A Maine court wrongly terminated a mother’s parental rights based on hearsay descriptions of drug test results that were never actually submitted as evidence, the state’s high court ruled Thursday.
Newport District Court Judge Sean Ociepka erred when he based his decision to terminate a mother’s parental rights to her five children on testimony that the mother had failed two drug tests, despite the fact that no evidence of the results were ever produced, Maine Supreme Judicial Court Justice Andrew Mead wrote in the court’s ruling. The mother was referred to as “Jennifer B.” in the opinion, since child protection cases are confidential. The ruling restored her parental rights and sent the matter back to the lower court for further proceedings.
A program director at New Season, an addiction treatment center where the mother was receiving medication-assisted treatment, testified to the lower court that the mother had failed two drug tests taken in June and July 2024. But the program director — whom the court noted had little direct contact with the mother — only had knowledge of the tests by reading about them in the mother’s file. There was no other evidence of the failed drug tests presented at the hearing, yet Ociepka relied on the testimony to rule the mother unfit and sever her legal ties to her five children.
“The court record contains no information regarding the circumstances under which the tests were taken, the method by which the test results were obtained, or the handling of samples,” the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled. “The testimony about the test results should have been excluded as inadmissible hearsay.”
The mother’s attorney objected to the testimony as hearsay during her parental rights termination hearing in 2024, but Ociepka declined to strike the testimony from the record, noting that it seemed additional information about the results would be forthcoming. But “no additional information about the tests was ever provided,” according to the high court.
Mead’s ruling noted that it was unclear whether the lower court would have ruled that the mother was unfit if the testimony about the failed June and July tests had been excluded from the hearing. So it vacated the judgment against the mother.
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services initially removed the children from the mother in June 2023 based on “unsafe living conditions at home” and the children’s poor school attendance, according to the ruling.
The Office of the Maine Attorney General represented the department at the termination of parental rights hearing and at the high court appeal. A spokesperson said the office could not comment on the case. A DHHS spokesperson also declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
The lower court discussed four drug tests in total. As with the results from June and July 2024, results from a January 2024 test were also presented through the testimony of the unnamed program director, and should have been considered hearsay as well, the high court ruled, but were not objected to at the time. A forensic toxicologist testified about a fourth test, a documented positive result for cocaine in August. The mother’s attorney did not object to the inclusion of the August results at the hearing.
The ruling noted that the mother acknowledged being aware of the positive June and July drug tests, but argued they were not the result of illicit use and were instead false positives.
Independent investigators have raised concerns about drug screen false positives in child protection proceedings. In a 2024 report to the Legislature on Maine’s child welfare system, the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability wrote that DHHS caseworkers and supervisors had challenges with parental drug screens, including “false positives, especially with rapid tests; difficulty determining abuse of prescription medication; and difficulty understanding prescribed vs. illicit drugs in results.”
In addition to the failure to produce evidence of positive drug tests used to rule the mother was unfit, Mead noted the high court had “concerns” about the trial judge’s failure to fully analyze the “best interests of the children” in his decision.
The lower court’s analysis did not acknowledge that the five children wished to stay with their mother or that the mother was deemed fit to care for her older children who were not involved in the case.
“These facts appear to merit discussion in a termination decision,” Mead wrote.
This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.
