The City of San Diego will pay $225,000 to settle a civil suit filed by a teen mom who lost parental rights to her daughter just days after the child’s birth. Johnneisha Kemper says San Diego Police officers took her baby away in 2008, just days after she gave birth at the age of 16, claiming she was unfit to raise the newborn. Now, the city of San Diego has approved a settlement in the civil rights lawsuit filed alleging the SDPD took the child without threat or warrant. “The system did fail her in every way that she could have been failed,” her attorney Shawn McMillan told NBC 7. McMillan said they pushed for a policy change and training for officers in how they remove children but the City refused and even offered more money instead agreeing to change.
McMillan has been fighting for the parents, he says, are being ripped away from their children. “We see this over and over and over again. We know it’s a systemic problem, and we’ve been looking for a way to address this systemic problem so we can get real permanent change,” he said.
That change he’s hoping will come from a federal class action lawsuit filed this week in Riverside County. The plaintiff is a newborn. The lawsuit says the baby was taken from its mother without a warrant by the Riverside County Department of Social Services while the two were still in the hospital.
“You absolutely cannot seize a child from its parents unless there is reasonable evidence to show that the child is likely to suffer severe bodily injury or death in a two hours it takes to get a warrant,” said McMillan.
“You saw what the police in San Diego said, they said we’re not changing anything. We’ll pay the money and we’re going to keep on doing what we’re doing, but that doesn’t work for us. What we’re really looking for here is a government that’s going to follow the law and protect its citizens,” he said.
