judge has denied the latest attempt by a pioneering legal advocate for foster children to proceed with a class-action lawsuit against New York City. By Michael Fitzgerald The main office of the Administration for Children’s Services in Manhattan.

Expedition class actio