Children’s Rights, a 2018 grantee of the Foundation, filed in June 2017 a class action lawsuit, M.B. v. Corsi, in Missouri, a state where foster children are prescribed powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic medications in the absence of an effective system of oversight. The case presents a direct challenge, the first of its kind, to a state’s longstanding failure to ensure the safe administration of psychotropic and antipsychotic medications to children in state foster care.
In January 2018, the Judge denied almost the entirety of Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss the case, and shortly thereafter issued a revised scheduling order that places the case on an aggressive path to trial in January 2019. The case is now in the fact-finding discovery phase. The parties have exchanged requests for document production and interrogatories and the Court has entered a protective order allowing the exchange of confidential information.
Children’s Rights has defended the depositions of our Next Friends and we began our depositions of the State’s witnesses in March 2018. We also filed our motion for class certification in March 2018, and hope to have resolution of that issue by late spring. We are now engaging experts in the fields of child welfare and psychiatry to opine on the issues raised in the case, and will disclose those experts to the Defendants by June 2018. (May 2018)