A Sea Change in New York City Family Court Practice

THE IMPACT OF MATTER OF SAPPHIRE W. AND MATTER OF A.R.

For decades, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) requested, and family courts routinely granted, pre-trial surveillance orders over parents who had not been charged with any wrongdoing (i.e., “non-respondent parents”) and had never lost custody of their children. These surveillance orders – sanitized as “supervision orders” in family court parlance – caused significant harm to families without making children safer. They led to humiliating home searches, traumatizing strip-searches of children, and intrusive government intervention in the sanctity of private family life. And they were predominantly and disproportionately issued against low-income Black and Hispanic families. These orders lasted for months (an average of nine months in 2024) and were frequently continued even after trial. In Matter of Sapphire W. and Matter of A.R., New York appellate courts ruled that this longstanding and widespread practice was illegal.

These were landmark decisions. As data from ACS shows, before these decisions, only 1% of new child-protective (“Article 10”) cases where the child was released to a caregiver did not lead to supervision orders. Since these decisions, that figure has skyrocketed to over 23% – representing a 2,200% increase in the number of non-respondent parents and their children who are spared ACS surveillance during Article 10 cases.

We estimate that this significant change in practice will result in enormous benefits every year, including: roughly 1,700 fewer non-respondent parents and children being subjected to ACS surveillance; over 10,400 fewer ACS home searches; and over $23.8 million dollars of taxpayers’ money saved on unnecessary surveillance of parents not charged with any wrongdoing and their children.